Closing her eyes, she was surrounded by a strong sensation of peace. His rhythmic heartbeat felt perfect under her hands as she fell asleep stroking him.
TJ was still in wolf form when they woke, and his enthusiastic good-morning kisses made her laugh until her stomach hurt. Her heart ached a little since that’s how Damon used to greet her—with a wet tongue-lashing that had her scrambling for cover as he chased her around the tangled bed sheets.
Damn it, her new boyfriend reminded her of her dog. This couldn’t be good.
She pushed him back enough she could sit up. He rested his chin on her thigh, big beautiful eyes staring up unblinking. She’d slept like a rock, his warm furry body pressed against her side, comforting and reassuring.
“Good morning, TJ.”
He tilted his head to the side, his eyes sparkling at her. One ear wiggled and she swore he sighed with contentment. Damn, he was cute. “Dibs on the shower, then you can tell me what you’ve got planned for today.”
TJ jumped off the bed and headed out the open door, leaving her alone in the room. She stripped off her sleep shirt and grabbed her things.
Mates. Werewolves. The calm, contented feeling she’d woken to dissipated a little. How come she hadn’t screamed and run away after waking up with a wolf in her bed?
Because it felt right?
The shower wasn’t hot enough to wash away the rest of her unease, no matter how long she stayed in. Still, she’d offered TJ time to prove his point. Not that she had much choice about getting out of the wilderness without his help. When her fingers and toes grew wrinkled, she abandoned the water to face what the day would hold.
She rubbed a towel over her hair as she joined him at the kitchen table.
The toasted bagels were only slightly burnt. A fully human TJ poured her a cup of coffee and passed her the sugar container, his damp hair sticking up in spikes.
“Where did you shower?”
He pointed out the window. “In the lake.”
Pam shivered. “You’re kidding. The water is freezing.”
“It’s too cold for me in my human form, but my wolf doesn’t mind a bit.”
She took a long pull at her coffee, letting the heat of it wash over her. It may be a handy solution—having two forms like that—but she was grateful it had been him in the lake and not her.
He handed her a note pad. “We’ve all got in the habit of carrying paper around for those times we need to talk with Robyn and our sign language isn’t adequate. While you were showering, I jotted down a few notes to distract me.”
“Distract you?”
His gaze rolled down one side of her and up the other, and suddenly the room grew a whole lot warmer. “You were naked in the shower. Imagining you in there…”
Their eyes met and Pam swallowed around the bit of bagel stuck in her throat. Oh lordy, what had she gotten herself into? She stared at him, the dark pools of his eyes enticing her to dive in.
He nudged the notepad and broke the connection. “As per orders, I’ve got adventure activities planned for each day, but I’ve added to them. This list is the things that are normal for wolf mates to experience around each other. I thought we could work our way through some of them—sort of see how things go, and still get in the activities you signed up for originally.”
He leaned forward and took her hand, his expression shifting from flirtatious to contrite. “I want to say one more time I’m really sorry I didn’t ask you straight out if you wanted to get involved with me. I should have done things differently.”
Wow. An unasked-for apology from a guy? Pam sat for a minute not sure what to say. “Okay.”
She glanced at the paper. He’d drawn five circles on the page, overlapping them in the middle like a malformed daisy. Paired words filled each circle.
Mental link
Chemical attraction
Physical connection
Emotional attachment
Complementary interests
Pam hesitated. He was taking this damn seriously. “Chemical attraction? Isn’t that the same thing as physical connection?”
TJ shook his head. “Not at all. One leads to the other, but I can assure you they are very different.” He brushed the back of his knuckles against her cheek before tucking her hair behind her ear. “This one might be hard to prove—heck they’re all going to be tough, but this one might be the most wolfish. I’m guessing a bit, since I only know what I’ve been told about wolves’ experiences. You being human…” He shrugged.
“So you don’t know exactly what you’re trying to prove?”
His eyes flashed. “Oh, I know exactly what I’m going to prove. That you and I belong together, without any doubt whatsoever.”
Pam pushed back her chair slightly, feeling caged by his intensity. She grabbed the notepad and held it between them, dragging air into her lungs to try and calm the blood racing through her.
“Okay, chemical. In short that means? What?”
TJ took a slow, deep inhalation and moaned. “I am never going to be able to do that without getting hard. Okay—what it means is you smell right. I’m not talking about your perfume or your soap, but you.” He closed his eyes and gripped the table tightly. “Just the smell of you makes me go weak-kneed. It makes me want to pick you up, carry you to bed and make love to you for hours.”
Pam shivered, erotic images flashing in her mind.
He opened his eyes. “But it also makes me want to sit beside you for hours and listen to you tell me about your favourite food, and your day at work, and stories about when you were growing up.”
Her stomach clenched before she deliberately relaxed it. No way he wanted to hear that kind of crap.
“So it’s different from seeing someone at a bar or a dance club and getting turned on? Or for that matter, watching Gerard Butler in a movie and feeling the dire need to jump him?”
He rolled his eyes. “What is it with you chicks and that guy? No, not quite the same thing. More like—what would you do if you met him in person?”
She laughed. “Probably freeze.”
“Right, and when we met, you wanted to…?”
She thought back to before the wedding. To the almost overwhelming desire to get to know him more intimately. “So we like how each other smells. I don’t know if that’s enough to prove anything to me.”
TJ sat back and sipped his juice. “As long as you agree there is something—magnetic—between us.”
She nodded slowly. That much she would confess to. It would also explain why no matter what insane thing he did, she responded the wrong way.
TJ tugged the notepad from her fingers. “Eat, the day is wasting. That’s not the item on our agenda for today anyway.”
Pam blinked in surprise. “It’s not?”
“Nope.” He topped up her coffee and raised his mug in a toast. “To working our way through the mate list.”
Hide and go seek. She was playing hide and go seek in the Yukon bush with a werewolf. Pam tucked her legs a little closer to her body and made sure nothing was sticking out.
They’d spent the morning hiking to an abandoned miner’s cabin and poking around for artifacts. After lunch he’d casually proposed this game, and now she sat in the branches of a tree, her body pressed against the trunk. TJ walked straight toward her like she’d left a trail of breadcrumbs for him to follow. He grinned at her and held out a hand.
“You need to work harder at this or I’m going to think you’re not trying.”
“You’re cheating. You’ve got lupine senses, don’t you, even in your human form?” There had to be a reason he’d found her so quickly. The last five times she’d hidden.
TJ shook his head. “Well, I can smell you, but I can also feel where you are. It’s like I told you, there’s a mental link between us, and I’m following that.” She pushed off the branch and he caught her, her body settling against his, warm and comfortable as she wrapped her arms around his neck.