by Lucy Monroe
All she saw was stony coldness.
"Ty?"
"So you love me."
"Yes."
"So much that when I refused to have sex with you yesterday you told me you didn’t want to be my friend anymore."
"I’m sorry I hurt you. It’s not like you’re thinking. I was at the end of my emotional tether with you, Ty. I wasn’t trying to manipulate you."
"Weren’t you? Human women are good at that."
"As opposed to what, female animals?" she asked, her voice laced with sarcasm.
"As opposed to my kind," he said, a kind of impotent rage throbbing in his voice.
"Your kind? What are you talking about?"
He grimaced as if he hadn’t meant to say what he had. "I’ll explain after you tell me if this so called love of yours is going to lead to marriage."
She scooted into a sitting position, dragging the quilt with her as a covering over nudity she wasn’t comfortable sharing with him at the moment. The sunlight coming in through the window put his features in harsh relief and there was no comfort there for her hungry soul.
"It’s not so-called love, it’s real, Ty." So real, his attitude was shredding her.
"Then you’ll marry me."
"Are you saying you want to marry me?" she asked, unable to believe he was offering her dearest hope with such emotionless detachment.
On top of that, after every thing he’d said yesterday, the proposal – such that it was - didn’t make any sense.
He sat up beside her and she had to stifle and urge to reach out and touch the beautifully molded muscles of his chest. He was so perfect.
He raised one knee and draped his arm over it, his casual pose at odds with the strain emanating off of him. "I don’t have a choice." His hand fisted in the sheet, his knuckles white with tension. "According to pack law, we are already mated. Until death do us part."
"Pack law?" She felt vaguely disoriented, as if she’d stepped into one of those rooms at the fair where everything seemed further away than it really was. "I think you need to explain now. This isn’t adding up for me."
"First tell me if you’re going to marry me."
"Is that what you want?" she asked again.
"I told you, I don’t have a choice."
Which was an answer she supposed. For some reason, he believed he had to marry her, but he patently did not want to.
She turned her head away, unable to stand one more second of his icy regard. "I see."
"No, you don’t. I want you to marry me, all right?" He sighed, the sound impatient. "I need to know if you were telling me the truth last night when you said you belonged to me."
She swallowed, focusing on the white snow contrasted with the bright blue Montana sky out the window. "I’ve always belonged to you."
"I guess you believe that right now."
She jerked her gaze back to him. "Why are you so cynical?"
"I stopped believing in fairytales a long time ago."
"And marriage between us, love...it’s all a big fairytale in your mind?"
"No." He cupped her chin, his gaze burning through her. "It’s very real. I need to know if it’s real for you too."
"It’s real."
"Then we get married."
"Just like that?"
"If you love me like you say you do, you’ll marry me."
"And do you love me?"
"Will you refuse to marry me if I don’t?"
She considered that. He wasn’t acting very excited about the prospect of marriage between them even though he said he wanted it. In fact, he was downright cranky, but this was Ty...her best friend for more than a decade and the man she’d loved almost as long.
His current attitude not withstanding, she knew he cared about her. A lot. He’d been watching out for her for years and usually, they enjoyed each other’s company more than anyone else’s. He’d also proven beyond the shadow of a doubt last night that he desired her physically. But was that enough for marriage to work between them?
"I’m not sure. Before I can answer that, I have to understand why you say you want to marry me, but act like you’d rather ride an unbroken bronco sidesaddle."
He took a deep breath and let it out before settling more comfortably against the headboard. "To understand, you’ll have to learn some things about me, things that very few outsiders know. I can’t tell you any of it unless you promise me that no matter what you decide, you’ll keep my family’s secrets safe."
"I promise," she said without hesitation.
"I’m a werewolf."
She shook her head, feeling like she had marbles rolling around inside it instead of brains. Ty was the most practical man she'd ever known. No way had he just said what she thought. "Come again?"
"I'm a werewolf." He paused, glaring at her impatiently when she remained silent. "A lycanthrope...a shape changer."
"I know what a werewolf is. They’re the guys who get all hairy during a full moon and kill indiscriminately..." Oh, yuck. This revelation had all the makings of a nightmare she wanted to wake up from. "Ty, this isn’t funny. You’re no killer."
"No, I’m not, but I am a werewolf. Werewolves aren’t the myths of folklore." His face twisted with distaste. "Though most of what the world believes about our kind is no better than that. We’re human and yet we’re not. The animal nature humans fight to suppress plays a bigger role in our makeup, but we don’t lose our humanity because of it."
"So, it’s just an inward thing?" She couldn't believe they were having this conversation.
Of all the post-mortem discussion she had imagined having with Ty MacAnlup, him trying to convince her he was some kind of monster was not one of them. He didn't look or sound crazed, but his words were the kind of thing that got people locked up on the funny farm.
"No. It's much more than an inner delusion," he said, indicating he knew the direction of her thoughts.
And why shouldn't he? He knew her better than anyone else in the world. But if what he was saying was true, she didn't know him at all. "You can't be serious, Ty."
"I am. Very. Moonrise comes at 4:16 this afternoon and with it I will shape change into a wolf, but inside I will still be me with all my knowledge, all my thoughts, all my feelings. You will still belong to me."
She wasn't even sort of going there. She belonged to a wolf? Not likely. "Today?" she asked in a squeak as the significance of what he was telling her hit her.
"Yes."
"You’re going to get all hairy?"
"I’ll get more than hairy, I will take on the form of a wolf completely."
For some reason, an image of the wolf she had met as a teenager came to her, but she pushed it away. The situation was bizarre enough with her getting fanciful. She wanted to dismiss Ty's words as a bad joke, or maybe even temporary insanity, but he was too serious, too obviously convinced himself for her to do that. "You mean it, don't you? You really think you're going to turn into a wolf later this afternoon."
"I don't just think it, I know it."
She shook her head, unable to believe despite his strong conviction.
He let out an impatient breath. "Do you remember the wolf that came to you when you were crying by the swimming hole when you were fifteen?"
A shiver skated up her spine. "Yes, but I told you about him. I suppose now you are going to claim that was you, or something."
"It was. It was the first time I kissed you."
"You didn't kiss me."
"Yes, I did."
And she remembered how he'd licked the salty tears from her face. She made a strangled sound in her throat, but nothing would come out.
"It was me."
"No." She felt tears welling in her eyes. Either he was serious and needed psychological help, or he was trying very hard to drive her away. Either way, it hurt.
"You never told me what you did after the wolf ran away."
No, she hadn't. No way would she have told him that.
"You took your clo
thes off and you went swimming. I watched from the trees. You were so beautiful and I wanted to join you so bad, but I couldn't control my change and I knew if I went back to you I would scare you."
"I..."
"But you didn't just go swimming...you came out of the water and you dried off in the sun. Then you closed your eyes and you touched yourself...you said my name when you came." His eyes burned into her with an angry passion she didn't understand. "I wanted to howl with frustration, you were so beautiful, but I could not have you."
Embarrassed heat climbed her cheeks and she averted her face. He'd seen her all right because he couldn't have guessed that happened. He'd watched her pleasure herself just like last night, only that time she hadn't known she'd had an audience.
"You couldn't have heard me say your name," she said, trying to stick within the realm of reality. "No one was close enough."
"I was. Wolves have far superior hearing to humans. You know that."
Yes, she did, but in order to accept that he had heard her, she had to believe he had been the wolf and it was too fantastic. And yet nothing else made any sense.
"You never even noticed me back then."
"You're wrong."
"But you always flirted with the other girls."
"They were safe. I didn't want them...or they were femwolves."
"Female werewolves?"
"Yes. Don't look so shocked. As a vet, you know every animal species has to have two sexes to mate."
"But you mated with me last night...I mean had sex." She couldn't call it making love because he'd said nothing about loving her.
"Werewolves and humans can mate."
"Can they have babies?" her scientific mind demanded to know.
"Sometimes. When it's a sacred bond."
"What's that?"
"The simplest answer is that it is a mating between two werewolves or a werewolf and a human that results in offspring."
"Oh." She wanted to ask more questions about that, but something else he'd said took precedence. "You said it was your family’s secret? Is this like a genetic mutation?"
"From what our scientists can tell, werewolves have existed as long as their single form counterparts."
"Humans."
"Yes. We co-exist, but our ways are different. Pack law takes precedence over human law."
She stared at him and an irrefutable knowledge settled inside of her. He totally believed what he was saying, but even more than that, she believed him too. She'd suspected for years that werewolves existed, but she'd dismissed her thoughts as foolish fancy. She couldn't dismiss that sense of rightness about what he was saying now.
That encounter with the wolf...Ty...oh, gosh, she still couldn't believe it had been him...but the encounter had been real. She'd never doubted it and now she had to accept that the reason it had such an impact on her was because she'd met not a wolf, but a werewolf.
"You belong to a pack?" she asked in barely a whisper, her mind still trying to wrap around this new reality she faced.
"Yes. Dad is pack leader."
That didn’t sound nearly as farfetched as it should. King was definitely a leader among men, why not werewolves?
Oh, man...lycanthropes in rural Montana. She shook her head, trying to clear it, but her thoughts swirled like a motorized merry-go-round. "If what you are saying is true, why didn’t I know about it? We’ve been friends since I was twelve years old."
"We’re good at keeping our secret. We’ve had millennia of practice."
"But I’ve been your best friend for fourteen years...wouldn’t you have told me?" The thought he’d kept something so integral to his nature from her for so long made her wonder again how well she really knew him.
"Obviously I didn’t, but I always half-expected your aunt or uncle to."
"They know? Who told them?" If all this was real, then her family knowing while she didn’t would hurt as much as the fact he’d withheld the information from her in the first place. And it did hurt. She felt betrayed even if she might have no right to that feeling. "And Marigold?"
"Yes, she knows." His lip curled derisively. "Too much."
"Why them and not me?" she asked with a catch in her voice she was powerless to suppress.
It seemed to bother him and he frowned, then pulled one of her cold hands between his, rubbing her knuckles absently. He’d comforted her this way many times over the years and she wondered if he was even aware of doing it now.
"Your aunt’s great-grandmother was femwolf, a female werewolf, but there have been no wolves born in the family for two generations."
"Aunt Rose is a werewolf, femwolf...whatever?"
"No, I told you—"
"Her family. Okay, I understand, I think, but I still don’t...I mean...why never tell me?"
He sighed. "You didn’t need to know. It didn’t impact our friendship."
Hadn’t it? It seemed to her like he’d withheld a pretty big part of himself. So had her aunt for that matter.
"If we did get married and had children, would they be puppies?" she asked on a sudden thought that frightened the life out of her.
"No, cubs don’t go through their first change until puberty. In a wolf-human mating, there is no guarantee any of the offspring will be born wolf."
"Does that bother you?"
He cocked his head to the side, as if thinking about it for the first time. "No. I don’t think it does. I'll love my kids regardless of what they are, but even if they are human, as long as they choose to belong to the pack and participate in its rituals, they are subject to pack law."
"That sounds scary," she said with a shiver.
"It can be." His tone was grim and she didn't doubt him.
"And if they choose not to belong to the pack?"
"Then they are subject only to human law, but they also forego the protection of the pack."
"And if I marry you, will I belong to the pack?"
"That's not a decision I can make. My father would have to approve you joining the pack and you would have to want to, but I will always protect you, no matter what."
Remembering the cold way King had always treated here, she thought her chances of being approved as a pack member were pretty slim.
"Is your father going to be angry if we get married?"
"Yes."
Her heart contracted. "Oh."
"But he will accept the marriage."
She said nothing to that, not as convinced as Ty was that his dad would accept anything.
"Is the werewolf gene the recessive one?" she asked, not wanting to dwell on future problems while her mind was all but mush dealing with the ramifications of what Ty was telling her.
He shrugged. "It’s more complicated than that, but werewolf science still hasn’t figured out the whys of it all. All we do know is that if it was a totally recessive gene, out of kind matings would never result in wolf offspring and sometimes they do."
"Out of kind?"
"When one partner is non-werewolf."
"You didn’t want to mate with a human," she remembered. "I mean it was a big thing with you if you've been avoiding me since I was fifteen." A lot of stuff was starting to make sense. "Even yesterday, you told me you didn't want that with me."
"Oh, I wanted you."
"Your body did, but your mind didn't."
"Right."
"You always tell the truth, even when it hurts," she said with a pain-filled laugh.
"It's a wolf trait. We're good at hiding what we are, but not lying outright."
She nodded, her knowledge of animals making perfect sense of that remark. "Everyone told me you were interested in Olivia..."
"She's our kind."
"You wanted to marry her?" she asked. All the signs pointed to that, but still she couldn't quite believe it. Not after last night.
"Yes."
She stared at him in disbelief. "You don't mean that."
"I do. Mating with Olivia would have been natural."
"You
r father likes her, I guess."
"Yes, he does."
"Because she's your kind."
"Yes."
"But you didn't want her!" Pain and anger was ripping through her in a torrent of devastation. "And she didn't want you."
"I planned to change that."
"Only I got in the way." If learning he was a werewolf was overwhelming, discovering he had truly planned to marry...mate with...another woman was devastating.
This conversation had moved from the realm of unbelievable to the tortuous.
"Yes."
The confirmation of her fear hurt. It also made her mad. Really, really mad. She hadn't been alone in that bed last night and he hadn’t been thinking of Olivia when they made love. Had he? What if he'd had sex with her because she was handy...because Olivia was not?
She would not live her life as a substitute for anybody.
"Just because we had sex doesn’t mean you can’t marry her," she said scathingly, her fury making her feel violent. She wasn't about to beg for his affection. She shouldn't have to. "That kind of thing happens all the time."
He seemed to grow with an anger that easily matched hers. "You’re wrong. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in the werewolf world. Once we mate, it’s for life - a byproduct of our animal nature and pack law. Unlike humans, we have no infidelity and there is no provision for divorce in our pack."
"Are you saying that making love is equivalent to mating for a werewolf...to marriage?"
"Yes."
"Oh, please."
His face creased in a fierce frown, his blue eyes dark with obvious displeasure at her skepticism.
She frowned back. "That would mean that every woman you’d had sex with would be your mate." No way could that be true, but then... "Hold on a minute, you don’t have multiple mates do you?" If her question came out more hysterical than not, she could be forgiven.
No way was she joining a harem.
But wouldn’t she have noticed if he lived like some kind of lycanthrope sultan? Then again, she hadn’t even noticed he was a werewolf.
And furthermore, did her questions indicate she accepted all that he was saying as truth?
It seemed she did. As implausible as his story might sound, Ty had never lied to her, nor was he the delusional type. And then there was the wolf incident...the things he knew he could not have known if he hadn't been there, hadn't had the sharp hearing of a wolf. This was all real. Too real.