ELLIOT
I handedthe toddler to Zed, stepping out onto the porch and kneeling in front of the gorgeous woman who’d just declared me hers. My wolf was fighting me for control, my heart pounding like a fucking jackhammer, but I forced myself to stay calm for her as her bones began to snap.
“I’m going to get these clothes off you so your wolf doesn’t rip them,” I told her, quickly setting to work at removing her clothes. My damn hands shook something fierce, but I ignored that.
I’d found my mate.
My wolf wasn’t hunting—hers was hunting me.
And that meant she’d been with another man, a first mate, and her wolf had rejected him before their mating was complete.
I’d never seen her around town, and I didn’t know who she was, which meant she’d come from another pack.
And she had a kid.
A kid.
That was overwhelming, to say the least.
I was usually good in tense situations, but this one had me by the balls and the throat.
She was almost done shifting by the time I got her clothes and shoes off. The noise in my house had cut off completely, and I knew my pack was probably watching through the windows, but that didn’t matter.
I’d found my mate.
Or… she had found me.
Her wolf stared me in the eyes, studying me.
I studied her back.
Like all werewolves, she had red eyes, and like most of us, gray fur too. There was something calm and quiet about the wolf that I liked, though I knew a person’s wolf was completely separate from them to the point where a wolf’s personality didn’t say a thing about the human’s. It was different for newly-turned females, but if her kid was a werewolf, she definitely wasn’t newly-turned.
My fingers lifted to her fur, and brushed through the soft texture. She growled at me, stepping past me and butting the door with her nose.
Shit.
Right.
Her kid.
I pushed the door open and she stepped past me, into the house. Her eyes scanned the space without a glance at the furniture, decorations, or anything else, and they stopped on her toddler.
She seemed to relax a bit, with her eyes on him.
Zed was still holding the kid, and the wolf stepped up to him, eyeing him suspiciously.
The little boy wiggled fiercely, and then started to shift.
Yup, the kid was definitely a werewolf.
“Put him down, quick,” Del warned Zed.
All he had on was a diaper, which was a style I knew most werewolf moms followed until their kids were old enough to control their shifting well enough to take their clothes on and off.
Zed set the kid down in time for him to finish transforming into a little, white-furred wolf in a diaper.
Almost all of us were gray, but his fur was almost pure white, which surprised me. I hadn’t met a white wolf before.