I looked at Nevaeh, the one who’d brought us our mate.
“What happened tonight at the hospital?”
Nevaeh picked up a strawberry, dipped it in the cream then ate it.
“It was a bit crazy, actually. I was just finishing my night shift and one of the nurses came in to say that there was a woman in the ER. She was dressed only in her underwear, freezing cold and asking for Claire.”
She had been... what?
I stared at the nurse. “What do you mean? She was running around town, in the middle of the night, in her underwear?”
Had Fate sent us some sort of cuckoo?
Nevaeh shrugged. “I went straight to her and she was already in the shower, scrubbing herself clean. That behaviour, combined with the fact that she said she used to live with bear shifters made me think she probably took her clothes off to knock them off the scent. She’s young and pretty timid, but she’s smart.”
Pride blossomed in my heart at the same time panic whistled through me.
“She was living with the bears? How is that possible?”
Nevaeh shrugged, seemingly unworried by this turn of events.
“I didn’t ask her. But seeing as Trevor deliberately dated me, then stalked me for years to keep me from finding you guys, maybe they did the same thing with her? Smelled it on her, the same way Trevor smelled it on me.”
Sam gasped beside me. “And she escaped them? And went straight for Claire. Pretty amazing.”
Nevaeh began picking at her pancake, eating it with her fingers.
“I agree. And since she was drinking in the pub the night, she met Tayte, she’d be twenty-one. At the least, I think.”
Well, that’s comforting.
Dane sat forward on his chair. “And how do we know if she’s our mate, too?”
Aaron answered that one. “Did she smell super sweet to both of you?”
I looked at Sam. “Yeah,” we both answered.
“She shook and gasped when you guys touched her, even after she’d touched the Alpha,” Nevaeh said.
“Yeah. So?”
Nevaeh grinned. “That’s another sign she’s your intended mate. It looks like you guys are very much designed to have one mate per small pack.”
Relief, unlike anything I’d ever felt raced through me. We wouldn’t be left, alone, without an Alpha. “That’s… great.”
The door banged open and I looked outside.
The sky was decorated with red and orange hues now.
A perfect sunrise.
Grayson and Tayte strolled back into the room, still in wolf form.
Grayson stood up, rising from his silver wolf into his massive human form.
He grabbed his clothes from where he’d left them and pulled them back on.
I glanced across to Nevaeh and watched her devour him with her eyes.