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

Chapter 8 - Thorn

I stare after Gwen, her words echoing through me.

She…

She hasn’t been able to shift. In our youth, she’d been a late bloomer. Even towards the end of our time together, Gwen had only been able to shift a small handful of times, and only once around me. I had thought that maybe she had been able to grow into it over the years—but that had been a reflexive assumption on my part, clearly.

Which makes me feel all the guiltier. Once again, I put her in a position where she would be humiliated and made to feel lesser. I don’t deserve to—

“Thorn, I’m so sorry,” Paige apologizes with tears in her eyes and her voice.

I stand and offer my son to her, every part of me tense and riled. Vulnerable emotions always fed into this font of violence in me, ever since…

“Take him.”

Her maternal instincts seem to take over enough to immediately accept the baby into her arms. There’s a part of me that wants to snap at her—at everyone here, really. All my instincts scream vigilance, knowing that this place is dangerous to my mate, needing to protect her above all else.

And the fact that I’ve poisoned and dismantled that bond makes that feeling all the more awful, even disorienting.

I whip my eyes around the scene and see all the stark stares locked on us. Some people have started to recoil and recover from the outburst, but I can hear the hushed trace of murmurs and whispers stir in the air. It takes all I have to not growl and menace all of them; my wolf seethes, wanting to put them all in their place for their audacity. It’s momentarily distracted by a particularly disdainful stare from one of the Portsmill wolves. In a more lucid headspace, I could maybe remember him as James Layman, the son of one of the old guard enforcers under the Alpha when I was a boy. But at this moment, he is just another threat my wolf would be glad to put in its place given the chance.

But above all else, I need to go to her.

My height gives me many advantages, and a long stride is one of them. Each step is wide and hurried, striving to close the distance as quickly as possible without going into a dead sprint.

“Gwen!”

She does not glance back. In fact, her pace grows more hurried, edging towards a run.

That just provokes me. I quicken my tempo as well, narrowing the difference with a dauntless intensity to my every movement. The man I am blurs at the edges, and in this moment I am more and more the predator in pursuit. I don’t waste my breath on trying to get her attention or slow her down. Despite her own advantage from her height, Gwen’s pace is no match for mine. My entire life has been in service to someone as a hunting dog; there’s no way a common civilian is getting away from me.

Soon enough, I’m closing in, and the edge of her scent and the narrowing distance sets off a keening in my blood that is thankfully overridden by my concern for her.

I snatch out for her arm and lock my fingers around her bicep, trapping her with an unrelenting but not violent grip. Gwen whirls around, half stumbling. I hurriedly reach out to try and help correct her, but she just slaps my hand away and forces herself into a staggered balance and glares viciously up at me.

“Let me go.”

My hand twitches tighter.

One thought sears across my mind: Never.

But I bite it back. I learned from an early age that I needed to curb and filter the animal that dwelled inside of me. It was one of the reasons why I preferred to talk as little as possible, and needed to take my time putting my thoughts to words. Having to negotiate with a wild creature dwelling inside you ready to lash out at a given moment has always been its own unique hell.

“You don’t know this place. I don’t want you getting lost.”

“I can look after myself,” she practically snarls out, baring her teeth at me. That sets off a strange short circuiting; I don’t know whether or not my wolf wants to pin her to the ground for challenging me or appreciate the ferocity of its counterpart.

But neither of those feelings help anyone right now, and just serve to make a messy situation even messier. So I shove them away and hurry to reply before I lose tempo entirely.

“I brought you here. You’re my responsibility—”

“ Fuck you . I never asked to be your charity case. If you want to be responsible for me, you had your chance years ago. And you made it abundantly fucking clear what your decision was.”

My emotions blur and roar into each other. I don’t mean to, but I pull on her arm and step in towards her. There’s only inches between us, and with her height she’s close enough that I can feel the edges of her breath. She’s panting from exertion and anxiety; each heave is short and strangled, and some primal part of me is acutely aware of how each gasp for air accentuates the lines of her collarbones and swell of her breasts despite the atmosphere between us. The parting of her delicate lips is fierce competition for my gaze and has a gravity all its own, making me want to lean in closer.

“You agreed to stay for the trial term, and I intend on looking after you. I refuse to stand by while you just storm off in an unfamiliar location and go lick your wounds after all that. If that’s so awful—...”

My mind starts to cue up an ultimatum to just take her home and let her leave if that’s what she wants, but I can’t. I’m too much of a possessive coward to even suggest that she go. I grit my jaw and force myself to salvage something to say.

“You aren’t here alone, and I need you to understand that.”

She glares up at me and all I can focus on are those eyes, those lips…

“You just need to make sure I don’t embarrass you any further in front of these wolves. I’ve already disgraced you before, and now here I am doing it again. I guess some things never change.”

There’s a vicious friction in my chest that feels like some manifestation of violence, but instead of wanting to hurt, I want to just crush her into me and destroy these awful words and feelings by any means possible. Yearning hits me like a freight train, and there’s an absurd urge to just pull her close and kiss that gorgeous mouth of hers. Maybe it’s the mate bond, maybe it’s the wolf, maybe it’s the boy who’d once loved her.

Either way, I have to pull every emergency break I can in my mind to not just ambush her with a brutal kiss.

My hand slackens on her arm and I stage myself back a step, no longer towering over her.

“I’m not embarrassed by you, Gwen. I’m worried. If I’m embarrassed about anyone, it’s my sister for forcing the issue and upsetting you.”

She doesn’t reply with another sharp, ready retort. Hopefully that means I finally managed to break through to her, even just a little bit.

“You’re not?”

“No.”

Gwen goes silent and stares down at the ground between us long enough that I start to get nervous.

“I’m—... That’s surprising. I just thought, after everything… That you were. You’d been ashamed of me back then, for not being able to shift reliably at all. And then after you rejected me, I haven’t been able to… So being rejected by my ‘fated’ mate and then not being able to shift made me a complete reject by pack standards. I became an undesirable. It was a mercy when Cherrywood Pack dissolved, because it gave me an excuse to escape that life.”

I stare at her, stricken, guilty, and confused.

“Your ability to shift had nothing to do with it.”

Her own confusion mounts enough that I see it in her face and hear it in the pause of her breathing. She opens and closes her mouth repeatedly before her voice lifts in careful question.

“If it wasn’t that—... Why did you reject me?”

Everything in me goes uncannily, suffocatingly quiet. The why invites the when, and I feel my memories broaching back towards those years.

The hand at my side forms a shaking fist, and I have to police my other hand to carefully release her arm so I don’t hurt it.

I close my mind down with the cold certainty of steel.

“I had my reasons. But that wasn’t one of them.”

Pain fractures through me as I watch her face settle into a brittle agony. Of course she’d be hurt by that response. But I can’t—

I just can’t.

Her features shift into a locked, acrid intensity, all lines and dubious exhaustion.

“How kind of you to give me enough rope to hang myself with there,” Gwen deadpans caustically. “God, I almost had a very silly spark of hope for a second that you might tell me anything. But glad at least my expectations were sound.”

Each stab is well struck and warranted. I know that I deserve far, far worse.

“Did you leave Rowan behind? I’ll go and watch him, and you can go join the run. I’m sure you’ll be able to catch up if they’ve left, unless my meltdown ruined the whole night for everyone.”

She starts to head back with a rigid stride, and I move to follow.

“ Don’t come near me. We might be going the same way, but I don’t want to see you right now. I’m going to go get the baby, and you can go back to your people without having to deal with either of us. He needs to get put down for bed anyways.”

I falter, and the words come without a moment of hesitation or processing.

“You are one of my people.”

She stops and looks back at me, and I see a flicker of pain in her profile before the firm fury sets in.

“If that’s the case, I’m owed the truth.”

I can offer her no reply.

Gwen watches me a moment more before she storms off ahead. I let her set a leading pace before I slowly march after her for my own walk of shame.

What did I expect, trying in vain to make up for the wounds I’d given her? My wolf whines and snarls, pacing as though injured and caged within the confines of my body. A headache pulses between my eyes and all I want is to be back at home, safe and sound with my boy…

And Gwen.

But if things kept going at this rate, I might not even get to drive her back.