Page 58 of The Wild Wolf's Rejected Mate

But I’ll be naked.

I could shift right back after I take a peek.

Justus has to walk all the way back down to camp and back up again. I have time. And my wolf needs a break. Is it fair to keep hiding inside her, especially now that she’s dragging ass?

Curiosity wins.

I don’t really take our skin. The instant I make the decision, my wolf dissolves into a puddle of fur with a huge sigh, and I have no choice but to mold us into legs and arms, rising up until I’m standing, shivering on two bare feet.

My body feels strange and rubbery, and my knees sway when I step toward the apple crate. The clock is ticking. My heart speeds up.

Run now. He’s gone. It’s your last chance. Run!

Through his entire pack, pups and elders and all? With these rubber legs? Butt naked?

I sink to my knees beside the crate and pick up the top book, a small white-covered paperback with a surreal picture of a sun with a human face on it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’sDiscourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. The pages are sepia and brittle as fall leaves. I’ve never heard of it.

I’m not much of areaderof books. I’m too distractible. When the money started to come in from the farmers’ market, I got into audiobooks, though. The sound doesn’t exactly drown out the pecking voice, but I can kind of focus on the narrator, and it really helps the day go by better.

I like mysteries and psychological thrillers, but only if they’re written and narrated by women. If a woman’s reading it, I can listen to the most grotesque crime scene descriptions and think nothing of it, but if it’s read by a man, I can’t handle it. I can’t explain it, but I don’t have to, either, if I don’t bring it up, and I’m not one to ever start conversations.

I sniff the paperback—old, musty paper, glue, and Justus—and set it on the pallet. The next book in the pile, Peter Kropotkin’sThe Conquest of Bread, has a picture of two menchopping down a tree on the cover. It smells the same. All the books are dog-eared paperbacks with yellowed pages—Waldenby Henry David Thoreau,Parable of the Sowerby Octavia Butler,Critique of Practical Reasonby Immanuel Kant, several each by Ursula K. Le Guin and N. K. Jemison, and a massive hardback of Plato’s collected works.

The Plato is the only one that looks like it hasn’t been read a hundred times. There are dozens more. I haven’t heard of any of them.

How did Justus learn to read? Can everyone in Last Pack? I was always told that they can’t.

I flip through the book with the sun on the front. The font is small, and the paragraphs are long. I skim the first page, but none of it sticks. My eyes slide along the words like they’re buttered.

I’m about to put it back when someone whistles outside the den. My fingers fumble, and the book falls, wide open and face down.

Another whistle rings out, closer this time. I pitch the book into the crate and scramble to sit on the pallet, wrapping my arms around my shins, tucking my knees to my chin.

Justus ducks into the den, and the second that he sees me, huddling in my skin, his eyes light on fire. A delicious spicy, muskiness fills the den. My heartbeat skips.

He has blue fabric folded over his right forearm and a steaming bowl in each hand, and he stands in the entranceway like he’s forgotten what he came here to do.

Suddenly, I’m aware of my bare bottom on the edge of his pallet. How my breasts smoosh against my knees. The trickle from my pussy that is immediately soaked up by his cotton top sheet.

His chest is rising and falling like he ran back. His nostrils flare.

In the back of my mind, the voice is shouting, but he’s not moving an inch, so I can ignore her.

He clears his throat. “Can I bring you this?” he asks, raising the arm with the fabric and a steaming bowl. My stomach grumbles.

I nod, keeping my eyes locked on him. In case he makes a sudden move. Not because he’s so tall and muscular and tattooed and bearded, and he has fabric folded over his forearm and a bowl like a fancy waiter on TV.

He slowly sets his own bowl down at his feet and then approaches me, one step at a time, like he’s stalking deer. My muscles tense and my belly explodes with butterflies.

I’m still shivering, but I’m not the least bit cold. The temperature in the den is actually pleasantly warm. Cozy, not stuffy. If I weren’t so terribly, painfully, awkwardly naked, it’d be comfortable.

Justus stops a few feet from me, places the bowl on the rug, and then lays the fabric beside it. He tries to fold it, but he does it about as well as the Z-roster males working off their punishment in the laundry.

“I’ll turn around so you can, uh—” He waves at the fabric and then goes back to the entrance and squats with his back to me, staring out into the dark.

His butt and quads stretch his pants tight. There’s a crease that follows his spine all the way into his waistband, and those dimples. His tattoos swirl along his right arm and shoulder, wrapping around his right side, but the left side of his body is blank except for the lines his muscles make.

I don’t realize I’m gawking until he fidgets, shifting his weight. I quickly bend forward and grab the fabric. It’s lightweight, but there’s a lot of it. I wrap it around me like a shower towel, and I’m covered from boob to ankle. I sit back onthe pallet, but the fabric is too tight to pull my knees up, so I fold them sideways.

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