It took her a little while to clean up—five people and two babies made quite the mess—but as she was rinsing the last of the dishes, her cell phone pinged with a single smiley face from Blaze showing her they’d gotten home safe. A man of few words, which was probably best considering the poor cell coverage in the area. She hoped the chatty, Albuquerque-born Annie was okay with her kind but quiet son. Too late now, though, what with the twins and all.
And all, of course, meaning that they were mates, bound together by a bloodied bite that stole their humanity and left them unfit for the normal world. And maybe damned. She’d been through her Bible numerous times and never found a definitive answer about the salvation of werewolves.
In her distraction, the soapy surface of the last cider glass slipped through her careless fingers. The glass cracked against the divider in the big sink and shattered everywhere, the jagged shards sharper than beastly teeth.
Huffing out an angry breath at her clumsiness, she swept the smaller splinters into the broken base. As if in punishment, one of the shards pierced her finger. She let out some very un-Catholic words while she swept everything into the dustbin.
She tried to never even think of the word. Neither of her boys had shifted in front of her since puberty when they gained full mastery of their beasts. The girls had never shown her their secret sides, although she knew Dena was a coyote shifter from birth and Annie had taken the wolf from Blaze’s bite. Learning that her own son had claimed and changed an innocent woman—no matter how willing she’d been—had nearly destroyed Solange. How could he do that to her?
And by “her”, Solange wasn’t quite sure if she meant Annie or herself.
But obviously the two were very happy together. And Solange could no more disown her child than voluntarily stop her heart. Apparently a mother’s love was stronger than any moral consideration, so what kind of monster did that make her?
But really, her grandsons were adorable.
Digging the shard of glass out of her fingertip with a needle, she grumbled to herself. Her own fault for getting distracted by nasty thoughts after such a lovely evening. There was no reason to think of the bad old times, not when the future was so full of rosy little cheeks and an endless march of birthday cakes and Easter chocolates and more Christmas cookies and maybe someday a quinceanera party for Dena’s little girl, God willing.
The kitchen sparkled again, the same way she wiped away all those thoughts. Just had to finish taking out the food scraps for her compost.
Carrying the paper bag of fruit and vegetable scraps, she went out through the side door to the landscaped garden. This time of year, everything was hunkered down against the cold and wind. Except by the compost bin, where the little extra bit of heat and water from the decaying scraps had created a miniature zone supporting some pink-blooming sedum that she didn’t know the name of. She’d memorized most of the common plants and what they cost in bulk at the wholesaler for the landscaping company, but design and softscaping hadn’t interested her much. She’d always been the practical, business-minded one, not the artistic eye. That had been—
Popping open the compost bin, she slammed the garbage inside. Why did her thoughts keep circling back to those painful places, like glass piercing her fingertips?
She wiped her hands on the dishrag still over her shoulder, as if she could wipe away the past, or at least her roving thoughts. At least there was no one here to witness the tears leaking into her eyes when she caught the torn edge of her skin on the dishrag, staining the spotless white.
She choked on another lump in her throat, neither sobbing nor swearing, and sucked in a harsh breath to silence herself. Then she froze.
She took another breath, this time a delicate sip of the seething wind. Maybe she just imagined it…
No, there it was again, on the edge of her senses that she kept blunted with the hottest chilies and the richest vanilla paste.
Werewolf.
“I know you’re out there,” she said, pitching her voice over the wind. “You can’t hide from me.”
That wasn’t true. He’d been hiding from her for almost twenty years.
At first, only the wind whined back at her. Maybe she was crazy, maybe it was just seeing the twins or Dena’s happy glow or the emptiness of the hacienda despite the holiday lights that was making her imagine ghosts in the winter night.
Between one gust and the next, he stepped out between the swaying junipers, like the desert itself taking form.
Her breath caught again, as sharp as if she were swallowing the broken cider glass.
He’d always been smaller in person than in her imagination, even the first time she’d seen him racing on the soccer field when she’d been cheerleading for the other team. From a distance, dazzled by his speed and footwork, giggling with her girlfriends, she’d thought he was so, so hot. But when he’d come up to her after the game, she’d realized he was shorter than her, and rangy in that way that made her suspect several of his grandparents hadn’t gotten enough to eat.
When he’d apologized for staring at her short skirt instead of shooting for the goal, she discovered that he was sweet as well as hot. At seventeen and hardly ever kissed thanks to her Catholic parents but with all of her French grandmother’s romanticism simmering in her veins, she never had a chance against his crooked smile.
She should’ve been suspicious of how a poor mestizo boy came to have such nice, white teeth.
On their second date, he’d dazzled her again with his even faster hands, his touch so light and gentle that she told herself it couldn’t be wrong. And always he had that bright white smile only for her.
On the night before their high school graduation, he gave her a ring, and she cried as only a girl who’d found the love of her life could cry.
Which was not as hard as she cried when he’d given her the bite that made her werewolf, and she discovered that the love was a lie.
She blinked hard, but it wasn’t tears hazing her vision this time. A light flurry of snowflakes drifted between them.
If anything, he seemed leaner now. Time had pared away that last lingering bit of childhood innocence. She could tell, because he was clad only in a worn pair of Levi’s, barely clinging to his narrow hips. He stood with his bare feet braced against the push-pull of the wind.
And maybe against the push-pull between them. For a heartbeat, she was seventeen again, caught yearning on the conflicting hooks of sin and sensation.
She tightened her fist on the dishrag. The twinge in her pierced finger was an echo of that long-ago bite.
She scowled. “Why are you here, Miguel?”
“I heard the boys were home, and I wanted to see them.” His soft tenor carried easily over the wind. He’d always had a beautiful singing voice, whether hymns at mass or a more wild chorus. “Dena is pregnant.” He smiled, and it was that same sweet, quick flash that had captured her from the first, undimmed.
She scowled at him. “Why did you change if you only needed to see?” Not to mention, he’d obviously kept an extra set of clothes somewhere out there in the desert. And not too far either, apparently, since even the toughest shapeshifter wouldn’t want to walk barefooted through the cactus and other prickly things out on the plain.
“That”—he paced forward a few steps through the snowflakes, but not within the low wall that encircled the hacienda—“is because I needed to talk to you.”
His expression turned somber, and he was close enough now that she could see the fine lines at the outer corners of his dark brown eyes. Once upon a time, she’d liked to complain about how his stubby, black lashes always made him look like he’d just touched up his eyeliner while she’d never had the patience for anything besides a good, expensive lipstick. He still had that dramatic look but now age had added a frosting of moonlight through the short, black hair at his temples.
He looked… So, so hot. Dammit.
But she wasn’t a lustful teenager anymore, no matter what her hormones were suddenly insinuating. Probably it was just acid reflux from the chilies making her heart ache.
Then the import of the words sank deeper and colder than the knife of the wind.
She wrapped her arms around herself, as if she could ward it off as she had all these years. “Tell me what?” When he didn’t answer right away, she propped her fists on her hips instead, in defiance of the wind. “I’m waiting, and I’m not getting any younger.”
She’d been waiting for years.
He took one more step closer, resting his hand on the low wall. “I’m leaving.”
She stiffened her spine. “Just as well,” she snarked. “It’s cold out here anyway.”
When she swiveled on her heel back toward the house, he clarified, “I’m leaving Angels Rest. Forever.”
She stood for a moment, staring at the side of the house. Only a single low-watt bulb illuminated the adobe. In the summer nights, she liked to sit here under the stars. Even now in the depths of winter, the mood was serene. The light cast soft shadows on the art mounted on the walls and scattered around the narrow side yard. Terra cotta sun faces, hammered steel moon faces, tiled birdbaths, some prototype pieces for Sunday Home & Yard Design that hadn’t quite worked out. Or that she liked too much to put up for sale.
Some he had made, before he’d moved out. Why hadn’t she gotten rid of those ones at least?
“Solange—”
She whipped around. “Why now?”
He gazed at her. “East and Blaze are happily mated and have started their own families. The company is doing well and has all the business it can handle. You…”
She waited, but he didn’t continue. “Why tell me at all? Why not just go?”
“There were enough times I didn’t tell you what you needed to know, don’t you think?”
Her jaw worked. “Now?” Through gritted teeth, the question was a growl. “Now you’re going to pour your heart out?”
He turned his head to one side, exposing his vulnerable neck as he swallowed hard. “I was lonely and desperate, and I loved you so, so much. But I was wrong.”
The icy chill that swept through her had nothing to do with the longest night of the year. “Wrong about loving me?”
“No!” He swung back—so much for his submissive stance—and took a jolting step toward her. “Not that. Never that. I was wrong to lie to you about what I am, what you were going to become. No matter how lonely and desperate I was, I was wrong to take away your chance to choose. To choose me. And to choose the wolf.”
“I was lonely and desperate too,” she said, her tone more bleak than the world beyond the adobe. “Lonely, desperate, and dumb. So young and stupid to believe you.”
“We were young. But you were never stupid. You were the smartest girl I knew in school.” A faint smile quirked his lips. “You always had a book in your hand. Another one in your purse. Two more in your locker. I memorized Shakespeare, hoping that might impress you.”
She couldn’t hold back a snort. “Instead of comparing me to a summer’s day, you changed it to a winter’s night.”
“Well, anybody is pretty on a summer day, but you…” He lifted his head, his dark eyes intense. “You glowed in the starlight.”
She wouldn’t be charmed by him, not again.
Maybe because she’d had such a lovely evening with two loving couples and their offspring, or maybe it was the rum she’d put in her dessert cider—not much, just for flavor—but whatever the reason, she didn’t walk away. But then, she never had. Despite the shock, the pain, the lies, the fear, the anger, she’d never walked away.
That had been him.
***
He’d never gotten far from her.
The first time Miguel had seen her—pompoms bigger than her skirt—it felt like someone had high kicked him in the head when the ref wasn’t watching and then stuffed a soccer ball down his shorts. He’d always been the shortest kid on the team so that wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Only because he’d been suffering an infatuation-induced concussion had he found the courage to go up and actually talk to her.
She’d been everything. Sassy, smart, sexy.
And delicately, obliviously human.
He’d been undeterred. His parents had told him to mate within the pack, but their alpha at the time had warned that without fresh blood, the pack couldn’t stay strong. It had seemed like permission.
And he’d tried to explain to Solange, without revealing shifter secrets, that he was different, that she would be different if they stayed together. Later, he found out she’d thought he meant they wouldn’t be virgins anymore. But of course it was more than that.
She wouldn’t be human anymore, or not just human.
Kisses like sweetest wine, their first sexual fumblings tightening the bond between them, the bite she’d thought was just rougher play… It had all seemed like a dream, like the summer after their senior year would never end.
She took the fever, and the dream became a nightmare. Though not everyone survived the bite, he’d known she would. She was too strong and stubborn to lose herself to the fever or the wolf.
But she’d been so strong and stubborn that she’d risen to the wolf before the fever truly broke. She had run with him under the berry moon, her eyes bright, her breath hot.
When they woke naked on Mesa Diablo the next morning, she’d thought it had literally been a dream. And when he explained—using all his words this time, now that she was officially one of the pack’s secrets—she’d thought he was teasing. Then she thought he was lying.
Then she thought he was a monster. And she was too.
They’d had that one run together, and she was already pregnant. Gestation was never consistent with shifters, and hers had gone so fast that her parents had accused them of hiding her pregnancy during the school year. Since she couldn’t very well tell them the truth, she’d pulled away from her family—a loss he hadn’t considered on her behalf. Almost as quickly as a natural wolf, in less than three months, she had the twins in her arms.
As far as he knew, she’d never shifted again.
The losses piled up over the twins’ early years, with words not said or, worse, words sharp and bitter that cut and stung. It was too late now, but seeing her this close, talking—even this little bit—sent a flood of yearning through him, undermining all his good intentions about explaining everything and letting her go.
“Can I…maybe we could go inside? It’s snowing harder.”
She lifted her chin, the same headstrong gesture she’d made whenever she wanted to look down at him. “The three little pigs would tell me that’s a bad idea.”
He smiled sadly. “There’s a reason I built this house of adobe.”
After a long moment, long enough for the snowflakes to catch on the threads of the agave plants, like stars peppering the Milky Way, she stepped back. “Come on then.”
He followed her through the side door into the kitchen. He’d traded a year’s worth of artistic treasures to the raven shifter who’d built the hacienda to his specs. It wasn’t particularly large or grand, but it was as beautiful as he could make it for her. She’d claimed the kitchen as her own, pouring her isolation into food. Now, set within the exposed beams and Moorish tile, the carved teak island an insurmountable barrier between them, she looked regal and very much in her element. Her dark, glossy hair as rich as the stained molasses-brown wood, lightly laced with strands of gray that only made her gray eyes more striking. And he once again felt like the callow boy, afraid to approach her.
Or maybe that was a reasonable fear, considering the heavy wooden block of knives was in close range.
She stood with her arms crossed over her bountiful breasts. The cartoon reindeer embroidered on her sweater peered over her wrist at him, its googly eyes very disapproving. “Are you the reason Sunday Landscaping won the outdoor design and maintenance bid for the Vegas casino mobsters who are building that retreat near Blanding?”
He winced. “Not mobsters. They’re dragon shifters. They wanted a new place to fly and were considering someplace near the canyonlands. I told them you could give them a desert oasis—and keep it beautiful.”
She crossed her arms the other way and drummed her fingers on her elbow. “Well, thank you,” she said stiffly. “That account pads our bottom line nicely.”
When she turned toward the refrigerator, he did everything he could to keep his gaze focused. But she’d said nice, padded bottom which was practically a challenge. He’d always loved that part of her flipping up her little skirt, topping the strong legs that had wrapped joyously around his waist when she was in one shape and very briefly in her other shape had carried her across the desert by his side, almost as fast as he could run.
Her bottom was still everything. And maybe even a little more than everything now. The back pockets of her good jeans cupped her ass like he used to do…
Swiveling toward him again, she held a stack of Tupperware containers in her hands and caught him staring like he was starving. Which he was, as proven by his belly letting out an embarrassing growl right that moment.
The scowl that had been gathering on her face like a slow-brewing storm dissipated into a reluctant smirk. “Nobody’s been feeding you?”
He stared at her. “No one.”
This time, her gaze slid away as she set the stack of Tupperware on the butcher block island and began unsealing the lids. Heavenly scents emerged, stunning his stomach to silence as if he was already full. Just from being with her.
Food was how she dealt with life, and if his last memories of her were her cold leftovers, he could only count himself lucky.
He took a small handful of spiced nuts. “Watch out for the dragons. They’re generous but demanding. Just set good boundaries from the start and you’ll do fine.”
“Good boundaries?” Her lips quirked again, more gently this time. “You’ve been reading online articles too.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Not much else to do.”
Her gray eyes flicked over him. “You’ve been giving your designs to the Sunday home décor line too, haven’t you?”
Chewing the nuts to give himself time to think, he finally said, “How’d you know?”
“I review all the invoicing, always have,” she reminded him. “You don’t have your name on it, but I know your work.” She spun the container of corn fritters toward him. “We licensed reproduction rights to one of the big chains for your crescent moon solar lantern.” She traced one fingertip through a wet spot left on the island’s well-waxed wood. “Where should I send your percentage?”
“I… I’m not sure.” He took one of the fritters, biting past the sweet-hot jalapeno bits.
She crossed her arms again. “If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know you’re leaving?”
Did she care? The faintest glimmer of hope, like the twinkle of a single star between the storm clouds, made him straighten. The jalapenos warmed him from the inside. “I just know I need to give you your freedom, such as I can, even though I can never really make it up to you.” He breathed out slowly, searching for the words that had jumbled around in his brain for the last couple decades. “I stole the life you thought you were going to have. I can make sure that you have enough business to make you a rich woman, and I stood watch a few years ago to make sure those Kingdom Guard bastards didn’t mess with you and the boys. But I can never give you back what you lost.” He raised his chin to meet her gaze. “And I’m sorry, but nothing can take away what I gave you with the bite.”
He meant the wolf, of course. When she gave her head a slight shake of rejection, for a moment his heart leaped with the chance that maybe she’d come to some sort of peace with her beast. But then she said, “Easton and Blaze, and now the babies, are the joys of my life. I wouldn’t give them up for anything.” A hint of that arch smile returned. “And the dragons will make us even richer.” The smile vanished, as if it had never been. “It’s not about what you took from me or what you gave, Miguel. But you didn’t tell me. You never gave me a chance to say yes.”
The flicker of hope in his chest winked out. “I know that now.” He rubbed his knuckle over his mouth before he confessed, “I knew it then, but I thought our love was strong enough to survive the change.”
She stared at him hard, her gray eyes sharpened to a slicing steel edge. “It was never about our love. What we lost was trust, communication, any chance of an equal partnership.”
He wanted to argue her points, denial welling up in his throat like sour peppers coming back to haunt him. For seven years, they’d raised the boys, built the house, grew the company—together, even when they weren’t talking. That was something, wasn’t it?
Slowly, he rounded the end of the island. Not stalking her, but if these were their last moments together…
“The only constant is change.” He gave her a wry smile. “Yeah, I read that somewhere, but it’s true.” He took another step toward her, until there was only an arm’s—or a knife’s—distance between them. “Twenty years is long enough for a change, isn’t it? I was wrong, and now I want to make it right with you. If I asked, would you let me?”
He waited, breathing the spicy-sweet scent that was partly the deeply infused atmosphere of the kitchen but was mostly just the perfume of her skin, delicately seasoned with the salty musk of sweat from her work. No wonder he’d bitten her all those years ago, when he’d been young and impulsive and the spring moons were running hot. It was no excuse, barely an explanation; all he could do was try to make amends, sending work to Sunday Landscaping, donating his designs to the company, funding school accounts for the boys though only Easton had used his and starting the same for his grandchildren. But it still wasn’t enough. He knew that. Even though those were causes that Solange loved, they weren’t her—his mate, his victim, his love.
“Tell me,” he urged. “What can I do to show you how sorry I am? What can I do to make things right?”
“Tell you what?” she said softly.
“Anything. If it’s in my power, I’ll make it happen. And if it’s impossible, I’ll die trying.”
This close, since she was taller than he was, he had to tilt his face up to meet her gaze directly, and the pulse in his throat felt naked. But there was a reason he’d left the rest of his clothes in the cached lockbox at the edge of the property line. He’d wanted to come to her exposed, vulnerable. If she grabbed one of the knives and plunged into his chest, he wouldn’t raise a finger to stop her. A life for a life, since she’d lost hers to the wolf. If she tore out his heart, still beating, he’d let her.
Hell, she had it already.
She angled her head to meet his stare but didn’t lower her chin. “I’ll tell you,” she repeated. “That I was lost, confused, afraid. That I didn’t know who you were anymore. Worse, I didn’t know who I was. That I didn’t talk to my family for years, and only reconnected when my father was on his deathbed, but I still couldn’t tell them what had happened. That I was estranged from your family too, because I couldn’t talk to them either. That I nearly lost Blaze when he chose your half of his heritage, and I almost pushed Easton away to keep him from it. And now, after twenty years, I am matriarch of a pack of wolves and one coyote and another on the way. And once again”—her voice hitched—“once again, I feel lost, and I don’t know who I am anymore, and the life I thought I’d made is gone.” She clenched her hands into fists, and the tiny bells on her sweater chimed with every heave of her breath. “And now you are here again, asking me to tell you what you can do for me before you leave. Damn you, Miguel, for damning me to this half life, alone in this desert.”
She didn’t carve out his heart, she shattered it. Every word was the broken edge of an icicle, jagged and freezing. A single tear broke free from her lashes and traced down her cheek. Not a thawing of the ice, but a pain so great even the bitter anger that had frozen him out for twenty years couldn’t keep it locked in anymore.
It was too much. He jolted the last step toward her and reached up to cup her cheek, whisking away the tear. “Solange…”
She stiff-armed him, her fingers spread across his bare chest over the moon tattoo that marked his pack affiliation. “You touching me is how I got into this mess.”
“You used to smile when I touched you, not cry.”
“That was a long time ago, and I was different then.”
He’d never felt more like the monster she’d accused him, many times, of being. “We can be different now,” he said, his own voice rough with emotion. “Let me touch you. Let me love you better than before.”
Her hand on his skin was so hot. Or so cold. He couldn’t tell. It had been so long since he’d been close enough to touch her, he shivered with a strange fever. And now he could see the darker streaks in her gray irises, like the clear night sky beyond the storm clouds, as though he were falling upward into her eyes.
“Please, Solange,” he murmured. “Let me remind you who we were.”
With a soft, almost despairing sigh, the stiff set of her elbow cracked, and she melted toward him, her lips barely parting.