Lover Beware

moment she said, “How do you do that thing with your clothes, anyway? They didn’t rip when you turned furry. They just weren’t on you anymore.”
    His chuckle was real, if strained. “You never run out of questions. I don’t know exactly what happens, except that they aren’t part of me so they aren’t part of the Change. Lily.” He ran both hands over her hair. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. They were on us so fast, and I couldn’t stop them. Not all of them. I didn’t think you had a chance.”
    “I’m pretty fast for a human.” She hugged him tightly around the waist, where he didn’t have any wounds. “Maybe now you’ll relax when I’m driving.”
    “Maybe I will.” A deeply held tension was easing out of him. “I was still scared, afterwards.”
    She swallowed. “I know what you mean. I am, too.”
    “I knew you’d let me hold you again. That’s the nature of the mate bond. But I didn’t know if you would want me to, after what you saw tonight.”
    She was the one who had killed someone tonight, not him. But Lily didn’t have the energy to get off on side issues. Exhaustion was turning her brain to lint. “Speaking of the mate bond…I don’t know what the hell that is. We were interrupted, remember?”
    “I think you’ve guessed the important part.” He cupped her face and smiled into her eyes. “Some say the mate bond is nature’s way of apologizing for our troubles with fertility. It doesn’t happen often, but once in a long while, a lupus finds his mate, the woman who is so supremely right for him that no other will do. His life-mate. I knew you before I saw you, Lily. The moment you walked into the room, your scent reached me and I knew.”
    She swallowed. “So it’s like true love, lupus style?”
    He brushed a kiss across her mouth. “Very like that.”
    “And it doesn’t cause problems? With the clan, I mean. If you have to bow out of the fertility business—”
    He laughed. “I’ve been out of the fertility business since I met you. There can be problems, yes, but not that way. If a lupus is lucky enough to find his mate, no one expects him to keep spreading his seed around. It would be…abomination. Like rape, or the worst form of prostitution.”
    “But it can cause problems.”
    He nodded slowly. “That’s the other reason everyone was so curious about you. Just because a lupus finds his mate doesn’t mean she’ll be able to accept him, his people, and his ways. Sometimes…” His throat muscles worked. “Sometimes he has to choose between his clan and his mate. But you had no fear-scent.” His thumbs stroked along her cheeks. “You have no idea how important that is, how everyone rejoiced for me. Women who are deeply afraid of us often can’t adjust. They may try, but they can’t become one of the clan.”
    Happiness swelled inside her, so large and grand she had to tell him. “I love you, Rule.” He kissed her, and that was delightful, but after a moment she pointed out, “You’re supposed to say it back to me.”
    His eyebrows lifted slightly. “You know how I feel.”
    “Wrong answer.” Her lips twitched. “This mate bond doesn’t make everything perfect, does it?”
    “No. It just makes everything possible.”
    A long time later he was sitting in the visitor’s chair, one of those plastic devices supposedly shaped like people but that don’t really fit anyone’s rump. It couldn’t have been comfortable. She was, though, since she was in his lap. “So, are we engaged?”
    “If you like. In the eyes of my people, we’re already married.”
    “In the eyes of my people, we aren’t. So I think engaged is a good idea. That makes you part of my family. Speaking of which…” She thought about all she still had to tell him. To explain. Things that were known only within the family.
    Maybe it was stretching a point to call him family before they married, but he had to know. They might have children. From what he’d said that was far from certain…but with Grandmother involved, matters often fell out quite differently than anyone expected.
    And she was likely to be involved.
    Some traits were passed through the male line. Some through the female. Very few of the women in Lily’s family inherited Grandmother’s abilities; Lily hadn’t, and she didn’t think anyone alive today had, either. Probably it was a recessive trait. But Lily carried that heritage in her genes. She would pass the possibility on to her