Page 45 of The Healer and the Wolf: Part One

That was all right. I could still fix it. It wasn’t irreparably lost. I just needed to change it again, although perhaps this time a bit more gently.

“I mean, your curse broke, so maybe theirs did too.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because none of them are here,” he answered as he poured a generous amount of the syrup over the pancakes. Normally I’d be way more conservative since it was so damn expensive it was, but Leo deserved a little decadence after everything he’d been through. Also, he needed the calories.

“I don’t follow.”

“In order for you to break their curse, I think you’d have to interact with them. I suppose there’s a small chance that somehow you broke the entire thing when you broke mine, but I should be able to sense that. When I reach out for my pack, there’s just nothing there. When I dream of them, their faces are distorted, like something’s trying to keep them from me.”

As horrifying as that was, I couldn’t help but get stuck on one particular part of it.

“Wait, you thinkIbroke your curse?” I asked as Leo stuffed his mouth with a truly impressive forkful of syrupy and buttery pancakes. I waited for him to chew and swallow, but the entire time he was looking at me like I was strange for questioning that.

“Of course, you did. I would have thought that much was obvious.”

“Obvious, how?”

“Because I was completely consumed by the curse until I met you. It wasn’t until you saved my life that day that I even began to inch toward being myself again. And the more I hung around you, the easier it was to remember bits and pieces of who I was. Honestly, before that day in the woods, I wasn’t even capable of actual thought. It was all animal instinct.Youchanged that.”

While that was an incredibly sweet thing to say and it made my stomach swoop again, it couldn’t be true. “Leo, I’m human. How could I possibly have broken the curse?”

“I don’t know. I’m not really magically inclined.” What a wild thing for a werewolf to say. I knew what he meant, but still. “Maybe true love’s kiss?”

“True love’s kiss?”I tried not to sound absolutely shocked and failed entirely. Was that really even a thing? Any other time, I would have said it was the stuff of fairy tales, but it was pretty hard to definitively declare that when I was staring at a man who could transform into a wolf at will.

“I mean, it would make sense. You kissed my nose, and the next thing I knew, I had my human form again.”

Oh shit, thatwaskind of how it had happened, wasn’t it? I’d been so startled and terrified at the time that my brain hadn’t exactly computed the order of events like that. But it was true. Thinking back, I remembered leaning toward his wolf head—something that was rather inadvisable to do with a wild animal—and giving him a gentle little peck like I would with my cats.

Still, what he was saying just couldn’t be true. “How can it be true love’s kiss when I didn’t even know you?”

Leo tilted his head again, although this time it was less adorable and more troubled. “Were we not friends?”

I didn’t expect the hurt in his voice, and my heart squeezed. Goodness, I was really fucking things up without even trying. Perhaps that’s why I didn’t have any close friends.

“Yes. I mean, I did feel like we had some sort of connection, even if it didn’t make sense. I definitely enjoyed your company and looked forward to coming home and talking to you, even if I didn’t know you understood.”

“Honestly, I didn’t understand a lot of it, but what I did told me you were a safe person. And something about you—actually, many things about you—made some part of me want to find all the pieces of myself I had lost.”

“I… I did all that?”

Man, those pesky emotions and tears pricking at the corner of my eyes had come back in full force. I’d spent so long living at the periphery of so many people’s lives, never being important, never being of any significance, but the way Leo talked about me made me sound so incredibly important to him. It was overwhelming in the best possible way. I felt so seen, even if it was intimidating—no, scratch that,terrifying—to be so visible to someone.

“Of course, you did,” Leo said, smiling ever so softly. The hurt was gone from his voice, but not the vulnerability. I actually felt as though I could ask him anything and he would tell me the truth without a doubt. “Even if you didn’t realize it.”

Not for the first time, I didn’t know what to say to Leo, so I stuffed a sausage patty into my mouth and made an affirmative sound. Leo chuckled, then busied himself with his own food.

Fortunately, my little trio decided to come run interference. They all knew they weren’t allowed to beg directly from my plate or get on eating surfaces when humans—or kind of humans—were using them, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t lower themselves to staring at us from their various perches around the room.

“Am I allowed to give them anything?” Leo asked.

“Protein and egg yolk only, but you need to throw it on the floor. Sometimes I’ll let my cats smell something from my plate if it’s something new and they’re curious, but they are not allowed to eat directly from it.”

“Interesting. Why is that?”

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