Three

Confusion swirls in his eyes. “Look, we have no intention of forcing you to stay. You can leave whenever you want.”

I open my mouth.

“Once you’re well enough.” He cuts in smoothly as he retreats to the doorway.

Narrowing my eyes, I examine him more closely. He might have kind eyes, but he’s no pushover.

And he seems the sort that can persuade you to do things you don’t want to. My lips are thin.

A charmer then, like Shane Dacre.

“And once the bus arrives.”

Shit. The bus. The driver would’ve gone. Five minutes, he said. It could’ve been five days, and I’d be none the wiser. Just as I’m poised to ask what day it is and how long I’ve been here, he speaks.

“Why would you think we’d force you to stay?” His question is quiet, and his gaze never leaves my face.

This wolf doesn’t seem the sort to miss anything.

I’d better be damn careful what I say around him.

“I can’t imagine you have many shifter women here,” I say evasively.

“We have some.” As if sensing my unease, he breaks eye contact and crosses over to the window. I watch the lean muscles in his arms, exposed by his white t-shirt, as he winds the blind up to flood the room with light.

“Enough that we have no reason to be forcing any to stay against their will. Especially pregnant mated ones.”

I should’ve been thinking up a story about why I’m running. And I would have… if I’d been expecting to stumble into a town full of shifters.

“Well, that’s a relief,” I say, ignoring his mention of my delicate condition.

Once he’s finished lifting the blind to reveal a bright blue sky with the same white fluffy clouds from my postcard of the town, he turns to face me.

He looks like he can’t be that much older than Shane. Maybe he’s in his mid-twenties or even younger, but there’s something about the way he leans back against the wall with his arms folded over his chest that gives the impression of him being older. More mature.

“Mmm,” he murmurs.

It’s a sound loaded with meaning. It could mean anything from okay, I believe you, to you big fat liar what are you hiding, even to, well this is boring, I should go find something more interesting to do than find out why a pregnant shifter has suddenly turned up in my town.

“The other shifter,” I start, and then promptly realize I don’t have a clue what I’m about to say.

The brown-eyed shifter doesn’t cut in or assume anything, he regards me steadily as if waiting for me to figure out what I want to say. As if he’s prepared to wait forever, and then some.

His patience untwists my tongue faster than anything else he could’ve said or done.

Eventually, I swallow. “He won’t… he won’t try to force me to stay.

Will he?” He frowns. “No, Bennett won’t force you to stay.”

I narrow my eyes, disbelieving. “You sound pretty sure. But I know alphas and once they’ve made their mind up about something, nothing will change it. So, tell me the truth. Will he force me to stay?”

Several seconds pass before he rises from his lean against the wall, his gaze never leaving my face.

“I promise you that the Winter Lake Alpha will not force you to do anything you don’t want to.” He sounds so assured, so confident, that if I hadn’t seen the other guy—the Bennett guy—from the way this guy just spoke to me, I’d assume he was the alpha.

But before I can chase that thought down the rabbit hole and see where it takes me, I notice something I should’ve spotted before, distracting me. I blink so I can focus on it all the clearer.

Just beneath the surface of him I see his pain, and it’s so sharp, I wonder how I missed it at first, given this is what I am, and it’s what I’ve been able to do since I was a child.

I see a shifter’s pain, and I can heal them. It’s one of the things I can do which gives me the title of Omega. To stem aggression in a pack?

That takes will and control, but this other thing, this healing? This takes no effort at all.

In a world where omegas are rare, my gift makes me valuable, even if I’m not as strong and as aggressive as other wolves. I’m not submissive, but I’m not dominant either, which, in Shane’s eyes, makes me worthless. Weak. Useless.

“You want to tell me your name?” he asks when I don’t respond.

I startle and jerk my gaze away because I’m realizing that for several seconds, it may even be minutes, I’ve been doing nothing but staring at this beta without saying a word. Probably without blinking.

Feeling myself blushing, embarrassed to have been caught staring at him as intensely as I was, I struggle to think of something to say. It’s made worse because the faint smile curving his lips tells me he didn’t miss my attention.

I can’t tell him I was staring because I find him attractive, even if it’s true, and I can’t tell him I was trying to understand the nature of his pain.

While his soul is a lovely aquamarine blue, his edges are ragged and torn as if he never recovered from some emotional hurt that he suffered a long time ago.

That’s the thing with souls, you can hide your expression and your emotions at least on a surface level, but you can never hide the effect it has on your soul. At least not from an omega. Not from me.

It’s a good thing that omegas are so rare because if I got within sight of another one, I don’t know how I’d begin to hide what I am or explain why my soul is so battered and bruised.

“I’m guessing that’s a no,” he says when I don’t answer.

Instead of answering, I turn to the overstuffed bookcases, which take up almost an entire wall of this not-exactly-small bedroom. “Whose room is this?”

In part, it’s my less-than-subtle attempt to distract him, but it’s also a genuine desire to know because I refuse to believe that any guy who takes such an interest in books is a bad guy.

“Mine.”

Right, because this is his room, which means I’m in his bed wearing nothing but a white t-shirt that has to be one of his.

Once again, I feel my face heat. “Oh.”

I should know that already, given the room is full of his rich scent that makes me think of warm nights in front of an open fire, and roasting marshmallows.

When I feel brave enough to dart a glance in his direction, I find he’s wearing another faint smile. “I’m Mack.”

I raise my eyebrow. “What, no surname?”

The smile develops into a full grin, and it's so gorgeous that I know I must be staring, but this time not to get a deeper peek at the wounds in his soul.

“Sure I do. But how about we trade for it? One first name.” He gestures at me. “For one surname,” he says, pointing at himself.

I considered making one up, but in the end, I decided to give him my real name. That way, I won’t have to worry about remembering a fake name for however long I’m stuck here. Which, considering the state of my leg, might be a while. “Aerin.”

“Winters.” He replies right after. Then he pauses and tilts his head to examine me. “Aerin, huh? Pretty.”

Oh my God, I have got to stop blushing.

“It’s just a name,” I say with a shrug, feigning indifference. “And Winters? Like the name of the town?”

The aquamarine blue of his soul turns the darker, redder shade of a soul in pain. “Yeah, I took it as my own when we settled here.”

I’m desperate to know why a pack of shifters have made a home for themselves in a town where old people retire. I want to ask why my innocent question makes his pain sharp enough that I feel myself reaching out to heal him without conscious thought.

Just as I place mental fingers on the most ragged of the tears to his soul, I realize what I’m doing and jerk away. If this guy—this Mack figures out what I am, he’ll tell his alpha for sure, and that’ll be it. There’ll be no leaving for me, ever.

“I’m tired,” I announce before turning my head away to stare at the bookcase, even though I know it’s rude.

All I can do is hope that my touch was light enough that Mack didn’t feel the beginning of my healing touch. Some shifters are so sensitive they would feel even that. I just have to hope that Mack isn’t one of them.

For a moment there’s silence at my back and I tense, thinking I’ve given myself away. But then he speaks. “You must be. Sleep as long as you want, and when you’re hungry, just shout and I’ll bring something up to you.”

Definitely the beta.

His words silence the tiny nagging voice in my head that he’s anything more than a beta. After living with my father, then Shane and his father, not to mention the countless other alphas I’ve had the displeasure to meet, there’s no way Mack is one.

He’s too… accommodating to be anything other than a beta. Which is a relief that I haven’t been unlucky enough to land myself in an alpha’s bed. My situation then would be a million times worse.

I relax the second he steps out and closes the door behind him.

The beta in my father’s pack loved reading as well, and he was nice—kind.

Considering the favorite sport of most shifters seems to be fighting, my father’s beta, Moses, stood out. It’s only because of his position as beta, and his mate’s as pack healer, that the rest of the pack didn’t view his love of reading as a weakness that they needed to beat out of him. I was saved by the same fate because I was the alpha’s daughter.

Others that the pack viewed as weak weren’t so lucky.

Mack seems the same as Moses, quiet but with a hidden strength beneath the surface. I just hope the alpha here likes him enough for Mack to be able to keep him as far away from me as possible.

I place my hand over my belly. Although it’s still flat, in a few months that will no longer be true. Again, I try to estimate how far along I am, but it’s as impossible now as it was when I first discovered I was pregnant in a filthy roadside bathroom with a lock that didn’t work properly.