I hugged my knees, wondering if I should say something, but feeling like I wasn’t supposed to.

“I’ve been having dreams. For a few months now…” Another pause, his jaw working, as if trying to figure out how to word something. “I don’t dream very often. It’s usually…wolf. If I postpone my Change, I dream of Changing. If I haven’t hunted, I dream of hunting. I’m reminded, prodded. Lately, I’ve been dreaming of you. Of us.

Of…”

He fell silent, jaw tensing again.

“Cabins,” he spat finally, as if making some terrible confession. “I dream of forests and cabins and us, and no one else. I dream of taking you someplace, holing up, making love and making—” He clipped off the last word.

“Making what?”

He met my gaze and his lips twitched. “From that look on your face, you know what I was about to say. Let me remind you, emphatically, that it’s a dream. When I wake, I’m as horrified as you.”

“Thank God.”

He arched a brow. “Can you honestly see me living in a cabin? It’s a symbol, obviously. An impulse. Not to carry you off into the woods and raise a pack of squalling brats. Just to…be with you.”

“The instinct to mate.”

He gave a low growl, and I braced for an argument, but he only turned his gaze toward the window, as if he’d already figured out what the impulse was, and just hated hearing it put into words.

“It’s understandable, isn’t it?” I said. “You’re fifty years old with no children. The animal instinct to reproduce is sure to kick in—”

“So I start having caveman fantasies about the first woman in prime childbearing years to cross my path? In some ways, I wish to hell that’s all it was. A biological imperative that randomly fixed on an appropriate target.”

He stood and walked to the window, his back to me.

“I used to hear other werewolves talk about it,” he said. “The problems of living solitary lives. Fighting the urge to find a mate and settle. I’d commiserate, if it was to my advantage, but even as I was listening I was calling them fools. Weak. Convincing themselves it was an instinct because they didn’t have the balls to admit the truth—

that they wanted a wife and kids and a picket-fence life. I’d never felt the urge to stay with a woman until morning, let alone for life, so I was living proof there was no mating instinct. The truth was, it seems, that I just hadn’t met…”

He let the sentence fade, and stared out into the night. The silence dragged out past seconds into minutes.

“Damned inconvenient, isn’t it?” I said finally. “That’s the problem.”

He glanced my way. I got up and perched on the edge of the coffee table.

“You’ve been on your own since you were sixteen,” I said. “Since your father died. There hasn’t been anyone. No lovers. No friends. No one you couldn’t cut ties with in a heartbeat…and wouldn’t kill if they got in your way. Then you joined the Pack, but you’re still ambivalent about that and tell yourself it’s a business arrangement and keep social contact to a minimum. Now you have me. Someone who might expect some kind of commitment from you in return, a commitment you might—horrors—want to give. Damnably inconvenient.”

He gave a hoarse laugh. “You can’t resist, can you? Even this you can turn into ‘Karl thinking about himself again.’”

“Am I wrong?”

He met my gaze, then turned back to the window. “Damn you.”

I crept to him, stood on tiptoes and kissed the back of his neck—or that was my goal, though I barely reached his collar. He glanced over his shoulder in surprise. I put my hands on his sides and leaned in, laying my cheek against the middle of his back.

“Remember when we met? Before you left, you said you were going to make a fool of yourself over me.

That’s still what you’re worried about. That you’ll find yourself doing things you never dreamed of doing, things you laughed at in others, and you’ll make a fool of yourself.”

A sigh rippled through him. “You never cut me any slack, do you? You can’t find some unselfish motive, like that I don’t want to hurt you. Or even a romantic one, perhaps that I’m worried about having my heart broken.”

“A broken heart is just a fancy way of saying you’ve been made a fool of—that you opened up, let someone in, and they took advantage. As for hurting me, I’m sure that’s in there somewhere, but it’s not the driving factor.”

“Dare I ask what is, in your opinion?”

“That a relationship with me would not only be inconvenient, but potentially humiliating. After all these years of being happy on your own, why risk that for a relationship that might not work out?”

“Sounds like you’re trying to dissuade me.”

I kissed the back of his shirt. “If you can be dissuaded, I think you should be.”

“No. I don’t think I can.”

He turned, pulled me to him and kissed me. Then he waited. After a moment of silence, he sighed. “My grand confession, my soul laid bare, and you aren’t even going to throw me a scrap, are you?”

“If you’re waiting for me to say that the idea of being a werewolf’s chosen mate is incredibly romantic, maybe swoon at your feet…”

“Perish the thought.”

“Granted, my mother would be thrilled to see me hook up with someone, but a fifty-year-old werewolf thief might not be her idea of the ideal partner.”

“We won’t tell her about the thief part. Or the werewolf part.” A pause. “Or the fifty-year-old part.”

“If you ask me whether a fifty-year-old werewolf thief is my ideal partner, in my idealized life…”

“I suppose not.”

“Sorry.” I looked up at him. “But if you ask me whether it’s what I want, my answer might be different. No guarantees. But there’s a strong possibility.”

“I can live with that.”

He scooped me up and carried me into the bedroom.

LUCAS: 3

I WAS IN BED, waiting for the alarm to ring. Paige lay on her side, facing me, the blankets pushed down to her waist. She’d been naked when we’d gone to bed last night, but must have risen at some point, putting on a short nightgown to go downstairs. Now the nightgown was twisted, and one breast peeked from the curtain of long curls, straining to be free, thwarted only by that last half-inch over her nipple. It needed only a tweak of the silk folds to finish its escape. Most mornings I would have completed the rescue, then turned off the alarm and found a less jarring way to wake her. But last night we’d worked on a new spell, and while that might not seem the obvious excuse for my hesitation, Paige’s methods of spell practice are far from obvious.