Page 3 of Legally Mated
Or ayoungone.
“Yeah, me too.” We didn’t have enough space in the enclave, not if we wanted to keep the semi-forest at the north end of the enclosure. And that was something that no Alpha at Mercy Hills had ever compromised on—shifters needed that space to run. It was as near the center of our cultural identity as anything, and if they took that away, I wasn’t sure what would happentous.
Probably the same thing that had happened in Rogue’s Hollow. By the time the army got done there, there hadn’t been enough of the pack left to keep the enclave open, and its remaining members had been dispersed to the nearbyenclaves.
The closest any of Mercy Hills’ Alphas had come to bowing to the necessity of our survival had been the gradual shift of the tree species from native evergreen and aspens to fruit-bearing orchard trees. Apples, peaches, pears, cherries—anything that could be harvested andeaten.
I watched Avery drive away, then trudged up to the house and used my key to let myself in. I’d had a key for close to two years now, since that awkwardly life-changing day when we’d won a close-fought case and somewhere in the middle of the celebration, I’d ended up drunk enough to finally pay attention to Laine’s interest in me. I smiled as I closed Laine’s front door behind me and set my bag on the floor at the bottom of the stairs before making myself comfortable in thelivingroom.
One wall was taken up by an old upright piano that he’d bought and just had completely refinished. It shone a deep golden brown in the sunlight slanting in through the window and I tapped a key just to break the silence of the house, and to remind myself of him playing something classical for me on it when he’d first brought it home. Laine was much more of a romantic than I was, but I didn’t mind. One of us should be the romantic one in a relationship, I figured. It certainly wasn’t going tobeme.
According to Holland’s decree, I wasn’t supposed to be staying overnight here anymore, not until we knew how it would affect the pack, but he was in court first thing tomorrow, and the last week when I’d tried staying at the pack house, one of the twins had gottensomethingthat could only be identified as disgusting all over my pants and I’d ended up borrowing a suit from Laine. Not that Laine had cared, but it scared the shit out of me wearing something thatexpensive.
That was top layer of the excuse, because my reasons for being here had more sides than astopsign.
Truthfully, I missed him. It was crazy and stupid and it couldn’t last—he was human and I was a shifter. I’d done pretty well keeping a low profile up to the Green Moon disaster, but since then, I’d been on the radar of both the pack and the humans. The whole thing was going to go south like migrating birds at some point, I knew that, but Laine made me feel so good in so many ways, even if you discounted thephysicalones.
And I never discounted thephysicalones.
Outside of the fact that we were, kind of, each other’s first lovers, he treated me like a lawyer. To him, it didn’t matter that the best I could lay claim to was the title of paralegal, as things stood now, and probably for the rest of my life. I didn’t have the right to take the bar and set up my own practice, despite all the years in law school, the money spent, the hours ofstudy.
It still amazed me that the pack had been willing to spend that money, knowing they’d get nothing out of it. Because of that, I put the pack’s needs over everything else. It was only when it came to Laine that the order of importance got kind ofblurred.
But Laine discussed his cases with me like he would with his partners, argued about which rulings to use in different situations and threw Latin legal terms at me like snowballs. So, while I couldn’t be a lawyer in real life, he helped me pretend I was one. That alone would make it worth the headache and the stress of balancing what I wanted and couldn’t have, with the risks of reaching for what Icould.
He also treated me like a person, which was, in some ways, worth more than the professional respect. There were…issues, occasionally, in the practice, no matter that I was doing my best to be helpful and keep a low profile. Some of the other paralegals refused to work with me, and I knew production suffered for some of them when I was in the same room. I could feel their eyes on me, like a rabbit must feel when they were being stalked. Laine just told me to ignore them, that they were jealous, but I didn’t think it was going away and eventually I stopped bothering him about it. It was, after all, my own problem and one I had to deal with on my own. No one ever said anything—well, not much, and I got good at ignoring it pretty fast, but it was obvious to me that they found me alien and frightening. So I kept my head down and worked twice as hard as anyone else in an effort to pay back to Laine the trouble I was certain I caused him with hispartners.
And then there was the other part, the morepersonalone.
Which was why I was tucking my tail and hoping no one noticed I wasn’t where I was supposed to be tonight. Between one thing and another, Laine and I hadn’t had sex in over a month. And I wasn’t waiting anylonger.
He was getting groceries at the moment, so there was time to unpack and let the wrinkles fall out of my suits. I only had two, which I thought was enough for a three day stay in town and which Laine still thought absolutely paltry. But I hadn’t hadanybefore I’d started working with him, and suits were expensive. Especially where Laine liked to shop, which was so far out of my price range it didn’t even make me sad not to shop there. I couldn’t fathom spending that much money on some cloth stitched together in humanshape.
I took my time over it, but he still wasn't home by the time I was done. And not that I was eager oranythingbut—
“Hey, what’s taking you so long?” I said when he answeredmycall.
Laine chuckled and in the background I could hear the beeping of the cash registers. “Took me a while figuring out whatyou’deat.”
“I’m not that picky.” Laine ate weird things, like stuff I couldn’t even pronounce. It had been, really, our one and only fight, and had ended with a negotiated settlement, on paper, that I would try one new thing every time I came over. I’d made sure it contained a clause stating that every time I came over started with my arrival in the city, not every single time I walked through hisfrontdoor.
Ha! He’d thought he was going to get that one past me, but he didn’t keep me around just because he couldn’t keep his hands—and other parts—off me. After all, I did have a law degree, and I hadn’t slept my way through that degree either. Anyone in the pack could tell you that a shifter needed to be twice as good as a human to get the same recognition. Bullshit clauses like that were the bread and butter of contract law, which happened to be my specialty. “What new weirdness are you going to make me eatthistime?”
“That’s for me to know, and for you to await with batedbreath.”
I could hear the smile in his voice, which made me want to tease a little. “Just so you know, I brought a bucket with me this time. In case I need tothrowup.”
“Garrick, Garrick, Garrick. And you call me aheathen.”
“Raw scallops?” Ewww. I didn’t like seafood anyway—it was expensive unless it was frozen, and Mercy Hills was landlocked. In more ways than one, come to think of it. “So, you’ll behomesoon?”
“Twenty minutes? Depending ontraffic.”
The grocery store wasn’t that far away. “What are youupto?”
“Nothing. But I didn’t want to waste time making supper, so I orderedtake-out.”
Oh, that wasn’t too ominous. “All right, I’ll see you then.” We got off the phone, and I went upstairs to use the giant walk-in shower in Laine’s en-suite and get ready for theevening.
