Page 27 of My Blind Date is a Werewolf

My fingers halted in the middle of brushing through his hair and I retracted as if he’d burned me. Stalking back to the picnic table, I spoke to him over my shoulder. “If you don’t want to talk about it, let’s eat so that I can get back to my coffee shop,” I snapped.

“Babe, come on!” Adrian laughed and jogged after me, picking me up and carrying me bridal style to the table. “Is it really so embarrassing to admit your feelings to me in person?” He peered down at my flushed face.

“Let me down, you overgrown puppy. People are staring.” I tried to swat his chest but couldn’t because of the way he was carrying me.

He sighed and sat me down on the bench. “I’ll tell you what happened, but don’t think this is getting you out of discussing what you said over the phone.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. You must have misheard what I said.” I turned my back to him and unpacked our lunch.

Adrian sat next to me, straddling the bench so that he was facing me, so I did the same. We stared at each other in silence—Adrian smiling like a fool, and me… Let’s just say I wished there was a limit to how many times a person could blush in a day.

I’d gone with a simple order of cheese fries, steak burgers, and—just so I felt like I was eating healthy—a small of Greek salad and bottled waters. Adrian devoured his food as if he hadn’t eaten in days, and I even gave him half of my burger since The Eat made them as big as my face and I was full after only a few bites.

“We killed them,” Adrian confessed quietly, his hands clasped between his thighs and gaze averted from me. I swallowed the water in my mouth, thankful I didn’t choke, and slowly tightened the cap on the bottle and put it back on the table.

What do I say to something like that? I asked myself.

“You might not understand it, and maybe you fear me a little now, but that’s the way of life. It’s shifter law. You break the laws or overstep your bounds and you’re put down. It’s brutal and violent, but at the end of the day, it saved us a whole lot more bloodshed than if we would have let them go,” he explained as if reading my thoughts.

Understanding dawned on me. “If you hadn’t done it, they would have hunted you and the senior members of your pack down so that they could take over. It was either you or them.”

He nodded and finally looked at me. “The law of the jungle. If we’d let them leave, they would have gone back to where they came from and brought back friends. This way, no one will think to challenge us again. We’ve made it clear that the Mystic Cove pack is not ripe for picking.”

“Who were they, the rogues? Did they tell you what they were doing with West and the others?” I asked. Adrian clasped his hands tight, his leg bouncing up and down. I placed my hand over his knee to stop the nervous bouncing, my breath catching in my throat when I saw the anger swimming in the amber depths of his eyes.

“One of them, the leader, was the son of a wolf Rod exiled twenty years ago. I was just a kid, but everyone knows the story. The man was caught stealing pack funds and distributing a drug designed specifically for our kind. It’s not easy for shifters to get high or drunk, but this drug could do it—with the side effect of making us go rabid. I’m told we lost a few of our juveniles at the time to the drug, and Rod was livid when he found out.”

Needing to walk off his excess energy and anger, Adrian asked me to walk around the lake with him. A family of ducks was swimming from one side of the lake to the other, and a little boy was desperately trying to entice them by waving a slice of bread in the air and making random duck noises as his mom took a video on her phone.

“Apparently, after exile, the man struggled to find a pack for him and his family to join. His wife hadn’t been ordered to leave with him, but when you’re a mated pair, there are really no two ways about it. Wolves are pack creatures, but once word got out about why he was exiled, no pack worth its salt would take him in. I guess that took a toll on the family and things didn’t work out well. Twenty years later, his son came back to Mystic Cove for revenge.”

He took my hand and drew me closer to him when three children came barreling past us, kicking a soccer ball between them.

“What was West’s role in this?”

“West promised him a place in the pack if they helped him take me out and install Logan in my place. The really screwed-up part is I don’t even know what I did to make them hate me so much. They wanted someone of Rod’s bloodline to succeed him, but there is no way they’re coming back from this.” He took a shaky breath and squeezed his eyes shut. “I had to tell this to his mother this morning. Logan officially challenged West to a duel. Normally I would have done it, but…” He trailed off with a helpless shrug.

“They’re his cousins and they did something this despicable in his name. He wants to mete out punishment himself and show that he stands by you.” I didn’t know how I knew that, I just did.

“You’re starting to think like one of us.” He flashed me a pleased and surprised smile. “Mrs. West was devastated to hear it, but she understands pack law and assured me that she stands behind the pack. That means she stands behind me.”

He glanced up at the sky and I looked up at him, smiling when he finally glanced down at me, his eyes clear of darkness and the depths of his feelings for me written in big, bold letters. It stole my breath away. “You were right, talking about it taking a load off my chest, but now I really don’t want to go back to work today.”

I stepped close to him, leaving no space between our bodies. I’d said I didn’t want to rush things, but I ached for him. The need to be with him in the most intimate way possible was a growing hunger that would only be satiated by one thing and one thing only.

“Then let’s go home. I can think of a couple of ways we could pass the day.” I trailed my hands up his body.

Adrian gave me a blank stare for all of five seconds before understanding lit up his features. “Is that so?” he drawled, wrapping his hands down my waist. “It’s a good thing my car is parked not far from here.”

We gathered up our stuff, threw the food wrappers and bag into the garbage, and made our way out of the park, giggling and stealing kisses like a couple of teens. The smile on my face died when I saw Dustin jog across the street ahead of us. It looked like he was coming from the park too.

“Adrian!”

At my alarmed call, my boyfriend paused in the act of opening the car door. “What is it?”

I pointed at Dustin’s retreating form as he disappeared around the corner of a hair salon. “Dustin Rathinger, the guy you rescued me from that one time. It could just be my imagination playing with me after the whole break-in incident, but I think he might be following me. I saw him at The Eat when I was picking up our food, and just now it looked like he left the park.”

Adrian scowled and turned his nose up to the sky. “There’s too many scents in the air to tell if his scent matches the residual I smelled at your house. Next time you spot him skulking about, call me, okay? If he’s the one who was in your house that night, there’s no telling what he’ll do.”

---