Page 67 of The Wolf's Kidnapped Mate

He raised his eyebrows with a smirk. “You could tell her that, you know.”

“That I’m scared?”

He nodded. “You’d be surprised what she might tell you.”

At this point, a lot of things were surprising. Like my best friend being on board with me talking to his sister. Whether or not he was cool with me dating her was a different story. Though at this point, she bore my mark. I bore hers.

In shifter terms, that was practically marriage.

I gripped the edge of my seat as my stomach flipped. “You wouldn’t be mad?”

“About what?”

“About having me for a brother-in-law?”

He sat up a bit more in his bed. “Hey, man. You can’t go around saying shit like that without meaning it. You mean that?”

I dug my nails into the fabric of the chair. “Shit, I think I do.”

“You better do something about it if you mean it.” He stared me down like one of his slingshot targets. “You better do it fast too. She’s thinking about leaving town.”

I shot out of the chair, sending it screeching back on the tile. “Fuck.”

Liam waved at me to calm down. “Alright, chill.”

“No chill, dude. Absolutely none.”

I paced toward the door.

The only thing that stopped me was his crackling laugh. It faded into a heavy cough, causing him to wheeze into his fist as his face turned red. I rolled my eyes while rounding the bed again. In the little cabinet of the bedside table were a few bottles of water. I grabbed one and unscrewed the cap, holding the bottle out to him.

He coughed loudly, smacked his chest, and took the bottle. “Thanks, man.”

“Don’t die before the wedding.”

He grinned. “Don’t fuck this up.”

I marched back to the door while ignoring the urge to turn around and say something snarky to him.

He was right. I couldn’t fuck this up. And I didn’t have any time to kill.

***

None of the usual places held that smiling star of a woman who aggravated me with her positivity. Some crazy spell must have been cast on me because I was yearning for the way her eyes curved when her smile grew too big for her face. It’d been a long time since that had happened. Too long.

Without my trusty Nokia, I was lost. I didn’t have a way to contact her, and it wasn’t like I’d actually ever had her number. She rarely used her phone, leaving it tucked in her pocket as she jogged or biked her way around the edges of the pack land.

After an hour of searching, I walked back to the greenhouse, using my hand to block the glare of the setting sun. I opened the door to walk inside, and froze when I saw the whispering palms multiplied by a dozen in the aisle.

I calmly shut the door and took a cleansing breath.

“Alright, we’ve been through a lot,” I said while holding my hands up gently. “Did you freak out because someone else came by?”

Whispers trickled through the air. A phantom breeze blew their limp leaves, motioning toward the rear of the greenhouse. More whispers floated along the air, drawing me into their unearthly tunnel. Branches creaked as they parted for my passage, curling up in jagged waves and then around me as I moved. The whispers intensified the deeper I walked, taking me past the poisonous bulbs I had tended earlier in the day, and then past the long teal stalks of bamboo that Blake had dropped off just this morning.

The voices ripened as I approached the back of the greenhouse. This was close to the door of my home, which was armed and ready with both a trap and cameras to catch any culprit whodaredset foot inside my private space.

“…just not sure, you know?”

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