Page 56 of The Alpha and the Baker
But even as I thought that last, vicious sentence, a large part of me objected to it. It was like my mind couldn’t unify the idea of Felicia being a bloodthirsty murderer of Wild Folk with the woman I’d gotten to know.
Clearly, I was biased. Far too biased and a danger to my people.
God, I was soashamed.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Calm down. What happened? Did the date go poorly?”
I collapsed on his couch. If Bethany was awake, she would hear every single word of my failure, but I didn’t care. My pack deserved to know how I’d doomed them. Like anidiot.
“No, it was actually amazing. Maybe the best I’ve ever had.” My heart ached at the thought. I really had been flying high, beyond cloud nine, only to come slamming back to Earth so hard it felt like my spine was still lying in shattered pieces around me.
Chris put the pickle jar back in the fridge, then crossed over to the couch and sat beside me. “What’s going on, then? I gotta admit, you’re freaking me out. I haven’t seen you this panicky since you had to hold your first funeral as an alpha.”
Ugh. That had been intense. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen my father preside over nearly ten of his own as alpha, but it was rather the magnitude of giving a beloved pack member who was much older than me a proper send-off that honored their legacy and helped the remaining members of our pack heal. I had indeed been a wreck, unable to sleep and racked with worry.
But this was somuch worse.
“She knew what I was.”
I could smell Chris’s anxiety spike and hear his heartbeat pick up. “You mean…”
“Yeah, she knew I was a shifter. A wolf, specifically.”
“How did this come up? Did she corner you with it? Try to attack you?”
I shook my head and replayed the entire scene in my head. Unfortunately, thinking about that made my mind naturally drift to what had happened right before. The soft sighs that had escaped her beautiful, full lips, those thick, strong thighs I had gripped under my broad palms. The silkiness of her skin, the way she looked at me—allof it.
Surely, that couldn’t have been an act, right? She’d have to be a sociopath to pull that off.
But what other explanation was there?
“No, nothing like that. We were actually talking about her perfume.”
“Wait, her perfume? I’m a little lost.”
I let out a dry, bitter chuckle. “She smelled so good that I asked her what she was wearing. Like I would buy her a bottle or something. She told me it was fucking shaved pieces of Irish Spring that she’d put into her lotion because a nature documentary said a lot of wolves like that scent, so she figured I might too since I was a wolf.”
Chris didn’t say anything, and I shot him an uncertain look, prepared for the condemnation. But he looked more incredulous than anything else.
“I’m sorry, I must be hallucinating. Did you say Irish Spring, as in the bar soap?”
I nodded, and now that I was saying it out loud, it sounded really fucking stupid. “Yeah.”
“There’snoway that’s true. She’s gotta be full of shit or was messing with you.”
“I dunno, man,” I said, more than a bit exasperated. “Look it up if you want!”
What a strange thing to joke about. That made even less sense than wolves loving bar soap in the first place. But I stayed locked in my thoughts while Chris fiddled with his phone.
“Would you look at that! It’s true.”
“Huh?”
He turned his phone toward me and sure enough, I saw a montage of wolves going ham and rubbing themselves all over various pieces of enrichment buildings. They looked pretty into it.
“And that’s all because of soap?” I asked, yanked out of my spiral by the sheer incredulousness of it all. Wolves were apex predators, a combination of majesty and terror that helpedbalance entire ecosystems. They weren’t supposed to be like kitties reacting to catnip.
“That’s what it says. How did we never know this, but a human did?”
