Page 1 of Coming Home

Shelby

Chapter 1

There are two types of small-town girls in this world: the ones who can’t wait to get out and see the world, and those of us who simply want to find our one true mate and settle down to start a family. I always knew I’d be the latter, but much to my disappointment, that did not happen.

Today I was turning twenty-seven. By the time, I was twenty I’d already started getting “those” comments, as if I were an old maid or something.

“Shelby, what are you going to do with your future?”

“Shelby, you can’t just sit around waiting for someone who might never come.”

“Shelby, you have to do something with your life.”

I had skirted through every basic job in our territory and I hated them all. I wanted to be a mom. I didn’t want to leave Collier, but I knew I’d make a hell of a great Pack Mother if that were my destiny. By this point in my life, I’d given up hope that either would ever happen for me.

I knew some of my sisters had been much older when they first found their mates, but Dad wasn’t going to just let me sit around doing nothing while I waited for mine.

Two summers ago, I started working in the Collier youth center and it had really opened my eyes to a potential career. After I graduated high school, Dad had insisted I needed a college education. I hadn’t gone away to school like Lizzy and Clara, but I had found an online program that appeased him and had even graduated. Turned out it wasn’t too hard to go back and get my teaching certificate because of that. It wasn’t a career I’d ever considered before, but two weeks ago it became my new life.

I was now Ms. Shelby, English teacher at Collier Middle School. Most people assumed those junior high years were the absolute worst age to work with. It was often a tough time for kids, but I’d personally loved that age in my life and already knew from working with the after-school program at the center last year that I most enjoyed working with the kids that age in my Pack.

For me, growing up had been easy. Why? Because I’d always had Ben by my side.

Benjamin Shay and I had been best friends since we were in diapers. We grew up doing everything together. Literally every great story of my life started with “Ben and I . . .”

He was there when I fell out of a tree and broke my arm when we were six. He’d insisted on carrying me the entire way home, despite the fact my legs worked just fine.

By age ten he began getting teased for hanging out with a girl all the time. Ben had never cared about that and told them they’d all be jealous someday. He was right: by seventh grade, the boys started noticing me and that’s when everyone wanted to be Ben’s friend.

Grayson Ward was my first boyfriend, in eighth grade. When I confided in Ben one day down by the river that I was nervous about getting my first kiss at a party the next weekend that Grayson and I were going to, Ben sat me down on a boulder and told me not to worry.

“I’m not going to let Grayson ruin your first kiss, sport,” he said, seconds before his lips touched mine.

I had been momentarily stunned and just sat there frozen, but he had kept kissing me until I relaxed. When I sighed, my mouth had opened just a little and he’d stuck his tongue in. It was a crazy sensation at the time. I had never kissed a boy before, let alone French kissed one, but Ben was patient and a really good kisser, though I didn’t know that until the next weekend when Grayson had laid one on me and aggressively tried French kissing. I nearly gagged and we broke up the next day.

Everyone assumed things between us would change in high school, but they never did. I taught him how to dance before prom. He taught me to drive. We did everything together and were inseparable.

Basically, Ben had been my first everything in life, and then he just disappeared. Without any warning whatsoever, and one month to the day after the greatest night of my life, my best friend and the only man I had ever loved walked out of my life with barely a goodbye.

The night before he left, he showed up at my house asking if I could go for a drive. He broke the news then that he had enlisted into the army and was going out for the Ranger’s program. I didn’t understand how that would work, knowing he could never shift and let his wolf out with so many people constantly watching him, but he assured me it would be fine.

I cried when he hugged me goodbye without even a final kiss and walked away. Of course, at the time I thought it was only temporary. He’d go off to boot camp and I’d fly out to meet him before he started his next training. I was prepared to wait for him, and I wrote to him every single day. The first few weeks I had heard from him, but by the end of boot camp letters from Ben were rare.

He made an excuse as to why I couldn’t fly out to see him for graduation. I accepted that, and continued to write him, every single day. He wrote to me for the last time four months later, telling me he was being deployed.

I never personally heard from him again after that. I still wrote to him every day for two years straight. It wasn’t until I found out, after the fact, that his parents and younger brothers had flown out to visit with him, that I finally stopped sending the letters.

He hadn’t called or asked me to join them. Clearly, he had moved on, and it hurt. Heck, it still hurt. Everyone told me to let him go, but I couldn’t. Peyton was the only one that knew I still wrote to him every single day since. I just no longer mailed the letters. They went into a box on the top shelf of my closet.

Ben’s mother still kept me updated on where he was and how he was doing. She was so proud of him and I never let on how much it hurt to hear her stories. I knew he had been shot the previous year, and still he had refused to come home. He never thought to call and tell me he was at least alive. He didn’t need me anymore. That much was obvious. Some days it made me so angry. He may have gotten his closure easily enough, but I still hadn’t, and every time I even attempted to go on a date or move past it, inevitably I compared them all to Ben, and no man had ever been able to live up to that bar he had set.

The bell rang, jolting me back to the present and away from the bittersweet memories that would probably always haunt me. My last class of the day began to wander in, seventh grade English. I equally loved and dreaded this class every day, mostly because Ben’s twin little brothers were in it.

Troy and Will were a constant reminder of what was missing in my life. I loved those boys so much. They had only been in preschool when their brother left and I had tried to be there for them for the first few years, but then it just became so hard. When I stopped sending the letters, I stopped visiting the boys, too. But fate has a way of bringing things full circle—or just laughing in my face—because now I was stuck with them every day.

Troy looked so much like Ben at this age, and Will had no clue just how much like Ben he acted, right down to his best friend, Caroline Wilson. It was hard watching the two of them, and some days I just wanted to shake little Caroline and yell, “Don’t fall for it the way I did. Those Shay boys are nothing but heartbreakers!”

“Ms. Shelby?” Troy said as he walked up to my desk.

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