Page 89 of Wind with a Chance of Wolfsbane

The minute he’d seen her, he’d recognized her. It didn’t matter that a chunk of time had passed since he’d crossed paths with her outside the Detroit airport. He’d know her anywhere.

Her face was etched into his memory.

She was the young woman he’d saved from being kidnapped. The one with an identical twin. The very same woman whose journal he’d spent years reading and re-reading—committing each line to memory and trying to unravel the secret of who she might be.

After twenty-two years, here she was, in the flesh.

She’d aged some, but not as much as he would have expected with over twenty years passing. He could remember thinking she was beautiful, but he hadn’t realized just how beautiful she was. Gone were the thick, broken glasses she’d worn during their first encounter. Now, he had an unobscured view of her gorgeous blue eyes. Her long dark hair had a streak of stark white in it, only managing to add to her allure.

With time came additional curves. Ones that left his hands itching with the need to touch them. The top she was in was snug, hugging her breasts. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop stealing glimpses of her nipples, which he could clearly see through the material of her top.

A groan nearly escaped him as he stood there, picturing her wearing the crocheted bikini top that Marcy had made. His senses dulled as thoughts of Willa wearing the top continued to flood his mind. His hands moistened, and he realized he was breathing in quick, shallow breaths.

How he’d not drawn an audience was beyond him.

Schooling his face, Jonathan continued to center his attention on Willa.

The same fierce need to protect her that he’d felt years ago was still there, clawing at his gut, but it wasn’t alone. With it came the urge to drag her against his body and capture her mouth with his. As his jeans grew tight in the groin, he realized he wanted to do a whole lot more than just kiss her.

The impulse to bed her was confusing on more than one level. Yes, she was absolutely beautiful with a body any man would be tempted by, but she wasn’t his mate. Jonathan, more than most, understood how things worked for shifter males. When they met their mate, their bodies only responded to said mate.

No one else.

In theory, he shouldn’t be attracted sexually to anyone else. A glance downward confirmed what Jonathan already knew to be true. His body was most certainly responding to this woman. If it kept responding the way it was, walking was going to become an issue.

Perplexed, Jonathan shifted his weight from one foot to the other, trying to adjust his erection without being completely obvious. He failed and was left standing there in a state that was less than comfortable.

He chanced a glance around the room full of furniture that, at first look, he’d not realized was original to the home’s construction well over a hundred years ago. There were two sofas, both with decorative markings carved into the walnut wood. The avocado green cushioned portion of the sofas looked to have once been overstuffed but was now teetering on the edge of being threadbare and saggy. For every deep buttoned section that was fully intact, there were two missing buttons.

A Renaissance-inspired coffee table was positioned directly between the sofas, which sat opposite one another and longwise from the large fireplace. Jonathan wasn’t sure what color the table had once been because it was worn and had numerous drink rings, pen marks, nicks, and scratches.

Interestingly enough, a bronzed wolf figurine was a centerpiece on the table. Next to it, someone had placed a stuffed plush bat that looked to have been won at a fair or something of the like. The pairing made Jonathan think of him and Bram, and he nearly laughed.

As his gaze wandered the room more, he spotted various pieces of old Hollywood horror movie memorabilia. It was hard to keep from grunting at the sight of a bust of Bela Lugosi as Dracula. That urge quickly gave way to a slight chuckle as Jonathan spotted a painting of Lon Chaney Jr. as The Wolf Man.

The moment was too surreal to ignore.

He was standing in the main living area of a room with items that paid homage to Jonathan’s past with a woman who had haunted his dreams for twenty-two years.

Willa.

No one was watching him, so he used the moment to adjust himself blatantly. Once that matter was as settled as could be, considering the source of his state of arousal was in the same room as him, Jonathan tried again to figure out why his body was behaving this way.

Even with as absolutely gorgeous as Willa was, she wasn’t his mate, and she sure as hell wasn’t a wolf-shifter. She smelled human with faint notes of cinnamon, like had been the case in Detroit, and she certainly didn’t smell like his mate—like cotton floss and raspberries.

Jonathan had seen too much in his time as a wolf-shifter to dismiss what he was feeling as nothing more than coincidence. Something was amuck. He just wasn’t sure what that something was.

She mentioned visions,he thought, excitement racing through him.

Did that qualify as something more than human? It was splitting hairs, but he felt compelled to hang on that thread. He needed her to be more than she appeared to be—but why?

Doesn’t matter, he thought, his gut tightening.You met your mate. You claimed her. This woman isn’t her. She’s not a wolf-shifter.

The joy he had experienced at the possibility that Willa was possibly a magik of some sort quickly gave way to guilt. He was, for all intents and purposes, a married man. Sure, he’d spent only one night with his mate eighteen years ago while they were both fully shifted, which meant he didn’t know her name, what she looked like, or even how to find her, but that didn’t take away from the fact that he’d completed the claiming. He’d marked the female as his and bonded to her for life.

His rational, human side wanted to call out just how stupid that move had been. The supernatural side didn’t see anything wrong with claiming someone he basically didn’t know. She was his mate. Therefore, to his wolf, it was fairly cut-and-dried.

The guilt won out, and Jonathan found himself doing his best to corral Marcy in hopes of getting her to go and leave Stratton and Astria to have alone time. It was less about really wanting the couple to have a moment and more about needing to put distance between himself and Willa.

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