Page 24 of The Good Boys Club

Bordalis was the capitol city of Borderlands. It was bigger than Remy, both in hectares and population, yet it yielded fewer matches. Hey, and guess what? Mash had fucked all of those women as well.

“Urgh, shit,” he whined, crumpling the empty biscuit wrapper in his hand and tossing it towards the wastepaper bin. It missed. Mash made no attempt to fetch it.

“What about if we lowered the age limit?” I suggested.

“No, my pack would never go for that. Twenty-five is the age you’re considered adult enough to settle down and build a family. Before then, you need to be sowing your oats. I mean, you don’t have to, but it’s like technically illegal to mate someone under twenty-five.”

“Why? That’s so odd.”

Mash shrugged. “They’ll tell you it’s because before that age how can you possibly know who you want to spend the rest of your life with, but really it’s because once you reach twenty-five the pack elders don’t feel guilty for haranguing you about your love life.”

I nodded . . . didn’t articulate my thoughts because I knew at nineteen who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. That hadn’t changed.

“So, your only option is to message one of the women you’ve slept with. Like, you’ve already hooked up with them, you should have some idea who’d be up for faking it and who wouldn’t.”

Mash puffed out a breath and leant back in his chair. He pouted as he mulled this over. I resisted the urge to stare at those lips of his.

“Or . . .” Gideon said, scare-jumping both of us. “Change the search to include shifters.”

“She has to be were. His pack wouldn’t accept a shifter, it’s . . . I dunno, a cultural thing,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said with awell-duhedge to his voice. “I’ve worked here long enough to understand were and shifter norms. But I’ve seen you partially shift to resemble a were. What if she pretended to be werewolf.”

“Ooh!” Mash sat forward again.

“I dunno. That’s a big ask,” I said. “It took me ages to figure out a partial shift, and it’s exhausting to keep it up for any longer than a few minutes. We’d be asking this girl to hold a partial shiftfor hours at a time, over a two-month period. It’s . . .” I trailed off.

“Yeah, that doesn’t seem fair, I suppose. Fuck.” Mash jumped to his feet, scrubbed both his hands through his hair. He began pacing, grunting and knocking his fist against his head.

I kept quiet. I was out of ideas. If Mash turned up to his pack’s event without a mate, they’d force him to mate with Dee-Dee. He’d move away from me, and I’d never get to see him again—or at least not nearly as often as I’d like.

And he’d be unhappy. I needed to stop thinking about myself in this situation. Mash would be unhappy. Wouldn’t he?

“What about if we could somehow convince the dean to call your alpha and explain how important it is you don’t miss the start of term?”

Mash’s face dropped in an instant. “Yeah, that’s not going to work.”

“What if I called your nana and pretended to be the dean?”

“She’s spoken to Agnes before. When she tried to get me to come last year . . . and the year before. She knows what she sounds like.”

“Damn,” Gideon said from beside me, apparently invested now.

All three of us sighed.

“Okay, bathroom break,” I said, getting to my feet. I needed some more thinking time.

“I’ll make some more coffee,” Mash said.

When I got back from the bathroom, Mash was sitting with his feet up on the desk, eating yet another packet of Julie’s biscuits. He offered a cookie to Giddy. Giddy accepted happily. His antennae quivered.

“I have an idea,” I said, sitting between them again. “You might not like it, but it’s the only thing I can think of that doesn’t involve messaging one of these women and begging.”

Mash paused his biscuit-wielding hand halfway to his mouth.

“You said it’s not necessary for you to fuck them, right? That there are other ways to prove the existence of a mate bond?”

“Yeah?” he said. His smile slowly morphed into a grimace.

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