Page 62 of The CEO Alpha’s Substitute Mate

At the edge of the woods, he lets go of my hand and turns around. “Are you sure you want to know?” His voice is quiet, and some instinct tells me to step back now. “I want to ask you one last time.”

The trees behind him are black already. There’s nobody within four hundred yards of us.

“Why did you bring me here to tell me?”

“Because it’s easier to show you than tell you.”

He starts unbuttoning his shirt. Three buttons come undone before I find any words at all, and my face goes hot at entirely the wrong time.

“Callum, what are you—”

“Don’t scream,” he says as he turns away from me and discards every inch of his clothing.

He steps back into the last of the light, and what happens to him isn’t something a body should be able to do. It takes about two seconds. There isn’t a sound in any of it. His shoulders pitch forward, his back lengthens, and the man I’ve been arguing with for the last two months isn’t standing in front of me anymore.

The wolf is enormous. Its head comes up past my shoulder, and every inch of it is black to the root, the last of the sun sitting red along the guard hairs. I can count the teeth from here. The eyes are the same. Those are exactly the eyes that watched me across a plate of pancakes, then told me to be good and come to bed.

It takes one step toward me on the grass. Somewhere behind my teeth there’s a scream with nowhere left to go, and I swallow it so hard that my throat hurts. Both my hands are over my mouth, my shoes are sinking into the wet grass, and I don’t run.

I can’t.

Chapter 12

Callum

Ariela falls on the ground.

I had expected her to fall backward, but instead her knees fold, and she sits hard in the wet grass with both hands still clamped over her mouth. The smell off her is pure animal fear, and it turns my wolf’s head toward her throat. However, the predatory instinct to hunt what fears it isn’t there.

My wolf puffs up his chest to show the woman before us how magnificent he is before approaching her. Ariela is frozen on the ground, and she doesn’t move. My wolf takes two steps and lowers his head until our nose is an inch from her wrist. I let him do it because I have never in my life been less in charge of him.

Every law we have says this shouldn’t have happened. A human is told what we are under exactly two conditions, and she meets neither. She isn’t bound to the pack by blood, and nobody here is promised to her. The elders would have my throat for what I just did on this grass, and Samuel Rook would sell tickets.

Except that she has no family at all. There’s nobody for her to run to, no cousin in a bar who might repeat it over a beer. Whatever else this woman is, she’s the emptiest security risk I have ever assessed.

My wolf touches her wrist with his nose. She flinches so hard that her elbow hits the ground. Then she stops, takes her hands off her mouth about an inch, and looks at us.

“Are you going to eat me?”

I huff, which is as close as I get to a laugh, then drop onto my hindquarters into the grass beside her and fold down onto my belly with my chin near her knee. No alpha alive would do this. You don’t put yourself lower than a human or lower than anybody because the second you do it in front of the wrong pair of eyes, somebody starts counting the years you have left. My father would have gone through the floor.

She puts her hand out toward me cautiously. It stops four inches from my shoulder, hovers there, then settles into the fur at the back of my neck. I shut my eyes, the touch calming rather than threatening. I can feel the way her hand is shaking, so I remain still under her touch. I lie down flat on the ground, letting her stroke me from the crown of my head down to the ruff, over and over, until her breathing relaxes. She finds the place behind my ear where the fur changes direction, and she scratches. It takes a lot not to whimper in pleasure.

“No wonder you looked so offended when I asked you if you were a dog,” she mutters.

I open one eye at her and make a disgruntled sound. I am closer to my animal’s emotions in this form.

“Can you change back?” she asks slowly. “Please?”

I can smell the taste of her fear, but she’s still touching me, which pleases the wolf. Brave. She’s brave. It takes two seconds, it hurts every time, and then I’m on my knees in the grass reaching for my pants. She has turned her head so far away that she’s nearly looking behind her, which is more insulting than if she’d stared.

“You can look now.”

She looks. Her shoulders relax the second she sees a man instead. She looks me over from the bare shoulders to the grass on my knees, then remembers to be appalled.

“So Luca is...”—she stops—“whatever you are?”

“Shifter.” I fasten the button. “I’m a shifter.”