The Reluctant Mate

Porter

My mate explained the whole thing with werewolves to her friends. Lisa had stopped talking and all four humans stared at my mate and my little wolf children with utter fascination.

“Sorry, Daddy. I had to.”

“I know, sweetie. We’ll handle it.”

“Let me down. Everything smells so good, I wanna run.”

“Not yet, Alina. We need to deal with the humans first.”

“What’s gonna happen to Lise and Darr and Carl and that other boy?”

“Nothing bad, I promise. You know we don’t hurt humans.”

Alina’s bright blue eyes bore into mine. Both our girls were too smart for their own good. They might not know what was going on, but they sensed that something was off. And they knew humans weren’t supposed to know.

“I promise I’ll protect them,” I told her seriously.

She inspected my face carefully, and then nodded. “You will.”

“I’m going to put you down, but you can’t run away. I’ll take you for a run later if you’re good.”

“Okay.”

Amanda was still explaining. I wasn’t surprised. All the secrets she had learned in her time amongst us had been piling up for years, like volcanic pressure. Mount Amanda was erupting. “So anyway, all these other kinds of people are worried that humans’ll annihilate them if we find out about them. I think it’s because they all rely on their abilities too much, but humans don’t have them so we use our brains to make a bunch of dangerous things instead.” She shrugged.

“I still can’t...” Lisa said.

“I know what you mean. Remember that time my grandma was sick and I stayed with her? Total lie. Actually I’d stumbled onto their wolfy secret and I was bullied into making excuses until they were sure I wasn’t going to tell anyone.”

“I see,” Daria said in a tone that said the opposite.

“You did seem off,” Lisa agreed. “But...”

Carrie and Jason came around the corner.

“Wait, are they werewolves, too?” Carl asked. He had moved over to Daria with a protective stance I could respect considering his mate was pregnant. I liked him, he was a good guy.

“Basically everyone here is,” Amanda said.

“Should you be telling us all this?” Daria asked.

Amanda shrugged. “Carrie said I could. And you probably won’t remember anyway.”

Carrie interrupted. “Well, that’s not necessarily true.”

Amanda perked up. Our friends looked varying degrees of shocked and worried.

“Humans are allowed to maintain their memories if they are no longer classified as mundane.” She fixed the four humans who were clumped together with a serious look. “You’ve got three choices. You can learn some witchcraft and join their ranks, join our pack, or have your memories of this night erased by our resident witch. If you choose to remember, you’ll be brought into the accords and you’ll be put on trial by the hunters if you ever intentionally expose the supernatural world.”

Jason smoothly cut in. “But you don’t have to decide right away. I’m sure you have lots of questions and need to think about it for a while.”

The scent of overcooked meat caught my attention. “Oh, shit,” I said, hurrying back to the barbeque. It wasn’t too bad, so I flipped it. Jason followed me. “Can they be trusted?”

“I think it’ll be fine. I don’t know Kevin as well, but he’s a stickler for rules.”

Jason nodded.

“Do you and Carrie want to join us for supper since you’re here?”

“Sounds good, thanks. We left the kids with Theodora, I’ll have to go grab them.”

“Alina and Clarity will like that.”

Jason spoke to Carrie, who was explaining some fine point to Kevin before he headed off in the direction they had come. Amanda was very happily telling her friends stories she hadn’t been able to tell them before.

My twin girls were running around in their wolf forms.

Honestly, this barbeque was a disaster, but I couldn’t even care. I had my mate, and my girls. And I was so proud, they could shift, not that I wasn’t proud of them before that, but we’d never been sure if either of them had wolves since they were only half werewolf, and half-wolves didn’t always inherit the ability. But my girls had, and so young.

“You seem happy,” my mate commented as she came up to me. “Everything’s a disaster and here you are standing around smiling like you’ve gotten everything you’ve ever wanted.”

“Well, I kind of have. The girls are half wolves, and they shifted younger than a lot of regular wolves. You know I would love them no matter what, but...”

Amanda wrapped her arms around me and watched our daughters rolling around. “You know, this makes them your problem now. I’m just a human, I can’t manage two little werewolves.”

“You manage werewolves just fine, Amanda. I think you were destined for it.”

She rolled her eyes and sighed, but only held me tighter.

She was right though. I tightened my hold on her. I did end up with everything I ever wanted.