Page 100 of Fated to the Warrior Wolf

He held open the door for Gustav’s too, and the most delectable scents I’deverexperienced bathed me. It was fresh baked bread, roasting meat, and some sort of rich sauce or broth I couldn’t put my finger on. I was instantly starving, voracious for whatever the hell they served here.

To my surprise, the inside was packed, low lanterns mounted on the walls gilding the working-class men and women scattered around every table and booth. It looked like a painting, and in that moment, I wished I had an ounce of artistic skill to capture it.

Though without the divine smells, it could never be as perfect as this moment.

He held up two fingers in a gesture to someone—though there was no one waiting at a hostess stand that I could see—and then led me through the maze of occupied tables right to the bar across the back.

“Gael! And you’ve brought a lovely lady to meet me. I’m so lucky!” A barrel-chested man with a wide grin and a green apron greeted us. Before we’d even settled on our barstools, a plate of steaming bread tied in intricate knots was slid between us, and he was already reaching for the nearest beer tap.

“Hang on, my friend—just water for us tonight. Unless you’d like a soda?” Gael asked me.

“Water’s great, thank you,” I murmured, a little overawed by the personal attention.

“Water! That’s not how we do it at Gustav’s, you know.”

“I know, Gustav. I’m sorry! But…” Gael glanced around conspiratorially, then leaned forward and stage whispered, “My lovely companion is pregnant.”

My cheeks burned as the man arched a thick brown eyebrow the size of a caterpillar over twinkling eyes, but thankfully, he kept quiet as he reached over for two water glasses with a wide smile. When he filled them and spun back around to hand them to us along with a pair of menus, his scent hit me for the first time, and my jaw nearly dropped. But I managed to hold my surprise until he turned to serve another customer.

Holding up my menu as a shield, I ducked behind it and turned to Gael.

“He’shuman? I thought everyone in the village was Kosta’s pack?” I whispered.

Gael grinned. “Youassumedthat everyone in the village was pack. But we’re sitting in a primarilyhumanestablishment right now, so if you could keep the glowing in check, that’d be for the best.” He gestured to my eyes.

I blinked, and I realized he was right. My eyes were glowing, my wolf reacting to Gael’s proximity and the surprise of being surrounded by humans. She’d been edgy ever since I got pregnant, and this was the first time I’d been surrounded by humans since I left my job back home at the gym. I blinked a few times until I felt her recede, and he gave me a wink of approval.

“Do you want anything besides fries? How hungry are you?” he asked as I glanced over the menu. There was no English on it at all, so I still had no idea what they served here besides bread.

“What’s good here? I could eat a horse right now,” I admitted, abandoning the laminated menu in favor of a roll.

Or the handsome, tempting, muscle-bound man sitting at my side. I’d love another taste of him.

The roll was safer, so I stuffed it in my mouth before I could say something I’d regret. It was slathered in some kind of garlic spread, and my eyes almost rolled back in my head from food-induced bliss.

“Everything’s good. I’ll order us a variety, if that’s okay?”

“Absolutely,” I mumbled around my mouthful of bread as Gustav stepped back up to the counter across from us.

“Are you ready, my friend?”

“Of course,” Gael said, then shot me a smile and switched flawlessly into fluid Romanian. Gustav took quick notes on a pad, then left us to enjoy our bread.

“So, I’d thought before that Romanian was your birth language, but that’s not true, is it?” I asked after I was done inhaling my second piece of bread.Stick to safe topics, Leigh.Do not let the hormones win.

“No, Spanish is my first language. English second, and Romanian is my third.”

“Wow,” I said, genuinely surprised. “Do you speak others, or…”

“I’m also fluent in Portuguese, and conversational in French. But that’s it.”

“I have never felt so American as I do in this exact moment. I speak English and a smattering of high school Spanish. Me llamo Leigh, y me gusta carteras rosas.”

He threw his head back and laughed, right as another server we hadn’t seen yet arrived with both arms loaded down with plates.

“Just the two of you?” he asked in heavily accented English.

“We’rereallyhungry,” Gael joked without missing a beat. It was a new side of him I’d never seen before, a freedom that he usually didn’t show when we were with the pack. He was always so straitlaced and serious. I was loving every minute of this. It felt like he and I werefriends.

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