Echoes of Fire (The Mercury Pack #4)(28)

Her brow furrowed. “Are you going to spend the whole night peppering me with questions?”

Taking in the tension bunching her muscles, Bracken sensed . . . “You don’t want to tell me about him. Why? Did he hurt you?” Because Bracken would kill him if he did. Hunt him. Shred him into tiny pieces.

“Look, it’s in the past.”

“Not when it’s affecting your present. Why were you dealing with touch-hunger if you had him?”

Madisyn bit the inside of her cheek. It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him it was none of his business . . . but it was, wasn’t it? She didn’t want to tell him, though. Didn’t want to admit just how much of an idiot she’d been. But she knew that he wouldn’t let this go. “It’s a long and very embarrassing story.”

Bracken brought her hand to his mouth and nipped at her fingers. “I have time.”

“Have you ever heard of PlusOne.com?”

Not expecting the question, he frowned. “The dating website for shifters?”

“Yes. I was talking to a guy on there for about five months. A shifter named Lucah Finch.”

The sneer in her voice eased his wolf’s jealousy. “I don’t recognize the name. What kind of shifter is he?”

“Lucah Finch is a lion shifter here in California. As for the person who’s been pretending to be him on the dating website? I’ve got no idea.”

Bracken did a slow blink. “Say that again.”

“After we started communicating on PlusOne.com, Lucah also began calling and texting me each day. But he didn’t want us to video chat, and he always had a reason why meeting up wasn’t convenient. I knew something was wrong.”

“Wait, you’ve never met him?”

Madisyn shook her head. “Before I even replied to his very first message, I researched him. His profile seemed legit. When he started giving me bullshit excuses for meeting up, I dug a little deeper. That was when I found the holes in his profile. Lucah Finch truly does exist and really is part of the Winter Pride, but he’s also been in a coma for a while now.”

Bracken flexed his fingers, every line of his body tense. “You’re saying that somebody created a fake profile on a dating website . . . and spent five whole months playing you?”

“Sadly, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Bracken swore. “You should have known there was something wrong about the situation when he first made excuses not to meet you.”

She held up a hand. “I don’t need a lecture, Bracken. I’ve given enough of them to myself.”

“I wasn’t going to lecture you.” But he did feel like shaking her, because she let it go on for five months. Knowing she’d shut down if he voiced that, Bracken instead said, “I’m assuming you confronted him. What did he say?”

“He claims that everything he shared with me was the truth and that he just lied about his identity.”

“Do you believe him?”

She snorted. “Fuck, no. I blocked his number, reported him to the website, and deleted my PlusOne account. Part of me wanted to hunt the fucker, but that would have meant wasting more of my life on him, which he probably would have gotten off on—I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”

“Why the hell would you use a dating website? It’s not like you struggle for offers from guys.”

“Someone at the shelter recommended it. It was how they met the guy they imprinted with. I thought I’d give it a try. Figured it wouldn’t do any harm. And how wrong was I?”

Bracken rubbed the knuckles of their linked hands back and forth under his jaw. “You were faithful to him,” he realized. “Even though you’d never met him, you were faithful to him. That’s why the touch-hunger hit you.”

“Yep.”

“You cared about the guy, didn’t you?” Black jealousy lanced through him, and he barely held in a growl.

“He’s not real.”

“Was it him who bought you that bracelet?” Because if so, Bracken wanted it gone.

She skimmed her finger over the pretty, expensive jewelry. “I won it.”

“You won it?”

“Through Cosmo magazine.” She pointed at the coffee maker. “Won that too, along with a year’s supply of coffee after entering a Walmart prize drawing. Also won my TV in a sweepstakes. You haven’t heard Makenna call me a walking lucky charm?” He gave her what could only be described as an indulgent smile, and she felt her eyelid twitch.

“You won those things because you entered the competitions, not because of luck.”

“You don’t believe in luck?”

“Believing in luck stops people from taking control of their lives. It makes people leave decisions to chance. I’m not saying that the belief in good luck is a bad thing—it’s what drove you to enter prize drawings and stuff like that. It’s probably also helped you succeed in other ways. But no, I don’t think it really exists.”

Not something she hadn’t heard before. “I was pronounced dead once.”

His mouth dropped open. “What?”

“Yep. When I was ten, a truck hit my school bus and knocked it into the river. I couldn’t get out. My parents came to identify my body, and I snored.”