Page 8 of Wrong Number, Right Gray Wolf

Bag acquired, I got us inside and put her down. This time when my wolf pushed to be set free, I allowed it. My beast was insisting that he make sure the house didn’t have any strangers in it. There was no reason there would be, but this was something I could indulge him on.

She’d come home and gone inside on her own, sure, but she’d have seen someone coming in with her and the door auto locked. But logic wasn’t working with him and I didn’t push it. I might not be able to give him his mate now, but I could allow him this comfort.

He knew our daughter had been by herself and scared. He needed to verify her safety before he could relax. Had we been outside, I’d never give him his fur for fear he’d run off and try to track down the car my mate was driving. But here, he was stuck unless he shifted back. It was a safe way to give him his freedom.

I barely had my clothes off when he took his fur.

My wolf went from room to room to room, sniffing every possible entrance, including those far too small for anything but a draft. He did that twice before deciding the house was safe. Posy grabbed onto his fur the way she used to when she was a toddler and went with him. It was then that I realized my wolf was doing this because Posy required it to settle and not only for himself.

Some parents’ beasts were able to communicate with their child’s best long before the parent could sense them. If it hadn’t been the lack of shared DNA between us, I’d have assumed that was what was happening here.

I shifted back. “Hey. What if we have those pancakes now?” Breakfast. Dinner. Same difference.

“Really?” Her face lit up. Posy did love her pancakes.

“Really. And you can tell me all about your adventures today.”

“How come you were late?” she demanded and rightfully so.

“I hit a pothole and got a flat tire. I tried to call the library so they knew, but my phone wasn’t working. And then when I got to the library, the lights were out.”

“They have a fundraiser tonight. They were in a hurry.” She grabbed the chocolate chips out of the cupboard and handed them to me. Chocolate chip pancakes it was.

“They didn’t even notice when I went with Micah’s brother.”

Neither one of us knew the guy’s name, and here she was getting in the car with him and no adults thinking to ask about it. Big yikes.

“It was a bad day, Daddy.”

Understatement of the year.

“I’m so sorry. How about I put whipped cream on your chocolate chip pancakes? Would that make it a little better?”

She nodded. “Can you make them shaped like bunnies and the whipped cream can be the tails?”

“I can try.”

She stood there watching me attempt to make delicious-looking pancakes. My bunnies looked more like blobs, but that brought its own set of smiles. As we ate, we talked about safety plans and what to do if something like this ever happened again. Not that I’d allow that to happen.

It wasn’t until I was tucking her into bed with not one but four of her teddy bears, and finished reading her story, that she brought up Stephen again.

“We need to thank Stephan.” She was right. He’d done so much to try and help a random child who asked for help, and he hardly got the reception he deserved for it. “Maybe I can call him tomorrow or make him something.”

“Maybe. Speaking of calling him, how did you know his number?”

“I was trying to call you, and I made a mistake.” Fate really did have their hands in this.

“It was very clever of you to call for help.”

“And he’s nice, Daddy. He praised me for calling to get help. He told me he would make sure that I had somebody on the phone the whole time so I wasn’t completely alone. He got his friend to help him find me. I was so scared. I know our address, but I couldn’t… I couldn’t remember it. I can say it now, but when I was scared…”

“You did really well, honey. We all forget things when we’re scared. I forgot my last name when I broke my foot.”

It was less forgetting and more not knowing what they were asking me, the stupid thing hurt so bad. But same thing. That was a case of needing to suffer like a human because it happened at a work event. Had I been surrounded by shifters, I could’ve taken my fur and been done with it.

From there, Posy went into her normal chatty, tell-Daddy-everything infodump. She told me all the little details of their conversation, like how he collected buttons and talked about her teddy bears with her. The fox shifter had dropped everything because a frightened child misdialed. And then when I got here and he didn’t know who I was, he was ready to take care of business to protect her.

“Are you mad at Stephen?”