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“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “You need to know, but it’s gonna freak you out.”

My stomach did a small, nervous flip. “Okay,” I said slowly, propping myself up on one elbow so I could fully look at him. “That’s a very ominous way to start a sentence this early in the morning.”

“It’s important.” Drift’s jaw worked like he was chewing on the words before letting them out. “My wolf chose you.”

I blinked at him. Waited for the rest of the sentence, the part that would make it make sense. It didn’t come.

“Your wolf.” I said it back to him carefully, the way you’d repeat something to a person who might be having a stroke. “You have a wolf.”

“I do.”

“Is it—” I glanced around the room, half expecting a dog crate I’d somehow missed, some large husky mix napping in a corner. “Is it here? Did I meet it and not realize? Was that whole thing at the bar actually about a real wolf and not a spider, because honestly at this point, I wouldn’t put it past me—”

“Phineas.” He caught my hand where I’d started gesturing at the room like an idiot. His warm thumb pressed against my knuckles and held steady. “It’s not a pet.”

Something in his voice made the joke die in my throat. He looked so serious. Too serious.

“Okay,” I said again, quieter this time.

“I’m a wolf shifter.” He said it plainly, like he was telling me his blood type. “My wolf chose you as my mate. The morning we were making the croissants.”

The room went very still. Somewhere down the hall, the puppy’s nails clicked against hardwood, and a bird made a racket outside the window. None of it touched the strange, floating silence that had opened up between us.

He’s not joking. His face hasn’t cracked into a grin. No punchline was coming. Just those greenish-amber eyes, steady and open and completely, terrifyingly sincere.

A wolf shifter. Right. Sure. And I was secretly the king of Belgium.

My brain scrambled to process this new information against everything I knew about Drift so far. The kind eyes. The patient hands. How he’d slept on his own bedroom floor so I wouldn’t wake up frightened. How he’d talked me down from a panic attack with a story about a moose. None of it screamed unhinged lunatic. All of it screamed decent, gentle, worth trusting.

Except those types of men did not typically believe they turned into animals.

Why did the universe do this to me? Handsome, kind, cooks like a dream, and apparently thinks he’s a Discovery Channel special. There had to be a support group somewhere. Men Who Fall for Beautiful Disasters, Temptation chapter, meetings held Tuesdays.

“Okay,” I said for the third time, because that was the only word left in my vocabulary. I sat up fully, pulling the sheet with me, my mind racing through gentler ways to handle this. You didn’t argue with someone in the middle of a delusion. You redirected. You stayed calm. I’d learned that from managing someone else’s moods, though this felt like an entirely different animal. Ha! Animal.

“You don’t believe me.” Drift’s mouth curved, not offended, almost amused, like he’d expected exactly this reaction and had already planned three steps ahead.

“I believe that you believe it,” I said carefully, which felt like the safest possible sentence a person could construct. “That’s a very supportive and non-judgmental thing to believe, right? I read that in a pamphlet once.”

“Phineas.”

“I’m being supportive.”

“You think I’m crazy.”

“I think you’re a lovely man who possibly needs to see someone,” I admitted, wincing even as I said it, because it sounded exactly as bad out loud as it had in my head. “A professional someone. Not, like, a bad someone. A helpful someone.”

Something flickered across his face, and for one terrible second, I thought I’d wounded him. Then his mouth twitched, fighting a smile, and he leaned back against the headboard with the easy confidence of a man holding a very good hand of cards.

“Prove it, then.” Some reckless, curious part of me leaned into the absurdity instead of away from it. If I was going to be tangled up with a madman, I might as well see the whole show.

Drift’s eyes lit up like I’d handed him a gift. “You sure?”

“No,” I said honestly. “But go ahead.”

He climbed off the bed, and I watched, helpless, as he reached for the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head in one smooth motion. My mouth went dry. Whatever protest I’d been building died somewhere behind lust, replaced by an entirely different, entirely horny reaction.

Broad shoulders gave way to a torso carved out of quiet, working strength, no gym-sculpted vanity to it, just the honest muscle of a man who used his body for things. A faint trail of dark hair arrowed down from his navel, and I followed it, my pulse racing as my dick twitched.