Page 18 of Daddy's Mail Order Mate

“... Take a seat.”

She doesn’t move or say a word for nearly a minute. Eventually, she walks over to the table nearby and does just that.When I finally turn to look at her, it feels like a fever dream. I’ve never even thought to imagine her here, in the home I bought for raising my son as peacefully as I can. But here she is.

If I didn’t know for certain that the app was anonymous, I could have almost guessed that Paige did this on purpose.

God, Paige.

I don’t have the energy to spare for getting ready for her reaction to all this just now. I still need to see to it in the first place.

I slowly pull out the chair nearby, making sure I’m sat right by my boy in case he needs anything.

But it is hard to not feel my attention torn, so much of my mind wanting to fixate on the woman sat across from me.

Her posture is rigid. She’s sat almost to the edge of the chair, back pin-straight, hands carefully laid on each leg under the table, feet planted so as to be ready to stand on a moment’s notice. She stares at me with a vigilant intensity, but I can see the exhaustion set beneath those scrutinizing eyes.

“I think we should call things off,” she says in a firm yet faintly choked tone.

She’d never been one for small-talk. It was one of the reasons why I fell in love with her in the first place. As a young man, I’d been relieved to finally meet a girl who not only tolerated my curt, focused nature, but one who thought and acted in a way that lined up so perfectly with me. The Gwen I knew had never been offended or put off by me, or seemed to stomach discomfort in the way almost everyone else did around me.

Every part of me locks up.

A terrible pain threatens up my throat and burns in my chest.

My wolf keens with a sort of territorial melancholy. Why would she leave? We only just found her again. She is here, with me. Why should she go anywhere else?

I drop my gaze to the table and distractedly notice that my hand has curled into a fist. With a hushed exhale, I force it to straighten back out and lay flat on the cool wood.

“... No.”

“Why?”

“Why do you want to leave?”

I look up immediately, needing to see the look on her face. Needing to just…Seeher.

There’s a flicker across her features, the emotions difficult to parse. I recognize the traces of the girl I used to know, though. There’s the way her eyebrows knot together when she’s trying to keep a straight face—I always found that tell of hers particularly charming when we were young. Her lips twitch in an indeterminate white noise that I can’t make heads or tails of, especially with how quickly it passes into a firm line. She’s not looking at me anymore now. Her gaze is cast off to the window, and I can see the gold and green through the linen curtain’s glow reflecting so prettily across her dark eyes. Despite her naturally red hair, her eyelashes had always been thick and heavy. But they’re a deep black right now, not that faintly chestnut tone that feathered out so prettily whenever she’d looked up at me when we were together. She’s clearly put on some mascara today. Maybe when she got ready today, she’d been wanting to impress the man she’d made plans to live with, as I’d never known her to wear much makeup.

A senseless gnarl of jealousy spikes off in me, but I’m spared the embarrassment of paying attention to it by her finally replying.

“You’ve already rejected me, Thorn. Give me the decency to not have to live through that again.”

Despite the steadiness of her voice, I can tell she has to force herself to not shudder in a breath afterward.

“This was supposed to be my last try to live with other wolves. I’d thought this would be as good a chance as any to… See if I could ever have a place among them again, or if I’m better off just committing to living like a human for the rest of my life. But I’ll take the cosmic punchline that I’d get matched to you out of an entire country of men as a sign that I should stay gone from this world. I wasn’t really even that keen on doing it in the first place. Really, I mostly just wanted to make my brother shut up about trying to set me up or join his pack.”

I huff under my breath, lip twitching in empathetic humor.

“Yeah. Know how that goes.”

“Did Paige make you do the app too?”

I grunt in assent, and there’s a fond bloom in my chest when I see the faintest crinkle of her eyes at that.

“Glad to hear your pack didn’t beat the spark out of her.”

I sober at that, and I see her mirth taper off just the same. Portsmill Pack had been a hostile place when we’d been kids. None of us had left it unscathed. Apparently not even Gwen, who’d only been able to be around our pack when the Cherrygrove Pack was in the area for a season or two. Shame churns in my gut. I know life must have gotten harder for herafter how things ended, but maybe she’d suffered worse than I’d imagined after I’d left Portsmill.

My vision loses focus, and I fight my mind to keep it here. I didn’t need to go getting caught in the undertow of my past right now.

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