Page 43 of To Challenge a Wolf

Vivian crossed her arms and stared at him through the dark. “Then you’re going to explain yourself. For real this time.”

Eleven

Wolf lore was so unfair.

Here Vivian sat, Rhett’s warm arm around her, having in the last half hour experienced the two hottest kisses of her entire twenty-seven years of life. Here she sat with a wolf who was not only attractive beyond her dreams but also strong, capable, smart, protective, and good. Not to mention better at snark than she’d ever be. Rhett was the definition ofher type. Worse—he was the original incarnation of her type.

No, she wasn’t his mate. He’d made this so clear, she had no room to doubt it.

So fate hadn’t chosen her. So what? Maybe they’d miss out on some mystical bond or something, but she didn’t need help making this wolf happy, and he’d make her happy too.

Except…what would happen to them when he found his fated life mate?

So many thoughts zipped through her mind while she waited for him to say something. Waited longer than expected. Rhett was never at a loss for words.

“Robert mentioned I moved like a vampire tonight,” he said. “Well, that’s because I trained with several of them.”

Not at all what she’d expected, especially as his lead-in. “Okay…”

“I couldn’t really best one, not at speed anyway. Couldn’t best Malachi either with his superior DNA. But I got trained to move like one of them—efficient, fluid. Flowing water, like Robert said. So compared to other fourteen-percent wolves, I’m fastest of the fast. I had to be, if I was going to go around punishing the people—wolves and humans—who disappointed Stone.”

“Punishing?”

“What do you think Walter did for my father, Viv?”

At last she could tell him what she’d learned after he left. What she now knew Rhett had refused to become. “He enforced Stone’s rule. Stone had plenty of white-collar enforcers to ruin a person financially or socially if he saw fit, but Walter was the physical one. The…well, the bone-breaker.”

“And the hit man,” Rhett said.

“The…what?”

“Yeah.”

“And—and you—?”

“I trained with vampires for speed and wolves for strength. I trained with Walter for strategy. I learned fast to stop getting hit. Getting bitten.”

“Bitten…” No. No, no, no.

“Don’t worry, I’m still a wolf.”

“Well, of course you are.” The ability to turn a person with their bite was a myth; Blaine had said so. “But, Rhett, you were just a pup when training started. You were like ten years old.”

“Nine,” Rhett said quietly.

She’d never known, when someone said their heart hurt, that it could be such a physical pain. She tried to hug him, but he took hold of her wrist and set her away from him.

“Look, Viv, the point is, I was trained to kill.”

“You’ve never taken a life,” she said. She didn’t need his confirmation. She trusted this truth with everything in her.

“No,” he said, “but—”

“I don’t care that you wish you’d killed Drew. In fact I wouldn’t care if youhadkilled him in defense of your pack. So if that’s why you think we can’t be together—”

“It’s not. I knew when you showed up yesterday.”

“What was your reason then?”

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