It had felt so good that she let him do it several more times that night, and when she sat in the passenger seat beside him as they bumped along a narrow dirt road through the woods that led to the lakeside cabin he owned, she had let him have another first.

When she’d been a horny teenager, the thought of shifted sex was a forbidden taboo but one that got her off. She couldn’t imagine letting another wolf have her in such a way, and as she grew to adulthood, the idea remained there in the distance, something delicious and dirty that she would probably never experience, one that made her hot all the same.

Everyone experienced the change differently. She knew guru types who taught parallel consciousness workshops, a sort of Tantric training to ensure that one retained their own mind as they shifted, behaving precisely as they would in their human skin, remembering all that happened beneath the moon once they shifted back. She’d never been a particularly good study with esoteric concepts like that. Her time as her other self always felt like a hazy dream, half-remembered and fuzzy around the edges.

She couldn’t remember all of the details on how he’d approached her or how they’d reached the patch of moonlight, and she couldn’t close her eyes and visualize how the scene must’ve looked, but her body remembered how it felt. She remembered wind in her ears and the sharp, wet smell of the lake, gleefully running from him, making him chase her. She remembered the weight of his body over hers, rolling her against the forest floor, pinning her with weight, his teeth at her neck and his cock filling her, primal and perfect.

She woke curled against his chest, his fingers tangled in her hair and his arm heavy over her waist, as golden sunlight filtered over the tops of the trees. Her body ached as it always did after the change

— bones and muscle knitting themselves back to her familiar form, re-shifting and leaving her sore.

The aches and pains of transformation were well-known, which is why most businesses allowed

lupine employees to take off the day after the moon, but the ache in her muscles was not the only one she felt. There was a sharp pull in her groin every time she shifted, exacerbated when she bent over, the lasting evidence of the way his body had stretched within hers, of what they had done together.

He was still asleep when she woke, and as she nuzzled against his chest, Vanessa was sure they would not go back to the status quo the next day, could not go back. She didn’t know how to keep him chasing, but there was no way to turn back the clock on what they’d shared.

Forty-eight hours later, as he barked at her over findings that he wanted on his desk, she wasn’t sure if she would ever be able to accurately read their situation.

“Let’s follow up with Brimm and see where they are with things. Johanna will be forwarding all of the reports to you. I’m meeting with Hastings today, so let’s get it done.”

She nodded, feeling a bit like his administrative assistant with the way he was once again piling her with paperwork, but simultaneously gratified that she was being called up again to work with one of the larger clients. Hesitating in the doorway, her hands tightened around her tablet, wondering if things were different now.

He glanced up, peering out from underneath a raised eyebrow. “Is there something else you need, Ms. Blevin?”

Vanessa shook her head, pressing her lips together in a tight smile. There was nothing she needed at all, she thought. It was fine, and this is what she should have expected. It didn’t matter what they did or things he said to her; it didn’t matter if he was constantly sending her mixed messages and signals.

He could treat her as callously as he had on her very first day — it was the right way for him to handle the situation. And she would absolutely be blowing him off again the following month, she decided, just to remind him of who was actually in control.

* * *

Chapter Six

“Y ou’re looking at that menu board like it’s a case file. Are you waiting for it to talk back to you?”

She scowled, glancing over her shoulder to see he’d never even picked up his head, sunglasses sitting at the tip of his nose as he scrolled through his phone, tapping out a text a moment later.

“Is Trapp’s girlfriend going to be there?”

The only one of his brothers she had met at that point was Trapp, a relief, as he was the one who mattered most and was also one of the friendliest people she’d ever known.

She and the small collection of werewolf friends she’d had growing up — made at the pricey werewolf-only summer camp to which her parents made sure to send her and her sibling — had been fixated on pack hierarchies as teens. They were all sheltered suburbanites and didn’t know anything about life on the fringes or the reality of pack living; wouldn’t know an actual wolfpack if one came through their front doors, but in their hormonal ignorance, they swooned over the idea of a protective, alpha boyfriend, their alpha fantasies growing more x-rated with each successive summer.

Grayson had big alpha energy, as they would have called it all those years ago. He was an aggressive asshole and oozed sex appeal, had the jealousy and protectiveness, and she hated that she was falling for an alpha schtick, but her wolf was a pathetic bag of trash for it.

Trapp was altogether different. A sigma wolf, she remembered reading from a magazine, from her position in the top bunk to the assembled girls below, he didn’t possess the over-the-top intensity of his two older brothers, had rebuffed the life map that had been laid out for him, had carved out his own little niche in the world, and as a result, he seemed one hundred percent less stressed out than Grayson every day of the week. He was model handsome, with a bright, beaming smile and an easy-going nature, not traits she found particularly exciting for a partner, but excellent in an ally, and she

reminded herself as they waited for the coffee that Trapp would be there. It didn’t matter if the rest of their ridiculously large family would also be sitting around the table staring at her like a bug — she could focus on the gleaming white teeth belonging to the sibling he was closest with, and hold her breath for the rest of the day.

He took his time answering, never lifting his eyes from the phone.

“I’m not sure. I don’t know what his plans were for this moon.”

Vanessa rolled her eyes so hard that she thought they might get stuck backward in their sockets.

Grayson and Trapp each knew what the other was doing every moment of every day, and it was hard to reconcile the fact that they were not the twins. Grayson had told her that Trapp was meant to be a doctor, following the roadmap of success laid out for each of them — finance, law, medicine.

Jackson, the eldest, had started out following their father’s footsteps into the financial world but had taken a right turn into academia, pursuing an economics master’s and Ph.D. with a cushy, tenured university position. Trapp had attended a prestigious medical school, had graduated near the top of his class . . . and had quit in the middle of his residency, deciding if he never stepped foot in another hospital, it would be too soon.

“I’m the only one who stuck with the program,” Gray had groused, and she’d bitten her tongue to prevent pointing out that his brothers following their own ambitions was not actually a bad thing, choosing instead to scrape her nails over the endless expanse of his back, distracting him.

“So that means no, because it’s not believable that you don’t know what he had for breakfast this morning, let alone what he was doing for half the week. You know, it would’ve been nice not to get into a fight with her when he knew I was coming today. It’s actually pretty shitty. That would’ve been like, the least he could do.”