Page 9 of The Werewolf’s Study Date

“I mentioned coffee. I didn’t hand you a recipe.”

“You complained about the dining hall sludge for ten minutes,” he says, looking way too pleased with himself. “Then you said your perfect coffee has so much caramel it’s basically a drinkable candle.”

I press my hand to my forehead. “I was sleep-deprived.”

“You were very passionate.”

“You remembered all of that?”

“Yeah.” He watches me. “You also said you concentrate better with background noise, which is why we’re here instead of the library.”

I stare at him for a second, my chest doing a weird, tight flutter. “You’re annoyingly observant.”

“Drink your candle, Pope. Open chapter four.”

I sit down, take a sip, and immediately groan. It’s perfect. “Damn it. This is great.”

“Told you.”

We work for forty minutes. Boone is actually a great tutor. He doesn’t treat me like an idiot when I miss a concept—he just strips out Perkowinski’s dense shifter jargon and explains how the biology actually works in real life.

The table is tiny, though. Our shoulders keep brushing every time he leans in to check my notes, and after a while, I catch myself staring at his hands. They’re massive. Broad palms, blunt fingernails, clean calluses from lifting.

“Maisie.”

I blink up at him. “Yeah?”

“You missed the entire last sentence.” He leans back, eyes narrowing with a slow smirk as he tracks where I was looking. “Were you staring at my hands?”

“No.”

“You were.”

“You’re six-four, Boone. It’d be weird if you had doll hands.”

His smirk widens. Instead of moving away, he reaches out and flattens his massive palm right in the middle of my open notebook, his fingers spreading wide over the text, dominating the entire page between us.

“Focus, Pope,” he murmurs, his voice dropping a fraction.

Heat rushes straight to my neck. I swallow hard, my brain completely blank. “Right. Trait lines.”

Boone chuckles and pulls his hand back, tapping my paper. “Recessive traits. Keep going.”

Ten minutes later, he catches me checking my GPA app for the third time.

He sets his pen down. “Talk to me. The forty-six is still eating at you, isn’t it?”

I sigh, wrapping my hands around my warm coffee cup. “I’m on the Human Heritage Scholarship. It covers tuition, most of my housing, and a chunk of my books. My parents help with what they can, but if I lose it, I can’t afford CU. I go home.”

Boone’s expression turns serious. “What GPA do you need?”

“A solid C average minimum. My other classes are okay, but if I bomb Bio, it tanks everything. And I actually studied for that first paper. That’s what’s pissing me off—I put the hours in and still failed.”

“Because Perkowinski grades like you grew up in a pack,” Boone says quietly. “It’s not about effort.”

“Doesn’t matter. If I fail, I lose the vet program.”

“Why this campus? You could do pre-vet in Ohio.”