Page 22 of Claimed By the Bookstore Alpha
"What are you talking about?" He pummeled my chest in frustration.
I glanced around at the other customers browsing nearby. "Not here. Can we... can we go somewhere private? My apartment?”
Clark hesitated, and I held my breath. Then he nodded.
"Let me buy these first," he said, grabbing two pregnancy tests. “We have to find out.”
“No, I’m paying.” I took five tests because one, two or three might not be enough.
As we walked back to my apartment, I tried to figure out how to explain that I was a shifter to someone who didn't even know we existed. The secret I'd been so afraid to tell him was about to become unavoidable. But for the first time in weeks, my wolf was calm.
TEN
CLARK
The cozy space that was Flynn’s apartment that had been so welcoming when I was last here, was now charged with tension. The air crackled with it. I sat on the familiar couch with the pregnancy tests in the pharmacy bag on the coffee table like a ticking time bomb.
"Before we..." He picked up the bag. “Before we deal with that, I need to tell you who I am.”
Was he married? Or living under an assumed name because he’d ripped off gangsters or was hiding from the police? I might be bringing up the baby alone. But the Flynn I knew wasn’t that person. “Whatever it is, we can work through it."
"Can we?" His bitter laugh worried me. “What I'm about to tell you will sound insane. You're going to think I've lost my mind."
"Try me."
He was quiet for a long moment, staring at his hands. When he looked up, there was resignation in his eyes. "Do you believe in fairy tales?"
The question caught me off guard. "What do you mean?"
"Is there any truth to the old stories? The ones about things that go bump in the night?"
Was he referring to my dragon story and the countless books I'd written featuring magical creatures and impossible worlds? I considered my response carefully. “There's truth in every story. Maybe not literal truth, but emotional truth. Why?"
He strode to his bookshelf and pulled out a thick, leather-bound volume. "This belonged to my great-grandmother. It's a family history, of sorts."
I opened it carefully. The pages were yellowed with age. The ink had faded and I studied hand-drawn illustrations. As I flipped through the pages there were sketches of wolves and what appeared to be... transformation sequences?
"What is this?"
"It's a record of my family." He sat beside me and heat radiated from his skin. “My family... we're shifters. Wolf shifters to be precise.”
I waited for the punchline. When it didn't come, I looked back at the book because I didn’t understand where our conversation was headed. "Shifters?”
"I know how it sounds but it's true."
"Werewolves.” I needed water because of my dry mouth but didn’t want to interrupt the conversation. "Like, full moon, howling at the moon, werewolves?" This had to be a joke though Flynn wasn’t the joking kind.
He almost smiled but shut it down. "Not quite like the movies. We don't lose control during full moons, and we don't turn people with bites. And we’re shifters, not werewolves."
I flipped through more pages of the book because I had to do something with my hands. My brain had given up trying to grasp this shifter thing. There were family trees with strange notations and pressed flowers, and maps.
How could any of this be true, though it would explain why he thought we were incompatible. We fit together pretty well when we were in bed together though.
“This is why you've been pulling away?”
“Yes and no. There’s a lot to tell.” He took a deep breath. “I was seven when I first shifted in front of two human classmates. It was much earlier than most shifters had the ability to shift, and it was the first time I’d met my wolf. The terror in their eyes... Our pack Alpha had to convince their parents they'd imagined it all.”
I blinked away tears as I imagined a little boy messing up and the lifelong consequences of that.
