Free Come Moonrise by Lucy Monroe

approve you joining the pack and you would have to
want to, but I will always protect you, no matter what."
    Remembering the cold way King had always
treated here, she thought her chances of being approved as a pack
member were pretty slim.
    "Is your father going to be angry if we get
married?"
    "Yes."
    Her heart contracted. "Oh."
    "But he will accept the marriage."
    She said nothing to that, not as convinced
as Ty was that his dad would accept anything.
    "Is the werewolf gene the recessive one?"
she asked, not wanting to dwell on future problems while her mind
was all but mush dealing with the ramifications of what Ty was
telling her.
    He shrugged. "It’s more complicated than
that, but werewolf science still hasn’t figured out the whys of it
all. All we do know is that if it was a totally recessive gene, out
of kind matings would never result in wolf offspring and sometimes
they do."
    "Out of kind?"
    "When one partner is non-werewolf."
    "You didn’t want to mate with a human," she
remembered. "I mean it was a big thing with you if you've been
avoiding me since I was fifteen." A lot of stuff was starting to
make sense. "Even yesterday, you told me you didn't want that with
me."
    "Oh, I wanted you."
    "Your body did, but your mind didn't."
    "Right."
    "You always tell the truth, even when it
hurts," she said with a pain-filled laugh.
    "It's a wolf trait. We're good at hiding
what we are, but not lying outright."
    She nodded, her knowledge of animals making
perfect sense of that remark. "Everyone told me you were interested
in Olivia..."
    "She's our kind."
    "You wanted to marry her?" she asked. All
the signs pointed to that, but still she couldn't quite believe it.
Not after last night.
    "Yes."
    She stared at him in disbelief. "You don't
mean that."
    "I do. Mating with Olivia would have been
natural."
    "Your father likes her, I guess."
    "Yes, he does."
    "Because she's your kind."
    "Yes."
    "But you didn't want her!" Pain and anger
was ripping through her in a torrent of devastation. "And she
didn't want you."
    "I planned to change that."
    "Only I got in the way." If learning he was
a werewolf was overwhelming, discovering he had truly planned to
marry...mate with...another woman was devastating.
    This conversation had moved from the realm
of unbelievable to the tortuous.
    "Yes."
    The confirmation of her fear hurt. It also
made her mad. Really, really mad. She hadn't been alone in that bed
last night and he hadn’t been thinking of Olivia when they made
love. Had he? What if he'd had sex with her because she was
handy...because Olivia was not?
    She would not live her life as a substitute
for anybody.
    "Just because we had sex doesn’t mean you
can’t marry her," she said scathingly, her fury making her feel
violent. She wasn't about to beg for his affection. She shouldn't
have to. "That kind of thing happens all the time."
    He seemed to grow with an
anger that easily matched hers. " You’re
wrong . That kind of thing doesn’t happen in
the werewolf world. Once we mate, it’s for life - a byproduct of
our animal nature and pack law. Unlike humans, we have no
infidelity and there is no provision for divorce in our
pack."
    "Are you saying that making love is equivalent
to mating for a
werewolf... to marriage? "
    "Yes."
    " Oh, please ."
    His face creased in a fierce frown, his blue
eyes dark with obvious displeasure at her skepticism.
    She frowned back. "That
would mean that every woman you’d had sex with would be your mate."
No way could that be true, but then... "Hold on a minute, you don’t have multiple mates do
you? " If her question came out more
hysterical than not, she could be forgiven.
    No way was she joining a harem.
    But wouldn’t she have noticed if he lived
like some kind of lycanthrope sultan? Then again, she hadn’t even
noticed he was a werewolf.
    And furthermore, did her questions indicate
she accepted all that he was saying as truth?
    It seemed she did. As implausible as his
story might sound, Ty had