Page 50 of Mismatched Mates

“Mom told us everything,” Luke said before I could get a word in and tell him to leave.

Oh, I bet she did.

But for all her brashness, at least my mom had the good sense not to gloat.

Victoria stepped forward, her warm hazel eyes searching my face. "Can we come in?" she asked, her voice gentle but leaving no room for argument.

Mom hurried up the drive toward the house, locking the car over her shoulder. “Jane,” she said, and shook her head, clucking her tongue. Things between Mom and Victoria hadbeen frosty for a while, but I guess they had fixed their issues because they exchanged a determined look. “Let’s get you inside.”

“The boys are at soccer practice,” Mom added to Luke and Victoria. “I’ll pick them up once we’re done.”

Well if that wasn’t ominous.

But there was no putting them off, so I just waved them in. The living room, usually a cozy haven, felt like an interrogation chamber as we settled onto the couch. Sunlight streamed through the windows, casting long shadows and highlighting the piles of laundry I'd been ignoring. Great. Now I was a mess AND a slob.

They sat in a row on my sofa and stared at me.

“This is creepy.”

Mom sniffed. “You’ve lost weight.”

“No I haven’t.” My answer was a knee-jerk response, but considering how little I’d been eating, if I had lost weight, it was hardly a surprise.

“We know about Grant,” Victoria said gently. “And I know—losing your mate is hard.”

“I’m fine,” I insisted. The words on the tip of my tongue that he wasn’t my mate hovered there. Since I’d hit puberty, I’d been aware of the discourse around mates. One person, destined to be it for life. The whole thing seemed ridiculous, even after Luke and Victoria found each other. Yes, they were clearly designed for one another, but she had literally moved across America to be by his side. That, I could just about get a handle on believing.

But this? Grant, the brother of the man who had broken my best friend’s heart, the wolf pack alpha’s eldest son, a man who had lived in Pine River his entire life, just the same as me, being my mate? That was too much. I’d been able to dismiss it as being so improbable as to be untrue.

If it hadn’t been for the constant tug in my gut and my bear howling her insistence in my chest, then maybe I could have gone on believing that it was an impossibility. But all my arguments were crumbling in the face of the quiet part inside me that alreadyknew.

Grant Elston was my mate. And he’d betrayed me.

“We know you’re not okay,” Luke said, elbows braced against his knees. “But you can’t keep telling everyone you’re fine and pushing them away while you kill yourself with work.”

“I have to be okay,” I whispered. “For the boys—for everyone. I have to be okay.”

Mom stood and pulled me into a rough hug that reminded me of when we were kids and grazed our knees, the way she would enfold us in her arms and hold us until the pain went away.

Except this time I didn’t think the pain was going anywhere.

And just like that, the dam broke. Tears I'd been holding back for days spilled over, and I found myself enveloped in a group hug that smelled like my mother's perfume, Victoria's shampoo, and Luke's familiar woodsy scent.

"I'm such an idiot," I sobbed into someone's shoulder – probably ruining a perfectly good shirt in the process.

"No, you're not," Victoria murmured, stroking my hair. "You're human. Well, mostly," she added.

Until I’d met Grant, I hadn’t had this sense that a part of me was missing. I’d been whole. I hadn’tneededhim. But when he’d burst into my life, it was as though he’d brought the color with it, like I’d taken a breath for the first time in my thirty-two years on this earth.

Now without him, I couldn’t breathe. I’d lost half of myself and I didn’t know how to put all the missing pieces together without him.

“Maybe he is my mate,” I said, my voice cracking. “But we were never together.”

Luke went still. “What?”

The entire story came spilling out, piece by tortuous piece. The way Luke had caught me in a lie—and how I’d used Victory Matchmaking to cover for it.

“I should’ve known better,” I said again, as they led me to the sofa. My voice cracked as I recounted every red flag I'd willfully ignored, every instinct I'd silenced.

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