Page 32 of The Werewolf’s Study Date

I have read decades of scholarship.

I have a notebook with a careful list.

I have watched him give me his sweatshirt in under two seconds and order my food before I finished asking and go very quiet every single time another guy talks to me.

I know what I'm looking at.

I look at him and breathe out, slow, and say, in a voice that comes out remarkably steady for someone whose hands are shaking. "Boone."

He meets my eyes.

"Am I your mate?"

The silence is only a few seconds, but I don't need the words, because his face gives me the answer first—all of it, plain and certain and unguarded, the amber in his eyes going gold and quiet and yes, without a single word spoken yet.

CHAPTER 8

BOONE

She is still sitting across my lap when she asks it.

Her mouth is red from kissing, her hair a mess around her shoulders, and my hands still warm from having them under her shirt. She looks straight at me, her hazel eyes steady and waiting.

"Yes," I say. No more stalling. She's waited long enough for the truth, and she deserves it clean. "You're my mate." I don't break eye contact. "I knew the moment I looked up and saw you at my table."

She doesn't shove off my lap or put distance between us. She just sits there on my thigh, one hand flat against my chest and the other resting in her lap. Her breathing is uneven, and the silence stretches until I'm hyper-aware of every place our bodies touch.

My wolf claws at the back of my skull, making it damn near impossible to think straight, but I keep my hands resting flat on her waist because she hasn't asked me to let go.

"Okay," she says finally.

"Okay?"

"I need a second." Her voice doesn't sound angry, just focused. "I'm not running off. I just need a second."

"Take all the time you need."

The apartment is dead quiet. I can smell her skin, sweet and warm—the exact scent that's been driving my wolf crazy since mid-September. I sit there gripping my self-control by a thread while she works through it.

When she looks up, her voice is steady. "You knew the second you sat down at my table."

"Yes."

"That was six weeks ago."

"Yes."

"We've been studying together, going to the festival, texting..." She stops, her fingers tightening into the fabric of my shirt. "You kissed me back. Knowing the whole time."

"Maisie—"

"I'm not finished." It isn't loud, just firm. "I had to figure this out tonight from a database. I sat in the library reading a sixty-page study on werewolf courtship behaviors and mapped them to my own life in a notebook because nobody would tell me." She stares right into my eyes. "Does that seem like something you should've let happen?"

There's no defending it. "No."

"Your friends knew."

"Tate figured it out pretty fast," I say. "But it wasn't his place to tell you. It was mine."