The Lone Wolf's Rejected Mate (Five Packs #3)(71)

I shiver. This is the opposite of alone, and so much more dangerous.

I wrap my arms around myself and try to sweep the worry away. We have enough to deal with, here and now.

Darragh comes to stand by my side. We both watch the current swirl small yellow leaves downstream. After several long moments, he clears his throat. “You’re scared,” he says.

I lift a shoulder.

“We lost them. Hours ago. I’d hear them if they were anywhere close. Smell them.”

I nod and keep on following the leaves caught in a shallow eddy. New ones keep getting trapped and bumping others free.

“My, uh, wolf—he has a very good sense of hearing and smell.”

I make myself smile, acknowledge the reassurance.

“I’m not trying to brag or anything.” He sighs and frowns. “It’s just how he is.”

“I know. I can’t hear them either.” He seems so unhappy that I tack on, “My wolf doesn’t have super hearing or super smell or anything,” just to keep this strange conversation going.

“She’s a good wolf,” he says. In her defense?

My mouth curves, genuine this time. “Yeah, she’s all right.”

“She took that guy’s throat out in one bite. I wouldn’t have thought her jaw could open that wide.” His gruff admiration rings with sincerity.

My cheeks warm, and I shift on my cold, aching, bare feet. “Thanks. Your wolf was pretty badass, too.”

“Sorry about the whole thing with the, uh, skull,” he says, directing the apology to the ground.

I sneak peeks at him out of the corner of my eye. He’s filthy, bruised and beaten, covered in dried blood, his faint silver scars impossible to make out under the grime. He looks like a hardened warrior returned from the war, and also, at the same time, shy as hell with his head bent, darting glances at me from under his thick lashes.

He’s my mate.

Maybe. If he doesn’t bail again.

“I didn’t mind,” I say before that thought can get too far. “That guy had it coming. At least it wasn’t my head.” I try to laugh, but it comes out rickety and weak.

“My wolf—he was cool with your wolf.” He sounds as surprised as I was at the time.

“You didn’t know he would be?” I blink.

He jerks his head no.

“So he could have gone for me?”

The answer is yes—it must be—but Darragh raises his head and gazes into the middle distance, the furrow returning with a vengeance to his brow. “I wouldn’t have let him.”

“Would you have been able to stop him?”

The question’s rhetorical, but he looks down, scanning my face, cataloging my eyes, my tangled curls, my flushing cheeks, my tongue licking my suddenly dry lips.

“Yes,” he says, as if he’s discovering the fact in this moment. Maybe he is.

Something about that quiet, certain “yes” undoes a knot in my throat.

“What if I’m pregnant?” I ask, my voice a whisper, and I don’t know exactly what I’m asking, but everything is surreal and heavy and nothing is firm under my feet.

His gaze falls to my belly, his whole body tensing. His wolf rumbles.

“I won’t let anything hurt him,” he says. He thinks a second and the crease between his eyes deepens. “Or her.”

It’s not quite an answer, not a reassurance. It sure as shit isn’t a plan or a commitment or a promise that everything is going to be okay.

But I think it’s what he can give me right now. I think survival is the only thing on his mind, and that makes sense. We just barely escaped with our lives.

It strikes me as he touches me on the small of my back to guide me across the stream, and we begin the hike back to the road—we are vastly different people who lived through very different times. He was almost grown before I was even born. For years, I’ve hated him for doing something that even if I knew why he did it, I might not understand.

As we make our way back to the road, and he pushes aside the brambles for me, just like he did when he led me back to camp after my ill-advised unannounced visit when we first recognized each other, a question sifts up from the muddle in my mind. “Why were you always bringing me meat? ’Cause you had to?”

He squints at me over his shoulder. “’Cause I had to?” His jaw tightens. “Killian kept you fed.” An ominous note enters his voice. “Didn’t he?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

He plows forward like he answered me, but he didn’t. Too bad for him, the female who would’ve accepted the dodge, the brush off, she’s gone. She got left in a container box. “So why, then? Why bring me meat if you knew I was fed? Guilt?”

He braces himself midway up a slick, muddy slope and offers me his hand. I take it. As he hauls me up, he says, “At first. Yeah. That was part of it. Then—I thought maybe you’d say something to me about it.” He shrugs like it’s nothing, but dark slashes appear on his cheekbones.

“Something like what?”

“I didn’t care. Anything.”

“Why didn’t you give it straight to me, then? Like the pheasant.”

“What if you were afraid of me?”

“That would’ve been so bad?” We’re wolves. Our lives are ruled by who we fear, who we protect, and who will protect us.