The Lone Wolf's Rejected Mate (Five Packs #3)(2)

His lips look soft.

My fingers itch.

I have the sudden urge to touch his mouth, and that’s so freaking weird. He’s old enough to be my father even though he’s way younger than my dad was. Folks my dad’s age grew up in the dens. Darragh’s too young for that, but he’s definitely from the generations messed up in the head from coming up under Declan Kelly, our last alpha.

Older packmates don’t get human references or jokes or the concept of “chill.” The males don’t talk to females unless they want to mount them, and they’re obsessed with patrolling the pack territory, hunting, and the shifter fight circuit, exclusively and in that order.

Apparently, Darragh Ryan does talk to females. Older, powerful witchy females. God, my stomach doesn’t like that. When I think of him and Abertha even drinking tea together, the flips and tingles begin to flop and slosh. Good thing I don’t eat breakfast.

Kennedy sidles up beside me and pretends to hack at a row she’s already dug. “What’s he doing?”

“Watching the sunrise?” I hazard a guess.

“The sun’s already up, and he’s facing west.”

“I don’t know. Enjoying a cuppa?” He’s not sipping anymore. He’s just holding the cup midair in a death grip.

“It’s coffee,” Kennedy says. “Well, mostly. Coffee and hair of the dog.”

“You can smell that?”

Kennedy wrinkles her nose. “You can’t?”

I draw in a breath. My lungs fill with that earthy, horsey, straw-in-sunshine smell. It swells in my chest, and suddenly, my eyes prickle like I’m about to cry, and my breasts grow heavy. I cross my arms to cover my nipples as they bead into hard points. Kennedy’s eyes narrow.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asks.

“Can we just change the subject? He can definitely hear us, you know.”

“He’s not acting like it.”

“Maybe because he has chill.” I’m aware I’m being salty with my best friend, and I don’t want to be, but it’s like I went from zero to PMS in sixty seconds. Even my wolf is being weird. If I like to play princess, she’s a genuine, pure-bred grand duchess—snoot in the air and prancing—but right now, she’s growling in the back of her throat and baring her tiny, pointy teeth.

She doesn’t like Darragh Ryan on that porch.

I press my open hand to my breastbone. My heart drums a beat against my palm.

Oh, shit.

No fucking way.

This cannot be what I think it is.

Darragh Ryan is a grown-ass man. A man-sized man. And he’s all mysterious with a past and issues and a possible friends-with-benefits arrangements with a witch. I cannot handle that. I’ve never even let a male kiss me.

Does he even have a cabin? I know he lives by himself somewhere up in the foothills. Does he have a den? He looks like he lives in a den.

I can’t live out in the middle of nowhere. I have shoes. And I cannot—I will not—live without baths. Or electricity.

Blood roars in my ears. Annie and Kennedy are whispering back and forth, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. All I can do is stare at Darragh Ryan with bugged out eyes.

Fate has to be playing a joke. My aesthetic is delicate, sweet, romantic, cottagecore. His aesthetic is—the pants I wore all last week are fine. No shirt, no shoes, no problem. Haircuts are for the weak. I kill things with my bare hands in human form. I’ve been through hell and seen the other side.

Tingles race across my skin as my stomach drops. When does it end?

Since the day I was born, Fate hasn’t once made it easy for me. I keep my head down and my mouth shut like a good unprotected female, but still, it’s like I’ve got a target on my back. When I was a baby, my father went moon mad and tried to kill me because he thought I wasn’t his.

My mom became a shell of herself after he was put down until one night, during a full moon run, she leapt off the bluff at the river’s bend when there was no way she could make the far bank, not with a wolf as wasted and weak as hers.

I was shuffled from family to family until I landed with Una in the lone female’s cabin, and I kind of curled into a ball and gave up on life for a while. Well, I wanted to hide in bed, but Una insisted on herding Annie, Kennedy, and I up to Abertha’s cottage all the time, slapping trowels in our hands and making us dig and weed and hunt mushrooms in the woods. And then she got into bees—

I’m a good wolf, and Una saved my life when my father attacked me as a baby, so of course I helped, but I’d still rather have been under the covers. Then, one day, Una bought us phones.

And phones have the internet.

And the internet has everything, and they will ship it to you, or the humans at the farmers’ market in Chapel Bell, which is close enough.

So, yeah, the world is cold and lonely and ugly, but I can buy pink dresses and fairy lights and big-ass hats like fancy ladies wear at horse races. I might be stuck in the kitchen, in the cabin as far away from the pack as possible, in a pack where I couldn’t matter less, but Killian Kelly missed the message about the internet. I can go wherever I want, talk to anyone, be anyone, anytime, day or night.

I do not care that I have to dig in the mud and mess around with bees to pay for it. I look cute in rubber boots, herbs and flowers are my jam, and I’ve got good company.