Page 4 of Forbidden Pregnant Mate

“Enough, you two,” Dad said.

Klyte immediately fell silent, as he always did when following an order from my father. Dad had always been the one person who could make Klyte shut up without fail.

“Come on. I wanted to spend some time with my favorite people,” Dad said. “You can leave the sparring match for later.”

I glowered at Dad. “You could have told me he was coming,” I whispered to him.

“I told you I was having friends over,” he said. “I figured you knew.”

I curled my fingers into fists. I could do this. I could handle being around Klyte.

My mind went back to when we were kids. Klyte would spend hours at my house, training or just spending time with my dad. There had been a lot of arguing between us, but there had been some good times in there as well. There was that time when we’d snuck out to the movies to see an R-rated movie our parents wouldn’t let us see, and another time when I had to show him how to bake bread so he wouldn’t burn the house down.

But then there were also the times when he contradicted everything I said for an entire day just to get a rise out of me. Things like that had basically come with the territory of knowing Klyte. On the whole, though, our relationship had been friendly, if laced with regularly traded barbs. For a while there, I’d started to wonder if maybe there was more.

But then, Klyte had just stopped talking to me. He would still come around the house to talk to Dad, but it was like I wasn’t there at all. I never found out why he shut me out. WheneverI tried to ask him about it, he found a convenient excuse to be somewhere else until I just gave up.

After he left, I got more and more angry with him, so I always found ways to avoid home whenever I knew he was visiting. It had to be close to ten years since I last saw him. But here he was.

Everyone filed into the dining room, and I made a point to sit as far away from Klyte as possible.

Dinner was fairly uneventful. Klyte was on his best behavior, and part of me wondered if he had mellowed out a bit. He still joked around and didn’t seem to take things particularly seriously if he didn’t have to, but there was something like restraint in how he was acting.

Later, after dinner was over and people had broken into smaller groups, he came over to sit next to me on the couch. That delectable sandalwood and leather scent washed over me, and it was hard not to want to inhale deeply.

“I didn’t realize you were going to be here,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

Heat rushed into my face, completely unbidden. “It’s good to see you, too,” I said. “Been a while.”

“Something like, what, ten years?” he asked.

“Something like that,” I replied.

“I saw you talking to the girls earlier,” he said. “What did you think of them?”

Again, he was being so surprisingly cordial. It felt unusual, knowing that this was the same guy who used to take every opportunity to taunt me.

“I like them,” I said. “They’re a nice group. They already invited me to hang out with them.”

“So does that mean you’re staying in town?”

I paused, unsure of the best way to answer that question. “For a bit,” I said cautiously.

“What about your pack?” he asked. “I’m sure you’ve got someone waiting there for you. A boyfriend or something.”

The suggestion nearly made me laugh in derision, but I managed to bite back the snicker. “No,” I said. “No boyfriend or anything like that. No reason to go back anytime soon.”

“Really?” His head tilted in curiosity. I waited for him to ask more questions, ones that I would have to come up with plausible answers to, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “Well, it’s good to see you.”

“Hey, Klyte,” Oliver said. “Quick question for you.”

Klyte sighed and began to stand up. Just as he was about to walk away, he paused and turned to look at me, and something about the look he gave me was enough to make my heart race and my wolf stir almost eagerly.

“Want to catch up soon?” he asked. He said it casually, but I’d grown up with him, and I could detect a faint trace of hope behind the words.

The question and the hope behind it caught me so off-guard that I said, “Yeah, that would be great.”

“Excellent!” He looked genuinely relieved. “Until then.” He turned away.

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