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

Chapter 10 - Thorn

I’ve missed her.

I’ve missed her so much —more than I ever thought I could miss someone.

Every new moment together with Gwen just brought up more of the old connection we had and the memories of how she made me feel. No one had felt quite like her, with all her sharp intellect, razor charm, determined care, and softness she hid beneath her guarded exterior.

I’m crushed by these thoughts in the wake of her dropping a casual retort just like she’d done all the time when we were young. Even in her teens, she was a master of sarcasm and dark, dry humor. It’s good to see that she’s clearly refined her art over the years.

She looks over at me with those big brown eyes and I know that there’s something my expression must be giving away, because her face shifts with a sort of seeking uncertainty.

I clear my throat and look down to Rowan to redouble my focus on taking care of him. The bottle weaning is still relatively new, but he’s already been doing so well. I can be nothing but proud of my little man.

“Bottle empty? Well done,” I softly utter and set the sippy cup aside. Rowan turns and grabs loosely at me. Every time after a meal, he likes to have a cuddle, and I’m not one to deprive him that. Especially with how much I have to be away from him, I’m glad for every chance to hold my son.

I negotiate him to be cradled up against me and then start to eat my meal with one hand. I’ve gotten so much practice doing almost everything with just one hand thanks to Rowan.

I take a bite of food and sigh. Gwen might think it’s from the relief of soothing my hunger, but it’s actually from some anxiety finally starting to unclench. I’d been skittish all morning since I realized Gwen was gone—her shoes were missing when I first came into the kitchen, and subsequent investigation proved it wasn’t just a fluke. My wolf had woken into overdrive, urging me to hunt her down and ready to attack anyone and everyone to find her. But after her response to me following her last night, I didn’t want to upset her further.

Hence the big breakfast. It wasn’t just an olive branch; I’d desperately needed the distraction to keep me from going stir crazy.

She seems alright enough, if she’s back here eating, making jokes, and even smiling at Rowan a little. But I can tell that she’s clearly not in the best condition.

Gwen is beautiful like always, but it makes my chest hurt to see her looking haggard and strained. There’s an exhaustion that weighs heavy around her eyes, and even a rim of red around them that makes me think she might have left the house to go find somewhere private to cry her eyes out. I can’t help but feel angry that she doesn’t feel safe enough to do that around me, but that just leads me to being rightly furious with myself for making that the case.

I want to be safe for her. I want her to be happy around me.

But I know that I’m not, and she can’t, and won’t ever be.

I shove that tangle of emotion down and absentmindedly eat my food while watching her.

The both of us finish the meal in relative silence, and I transfer Rowan into her care while I start working on the dishes. As a default, I would have preferred to keep minding my son, but Gwen clearly wanted to try and help and…

If I’m honest with myself, I do really enjoy watching her with him. Whenever I watched other people take care of my son, there was this sense of impatience scratching through my skin. I felt desperate, territorial even, a sort of vigilance that refused to relax until he was back solely in my care. But even though she’d only been around him for a few days, it feels like whatever quadrant of my brain kept me paranoid every time someone else watched him finally shut up. It just seems so right to have her with him.

I glance over my shoulder from the sink and see her sat on the floor with him. They’re playing with one of his toys, and he’s giddily laughing and crawling along as Gwen sits there with this lovely smile on her face.

I watch them long enough that she notices me staring and we meet eyes again.

The morning light through the kitchen window catches her just right and once more, I am struck with just how beautiful she is. Her soft red curls glow like the edge of sunrise and all I want to do is run my hands through them. I want to kiss every little freckle that runs across her tanned skin, even if it takes me hours and hours.

“Thorn?”

“You should nap.”

She blinks, chuckles bitterly, and resumes actively focusing on playing with my baby.

“Is it obvious I barely slept?”

I turn back to the sink and continue working my way through the dishes.

“You need rest.”

“What I need is—... Nevermind.”

My throat clenches and I carefully set the plate in my hand on the drying rack.

“... I can help.”

“What?”

“Your wolf.”

She says nothing. I can’t look back at her, afraid of what I might see. I know how much of a bastard I must be to her, making what seems like a half-hearted offer to fix a massive wound I’d caused in the first place. But I’ve been haunted with thoughts of how isolating and terrifying things must have been for her if she’s been unable to access her wolf for all this time.

“Hah. Like when we were kids?”

“Yes. It worked, didn’t it?”

She hums, the sound troubled but not disagreeing.

There’s a little flare of tender hope in me at that. I can’t give her the truths she wants, but maybe I can help in other ways.

Maybe I can make it worth staying.

Maybe I can make up enough for what I’ve done that she’ll…

“We can go out to the woods later. If nothing else, it’ll give us a break from the packs for a bit.”

She scoffs dryly.

“That way we only have to do whatever pageantry they want to put on for the evening, yeah?”

I grunt in confirmation.

Gwen pauses a moment before a long sigh drifts out from her.

“You know what? Fine. If I’m going to give all this one last shot, I suppose I might as well make sure I’ve done my due diligence. When I show you that I’ll never be able to shift again, it’ll just be another set of nails for the coffin.”

The casual resignation in her flippant remark makes something stubborn churn in me. I feel my wolf start to stir, aggressive and certain that it can claw its mate out of her, if I just give him the chance.

My eyes flicker and I brace one hand on the sink, humanity tightening the chains that keep me civilized and sane against the overwhelming potency of my wolf’s instincts. I can feel the bestial sensations recede away from my body. There’s a hollow trace in my bones that aches to change, and my skin itches and feels wrong .

We’re a hell of a pair, Gwen and I: a woman who’s starved of her wolf and a man who is just a wolf in human clothing.

But maybe that’s why the mate bond sparked in the first place.

“Mmn,” she pipes up behind me, “Rowan needs changed. I’ll do that and then go lie down. Sound good?”

“Yeah,” I grunt out.

I listen to her gather my son up. Each sound sounds too sharp and too dull—they should be clearer, brighter, more pronounced. But I know that’s because my body yearns for how it sounds when I’m a wolf. Even though I know my senses are greater than an actual human’s when I’m in this form, there’s this sense in my subconscious that I’m somehow stunted and trapped when I’m in this shape.

It takes until I hear Rowan’s contended giggle in the other room and her cooing over him for me to remember where I am and what I was doing.

“Dishes.”

I resume the task and throw the dog in my skull a bone with the promise of taking her out to the woods later. Hopefully that’ll keep it at bay for now.

***

It feels surreal to walk through the woods with Gwen again. We did it very often when we were younger; it was our respite from the pressures and judgment of others, and excused decently enough with our respective ability to fly under the radar. And with how Cherrygrove Pack only spent a few months with us out of the year at most, it was vital for us to make the most of the time she was around.

I stare at our feet and the path, and my mind is struck with the memory of her gently prancing along in worn out boots when she was fourteen beside me, her hand held in mine.

My hand between us itches, and I slowly shove it into my jacket pocket to keep it contained.

Paige and Quinn had been glad to look after Rowan when I’d gone to ask during Gwen’s nap. Quinn is and had always been a bit more emotionally adept than my dear sister (though I’d never tell Paige that if I could help it), and I could tell that she’d been caught up to speed from her carefully supportive tone and close looks. I felt guilty about approaching them while they were both preoccupied with the sister pack event, but they assured me that it’d be fine. Quinn emphasized that if they couldn’t spare the time for him, they could call on the young woman in Elmwood Pack, Alex, that I’ve been using as my local babysitter for the past few years.

“... It’s nostalgic, right?”

I glance over to Gwen and do my best to hide any reaction to my heart suddenly jumping in my chest. It’s not for any grand or particularly obvious reason—I think my pulse spikes just from the sheer fact that I looked at her. The sunlight that softly shades through the canopy moves over her in golden fragments, utterly dreamlike. Her eyes have the faintest trace of softness crinkled around them and I can’t look anywhere else but those beautiful eyes . A craving shoots through me to see more emotion in those eyes. All of them. I want all of her.

“Yeah,” I answer in a dull, low tone. Then I force my attention forward, because the more I focus on her, the more derailed I feel. My devil’s deal with my wolf is starting to take its toll; I can feel it pacing, caged, hungry inside of me.

We walk a few more steps without saying a word, the only sounds being those of the woods settling gently around us.

“I don’t want you to think I haven’t tried.”

Tried to shift , I complete the sentence in my mind.

I look at her and raise an eyebrow, just a bit.

“Of course you have.”

She exhales in a tight, measured way that I know means that she’s trying to settle out of her anxiety. My gut tangles with another pang of shame, and I fight the clenching of my throat to try and offer more specific assurance.

“I know you. And you’re not the kind of person to give up.”

A laugh barks out of her, sharp and glassy. Gwen sighs in the wake of it and shoves her own hands into her pockets as well.

“I guess not. At least, that’s how I used to be. But eventually, it’s not that you give up. It’s that there’s just nothing left to give. You don’t choose to quit—it’s just the reality you’re forced to accept.”

That grinds away at me. How much suffering had she resigned herself to because of me and what I’d done to her?

We make it further down the main path and I guide her towards one of the thinner trails that tapers off, only really a person wide. I’ve become decently acquainted with the woods around here thanks to my routine involvement with the Elm Wood Pack. We needed some privacy for this.

I’ve been chewing over my memories of how I’d helped her in the past in hopes of just retracing our steps. If it’d worked before, maybe it could again.

“What do you hear, Gwen?”

When I speak up, it’s with a meditative clarity, guiding and certain.

I catch the falter in her step before she gets back in stride behind me.

“... I hear the birds,” she murmurs. “And a bit of a breeze through the trees.”

“Where are the birds?”

Gwen goes quiet, and her pace audibly slows behind me. I instinctively slow down as well, though keep at a good leading speed to keep her moving forward.

“... Around, up there. In the trees.”

“ Focus. Where?”

It’s nearly ten seconds before she speaks up uncertainly.

“Mostly ahead. The… crows are on the right?”

“How far?”

Once again, my immediate pressuring reply is met with silence. I don’t look back at her—I learned that she got too self-conscious if I stared at her most of the time. There were some moments where I discovered that she benefited from the pressure, but I want to avoid spooking her off before we’ve even really begun.

“I don’t know,” she finally says with a small, dismal voice. “Maybe thirty yards now?”

I shake my head.

“They’re not that close. You just guessed. I need you to focus, Gwen.”

“I am ,” she says, and despite being thirty years old I hear the teenaged girl halfway between snapping and crying at me again.

I finally stop and turn slightly to look back at her.

Gwen’s taller than she used to be, but so am I. And while she’s grown and matured, those eyes are exactly as I remember them. And right now, they’re staring at me with frustration and misery.

“I’m not like you, Thorn. I’ve never been like you, no matter how much you tried to convince me that I could—could tap into my wolf to hone my senses.”

“You were able to before. You just needed time and support to learn the feeling. It worked before.”

“That was before ,” she retorts in a bitter undertone.

I feel my mouth press into a tight line.

“The gentle approach isn’t going to work. You’re too resistant. Trapped in your own head again. It’s worse than before.”

“I wonder whose—...”

She stops there, eyes turning downcast. Her hands leave her pockets to defeatedly slump at her sides.

“Sorry. I just—... It’s been painful. All of it. I—I really want this to work. I’d love more than anyone to be able to change into a wolf again. But I nearly drove myself insane trying, after you… After everything. The closer I try to be to her, the worse I feel. It’s like there’s something dead rotting away inside of me, Thorn, and I—”

I step in towards her and silently take the back of her hands in my palms, holding them between us with a delicate intensity. My skin flares with heat at the contact, but I disregard it, caught in the momentum of my own intervention. I’d moved without thinking; I heard her about to cry, and it was as though I was possessed by my deepest instincts to step in and comfort her.

Gwen blinks up at me, and a captured tear twinkles like dew in her thick eyelashes. I resist the urge to lean in and kiss it away, even though my mouth aches at the thought of tasting the salt of her tears again.

Her lips are parted, and she is struck still and breathless. I force my attention back to those eyes in the hopes that it will keep me from taking advantage of that startled pout.

“We need to force your wolf out again,” I state as tenderly as I can, even though I know it would sound rigid and grim to most people’s ears. “Remember the time we got you to shift because you wanted to keep up with me?”

She nods with a tearful dimpling of her chin, though she immediately does a clearing of her throat to try and sober back up.

“I do.”

I swallow back a sudden pooling of saliva under my tongue, and even though I haven’t shifted at all, my teeth feel too sharp for this mouth. In spite of myself, my voice comes thicker, lower, with a thickened texture to it that I know isn’t just me.

“Let me hunt you.”

As though some sort of hunter’s spell, the birds quiet and the wind stills. The stagnant, silent air between us just makes the sound of our breaths suddenly more pronounced.

I hear her wet her tongue and watch her jaw twitch with the effort of trying to find her voice again.

“... What?”

“Think about it,” I urge. “I could chase after you as a wolf. We could force your survival instincts to take over.”

The suspense rises further still when she looks away, and the timidity of the expression makes me want to just—

I don’t know what. There is just a hunger that verges on violence brewing in my blood, and it’s getting harder and harder to ignore with each passing second.

“Fine.”

My lips start to twitch back as though to smile.

“But when… When it doesn’t work, you’ll drop it. Okay?”

Even with her couching remark, I can hear hope trying to break through her cynicism. I clench my hands around hers and unless I’m just deluding myself, I swear I hear her hide a gasp.

“Okay.”

With the pact sealed, my wolf practically howls through my bones, triumphant. But it clearly knows the true victory is yet to come. And oh, it is ready for the rush, the conflict, the tangle, the kill. It is ready to maul whatever shadows hide his mate.

When I think of my wolf as he, and not it…

That’s when I know that I’m on the brink of running absolutely wild.

It’s going to be difficult to keep myself in check, but the possibility of helping Gwen, and the temptation of it all is too much to deny.

Besides , I feel the thought stir through me, subconscious instinct manifesting in my own voice, it’s been too long since I went feral.

I slowly retract my hands from Gwen, turn, and set a steady march deeper into the woods, forcing lucidity back on myself with a sense of vicious discipline.

This isn’t about me. I need to help her and make up for the damage I’ve done. The last thing she needs is to suffer at my hands again.

But the sound of her footsteps following me makes my heart hammer like a war drum and I dread that I might not be able to keep that side of myself at bay much longer.