Page 71 of To Challenge a Wolf

“We can’t do this,” he said.

Vivian went still. A tang of uncertainty overpowered her scent, but she didn’t ask him what he meant. Instead she began slowly shaking her head. “Rhett, no.”

“I’ll take you back to your car.”

“Rhett.No.”

“Did you see that wolf just now? He knows how to support his mate, knows how to take pride in his pup.”

“Well, great, but I’m not in love with that wolf.” She tugged his arm and leaned into his side. “I’m in love with this one.”

“Wh-what?”

Vivian met his eyes, and hers were stripped of all sarcasm, all pretense…all self-protection. “I know who I’m getting, Rhett. And I don’t want some teddy-bear wolf who cries happy tears at the drop of a hat. I want the steel-armored wolf with all his defenses, because I’m not scared to work my way underneaththat steel. I want the wolf who pokes me for the fun of it, who never misses a chance for a snarky comeback, who makes out with me on a bed of moss at midnight and makes my toes curl with a single smoldering smirk. I want you. I love you.”

“No,” he said, his voice so faint he hardly heard it. But Vivian did.

“We belong to each other, Rhett. I belong with you, and I don’t want to belong with anyone else.”

“I don’t know how, Viv.” The admission seared him from the inside out. He could hardly draw a breath.

“So we learn together.”

“It’s not something you learn. It’s something you are, or you’re not. From your wolf heart, or…not.”

“Your heart is right here.” She pressed her palm to his chest, and his heart beat against her hand. But that was his physical heart, just an organ of his body.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “You don’t want to see it, so you don’t.”

“See what?”

“There’s a giant hole in me, Viv. Not a heart, a hole.”

“That’s a lie, Jamie. Stone fed it to you to keep you under his control, doing his bidding.”

“I can prove it.”

She shook her head, but she kept quiet. Let him say the words he had held back every other time he’d ever tried to tell her because he hadn’t truly wanted her to go. Not then, not now, but it was time to stop withholding.

“There’s another wolf like me. A wolf whose moods didn’t show up in his scent because he had no moods. He was flat. Like me.”

“Well, let’s go talk to this wolf and see if Stone—”

“He’s dead.”

She studied him a long moment. “Who was he?”

“Drew. I have more in common with a psychopath than with my own pack.” He paced across the blacktop in front of the truck’s bumper, back and forth. He latched one hand onto the back of his neck as the old phantom bite ached. “There. Now you know. I should’ve told you before.”

She was quiet a moment, watching him pace. “Do you think you’re a psychopath?”

“No,” he growled. “But I smell like one, and you can’t get around that, and you can’t say it means nothing.”

“Why can’t I? An effect can have different causes depending on the person. His moods didn’t show up in his scent because he was a psychopath who had no feelings. Yours don’t because somehow you don’t know what you’re feeling or how to feel it. There. Solved it. What else have you got?”

He growled some more. “You are so freaking stubborn, Vivian.”

“Takes one to know one.”

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