Daddy’s Mail Order Mate (Twilight Meadows Wolves #3)

Chapter 4 - Thorn

Gwen.

Her name loops in my mind over and over, echoing through my bones.

It has been so long, but I could never forget her, no matter how much she might change. The mate bond would absolutely make sure of that. But even still, it was uncanny looking down at the woman on my front doorstep.

She was one of the few women I’d met in my life who didn’t seem short to me, all willowy limbs and slender frame. Though her skin was more tan and there were hundreds of more freckles dappling across her skin, there were patterns and particular ones burned into my memory in the same way one learns the positions of the stars. They bloomed across her face, creating a ruddy glow that radiated out from the line of her nose, bleeding color across every inch of exposed skin, even staining the edges of her sharp, sinuous mouth. Her girlishly wide yet elegantly high cheekbones paired with the almond angling of her dark brown eyes kept her looking almost uncannily youthful to the memories of her resurfacing.

Those eyes were flung open in shock, locked with mine, like a deer in the headlights.

My heart races, and I feel a pit of chill and a feverish blaze fight for dominance through my body. Guilt deadens my gut and constricts my chest, but my blood runs hot with the resurgence of feelings I thought I’d killed long ago.

Then I lose sight of her, and my eyes snap up to the face brooding down at me. That was an unusual feeling. Despite my mind running double time trying to catch up to the strange situation I find myself in, I’m still able to recognize her brother Lucas despite how he’s practically tripled in size.

“Go put your baby down so I can properly punch you in the face, motherfucker. Gwen! Get in your car, now—”

“ Lucas,” Gwen snaps out, her voice cracking like a whip. “Stop.”

He turns, allowing me to catch sight of her again. Her expression is hardened, tension carried all the way from her temples to her collarbone.

“ Gwen , you—He—It’s—”

“I know. ”

“Then why the fuck are we still here?!”

He goes for her arm with a forceful and frustrated sigh, and a growl rips my throat raw as I step forward by pure animalistic reflex. But thankfully I don’t have to follow through, particularly since I’m still holding Rowan. Gwen jerks her arm out of reach and scowls so stonily up at her brother that it adds a new layer to my shock. She’d been a firm and fierce girl in our youth together, but there was an intensity to her demeanor that had been honed to a practically violent edge.

“ You go to the car. I will handle this.”

Lucas turns more fully towards her, practically seeming to forget me in his indignance. My gaze locks onto his back and years of training hum in the back of my mind, long burnt-in memory listing off various methods of injury and incapacitation by autopilot.

But my wolf just wants to launch, teeth bared, and gore out his neck. An aggressor was here, on my territory. He was a threat to myself, my child, and my—

I swallow down the rock in my throat.

“You can’t be serious?! This motherfucker,” he goes on with a sharp point back at me, “Rejected you and made you miserable for years! You’ve got nothing to say to him—”

“Do. Not. Tell me. What to do. And go sit in your truck. I’ll get you if I need you.”

The tension in the air finally seems to have gotten to Rowan, because he starts to whine and warble.

Both of them look to the boy, then exchange taut looks.

I manage to clear my throat, voice coming out coarse and low, teeth biting back every threatening syllable.

“I would… Appreciate it. You’re upsetting my son.”

Lucas gives me a furious glare, but it fizzles out as he turns and storms off the porch with his hands in his pockets.

“Fine. But when he hurts you again, I told you so.”

I watch him warily for a moment before Rowan’s cry pulls my world entirely in to him, and I adjust him in my arms to do a soothing cradle.

“Shhh, you’re alright,” I murmur, pressing a kiss to the top of his head of fine black hair.

There’s a little pique of distress in his cries before he settles back out. Even though I’ve gotten him calm, I’m still the furthest thing from. I can’t even bring myself to look at her.

So I don’t.

“Follow me.”

I turn myself back around and walk inside, traversing through the foyer. I jerk my head towards the entryway to the kitchen and make my way to put Rowan down in his little crib set off to the side in there. I’ve gotten the house nicely set up over the last few months to make sure he would always be safe, comfortable, and close at hand no matter what room I have to be in.

Her steps quietly follow after me. Each one is slow. Not with ease, but with caution.

Of course she’d be wary. Instead of an anonymous match as the whole arrangement had promised, she wound up delivering herself to the front doorstep of the man who’d rejected her all those years ago.

My son’s eyes blink up at me, little hands reaching out in gentle seeking to not be put down yet.

“It’s okay. Daddy’s right here.”

The back of my neck prickles; I don’t even need to look. I feel the shadow of Gwen lingering in the doorway, haunting me. She had a tendency to do that if I let her.

Rowan sounds out a bit more of his mild displeasure at being set down, but the application of a few kisses to get him giggling and a crinkly toy being placed in his hand to remind him that it exists set him smiling away.

I straighten and rest my hands on the lip of the crib.

Gwen is silent.

I am silent.

The drone of the refrigerator across the room is deafening to my ears. I hone in on the edges of her breath, part of me desperate for any trace of her.

“... Take a seat.”

She doesn’t move or say a word for nearly a minute. Eventually, she walks over to the table nearby and does just that. When I finally turn to look at her, it feels like a fever dream. I’ve never even thought to imagine her here, in the home I bought for raising my son as peacefully as I can. But here she is.

If I didn’t know for certain that the app was anonymous, I could have almost guessed that Paige did this on purpose.

God, Paige.

I don’t have the energy to spare for getting ready for her reaction to all this just now. I still need to see to it in the first place.

I slowly pull out the chair nearby, making sure I’m sat right by my boy in case he needs anything.

But it is hard to not feel my attention torn, so much of my mind wanting to fixate on the woman sat across from me.

Her posture is rigid. She’s sat almost to the edge of the chair, back pin-straight, hands carefully laid on each leg under the table, feet planted so as to be ready to stand on a moment’s notice. She stares at me with a vigilant intensity, but I can see the exhaustion set beneath those scrutinizing eyes.

“I think we should call things off,” she says in a firm yet faintly choked tone.

She’d never been one for small-talk. It was one of the reasons why I fell in love with her in the first place. As a young man, I’d been relieved to finally meet a girl who not only tolerated my curt, focused nature, but one who thought and acted in a way that lined up so perfectly with me. The Gwen I knew had never been offended or put off by me, or seemed to stomach discomfort in the way almost everyone else did around me.

Every part of me locks up.

A terrible pain threatens up my throat and burns in my chest.

My wolf keens with a sort of territorial melancholy. Why would she leave? We only just found her again. She is here, with me. Why should she go anywhere else?

I drop my gaze to the table and distractedly notice that my hand has curled into a fist. With a hushed exhale, I force it to straighten back out and lay flat on the cool wood.

“... No.”

“Why?”

“Why do you want to leave?”

I look up immediately, needing to see the look on her face. Needing to just… See her.

There’s a flicker across her features, the emotions difficult to parse. I recognize the traces of the girl I used to know, though. There’s the way her eyebrows knot together when she’s trying to keep a straight face—I always found that tell of hers particularly charming when we were young. Her lips twitch in an indeterminate white noise that I can’t make heads or tails of, especially with how quickly it passes into a firm line. She’s not looking at me anymore now. Her gaze is cast off to the window, and I can see the gold and green through the linen curtain’s glow reflecting so prettily across her dark eyes. Despite her naturally red hair, her eyelashes had always been thick and heavy. But they’re a deep black right now, not that faintly chestnut tone that feathered out so prettily whenever she’d looked up at me when we were together. She’s clearly put on some mascara today. Maybe when she got ready today, she’d been wanting to impress the man she’d made plans to live with, as I’d never known her to wear much makeup.

A senseless gnarl of jealousy spikes off in me, but I’m spared the embarrassment of paying attention to it by her finally replying.

“You’ve already rejected me, Thorn. Give me the decency to not have to live through that again.”

Despite the steadiness of her voice, I can tell she has to force herself to not shudder in a breath afterward.

“This was supposed to be my last try to live with other wolves. I’d thought this would be as good a chance as any to… See if I could ever have a place among them again, or if I’m better off just committing to living like a human for the rest of my life. But I’ll take the cosmic punchline that I’d get matched to you out of an entire country of men as a sign that I should stay gone from this world. I wasn’t really even that keen on doing it in the first place. Really, I mostly just wanted to make my brother shut up about trying to set me up or join his pack.”

I huff under my breath, lip twitching in empathetic humor.

“Yeah. Know how that goes.”

“Did Paige make you do the app too?”

I grunt in assent, and there’s a fond bloom in my chest when I see the faintest crinkle of her eyes at that.

“Glad to hear your pack didn’t beat the spark out of her.”

I sober at that, and I see her mirth taper off just the same. Portsmill Pack had been a hostile place when we’d been kids. None of us had left it unscathed. Apparently not even Gwen, who’d only been able to be around our pack when the Cherrygrove Pack was in the area for a season or two. Shame churns in my gut. I know life must have gotten harder for her after how things ended, but maybe she’d suffered worse than I’d imagined after I’d left Portsmill.

My vision loses focus, and I fight my mind to keep it here. I didn’t need to go getting caught in the undertow of my past right now.

“... But,” she goes on, “I should go. I’d rather walk out of here with my head held high and go be homeless than have to deal with you kicking me out of your life. Again. Feel free to tell Paige I said hi, and sorry. I lost the bracelet she made for me ages ago and I still feel bad about it.”

Gwen shifts to stand, and I have to fight my body to not reach out and urgently grasp her hand. At least I have enough sense to know that trying to suddenly touch her is a bad idea. Not just with our complicated history, but I’ve heard that the rejected mate bond is torture. It felt bad enough being on this end of it.

“Don’t go.”

She flinches and stops. A long silence hovers between us before she carefully wets her mouth and speaks in a careful, cracked tone.

“... And why not?”

“You—…You’re homeless?”

Her expression sours.

“I didn’t say that to garner any sympathy. Just to make a point.”

“But why are you homeless? Couldn’t you at least go and live with your brother and his pack? Who is he even with?”

“Elm Wood. Not too far from here, apparently.”

Ahh, he was one of Eli’s new recruits. I hadn’t properly been through there in a decent bit. That was for the best though. I imagine if I’d run into Lucas in the wild, I would have had to deal with him trying to instigate something rather publicly.

Her arms cross and she stares down at me a sharp narrowing of her eyes.

“And we talked about this on the app. Neither of us have any interest in joining a pack. And the last thing I need is to be stuck dependent on a borderline cult that could treat me like shit at a moment’s notice. I’ll take curling up in my car each night if it means I don’t have to deal with that ever again.”

I can’t look her in the eyes after that.

God, I’m such a hypocrite.

“... And you won’t have to. Stay here for the two weeks that were agreed on. Get your bearings.”

That slakes some of the territorial spike from my wolf, though I can feel the warning snarl and flash of teeth in my subconscious as it warns me not to make any implication that she would leave after.

“Why?”

Rowan makes an idle little babble and by reflex I look over at him and reach into his crib to start giving him attention. That earns me an easy smile and some more happy noises from my baby, heedless of the serious conversation going on right in front of him.

“... I owe you that much.”

The conversation stills once more.

She says nothing long enough that I finally look back to her, seeking some indication of what she might be thinking. Her eyes are distant, but they lock in to mine a moment after.

When I’d first fallen for her, hers were the eyes that taught me what “doe-eyed” really meant. To the point that I’d even call her doe as a pet name. At some particularly sentimental moments, I’d even called her my little doe once or twice. And my wolf stirs, knowing he’d chase this particular prey to the ends of the earth…

If only I would let him.

“Fine.”

My breath stops.

Gwen’s posture goes firm, and she looks at me with a steadfast resolve that reminds me so much of the girl who’d I’d shared so many of my firsts with.

“I’ll go call off my brother. He’s going to be an asshole about it, so give me a few minutes.”

“Sure,” I reply, my terse tone not betraying the tumult of emotions stirring inside of me.

As I watch her stand and stride back outside, I wonder how I’m going to manage all these old emotions on top of raising my son.

“Goddamn it.”