Free Healing Her Wolf: Paranormal Werewolf Romance by Zoe Chant Page B

eyes wide as she held a glass under the tap. “What? How the hell do you know that?”
    Oh shit. “I can smell it; you used coconut shampoo,” he quickly said, scooting his chair back. “I swear I did not lurk in the bushes or anything.”
    “Well, you’re right,” she muttered, raising a hand to her hair self-consciously. “I guess I didn’t notice the smell myself.” She put the glass of water in front of him, and eyed him suspiciously as she sat down opposite him.
    “It’s nice,” he said, in case that made it better. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and bury his nose in her hair.
    Her cheeks reddened slightly, and she looked away for a moment. “Yes, well, anyway, Tyler said you wanted to talk?”
    “I did, yeah.” Where did he start? “Things didn’t go so well this morning.”
    “They didn’t, no,” she agreed, folding her hands together on the table, rubbing her thumbs against one another.
    “I shouldn’t have been so pushy.” There, he’d said it.
    She smiled a little. “True. And I may have been a bit quick to kick you out.”
    He squashed down on the relief sweeping through him. They weren’t done yet. “I should’ve listened to you. You — you made some good points. We don’t know each other at all.”
    “Yes, but telling you to leave didn’t exactly help with that.” She sighed. “If I could do it again, I would’ve asked you to leave for a few hours and then meet for lunch, or something.”
    “Hey, I get it now, you just had your world turned upside down.” It was amazing what a few hours of thinking could do to you. “Of course you needed space.”
    “I did. I do,” she added. “This is still — this is still weird for me, Konrad.”
    He had tried to imagine what it must be like for her, to suddenly discover a whole new kind of human. “It’s a little weird for me too.” He had had crushes before, even fallen in love, but meeting his mate was so completely different from that.
    Maddy laughed. “At least you know what you’re doing.”
    “I really, really don’t,” he replied, laughing as well. “Didn’t I prove that this morning?” Suddenly, he had to be considerate of someone else’s needs as well as his own in a whole new way.
    She leaned forward, folding her hands under her chin. “Shall we agree that neither of us know what we’re doing?”
    He nodded, raising his glass of water. “Agreed.” He took a sip. “So, now what? Because Maddy, I have to be honest, I don’t want to leave you. I don’t think I can stand it.” The pain was still fresh in his mind, and he never wanted to feel that empty again.
    “I don’t want you to leave either. I pretty much regretted sending you away the moment you went,” she admitted, lowering her hands to the table again. “But I also don’t want to go with you. I just can’t.”
    That stung, even if he understood. “I’m gonna have to go back home eventually.”
    “Do you really?”
    He frowned. “I have to if I want to be an Alpha. I’ll have to see how the council feels about an Alpha whose mate doesn’t live in the town, though.”
    She shifted in her chair. “What if I never want to live in Woodland Creek?” she asked. “What if, assuming you could be an unmated Alpha, you had to choose between me or the town?”
    He stared at her. She couldn’t be serious. There was no way the council would allow that to happen. Maybe if he made his case that even as an unmated Alpha he was still a better candidate than either of his cousins who did have mates — and that was assuming they had found them — the council would agree to an exception to the rule. But it didn’t matter, because when it came to choosing between Maddy or being Alpha, the choice was obvious. “I’d go with you,” he said. He couldn’t be without his mate. “I’d make a terrible Alpha if I was constantly pining for you.”
    Her cheeks flushed again. “You wouldn’t be pining.”
    “I would,” he insisted, leaning