“Nothing I wasn’t expecting.” I shifted slightly to view him better. “I got the impression in the restaurant that she ran someone off—was that someone the wolf you loved and lost? The one you’re reluctant to talk about?”
“No. I ran Mia off, not my mother.” He hesitated and then grimaced. “I gave her a choice. She chose the second option.”
Which wasn’t him, obviously. “What did she do?”
“She lied. Everything she’d told me about herself—every single thing—wasn’t true.” He glanced at me, his eyes filled with shadows and hurt. He loved her still, despite everything, and that damn near shattered my already aching heart. “My mother never liked her, but she also never did anything physical to disrupt or otherwise end my relationship with her.”
Which no doubt meant she’d done everything in her power to verbally run her off—something I suspected she intended with me. Thank God a good percentage of our customers at the café were tourists or human locals—even if she ordered the wolves to avoid our venue, we could still survive.
“But she has run one of your lovers off?”
“Yes. When I was eighteen and head over heels for a wolf who turned out to be a rather close relation.” He glanced at me. “What did she say to you?”
A smile touched my lips. “That I would never be allowed to marry you. To which I replied, ‘never fear, because that prospect has never been part of our equation.’”
“It looked a whole lot more serious than that when I came around the corner.”
“That’s the condensed version. Was Mia a local wolf?”
“I don’t really want to talk about her—”
“And I don’t really want to talk about your mother. Besides, you can’t keep putting this discussion off forever. Not when you’re the one who demanded utter honesty.”
“I knew those words would come back to bite me,” he muttered. He took a somewhat shuddering breath and released it slowly. “No, she wasn’t local. She was a nurse who came here as part of the exchange program.”
The exchange program being a means of ensuring reservations didn’t get too inbred. “Where from?”
“The Raines, who hail from the Northern Territory.”
And who were the only pack in that state, if I remembered correctly. “How long were you together before you discovered her lies?”
“Just over a year. We were set to marry.” His expression was distant, and his aura swirled with pain that had neither been forgotten nor healed. “It was a simple text that alerted me something was wrong. It was from a man named Jude, demanding to know when the hell she was coming back home, because he was missing her something fierce.”
“You read her texts?”
“Not intentionally. She was in the shower and the text flashed up on the screen.” He grimaced. “It did at least explain why she’d been so protective of her damn phone.”
“And Jude was?”
“Her husband.”
My gut dropped. No wonder he’d been so determined to uncover my secrets—he’d feared he was facing a similar situation. And, in many respects, he had been. “Oh fuck, Aiden—”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “She went back home five or six times while we were together, and I never thought anything about it. I just figured she was missing her pack. As it turns out, she was going back to see her husband rather than her family.”
“Surely he must have suspected something was wrong?”
“Why would he? I didn’t, not until that text. But even if he did, the Raine pack was going through hard times thanks to the long drought and a fall in tourist numbers. His entire family are omegas, and way down on the pack’s food chain. It was her money that kept them going.”
“Why go interstate to work, though? Surely she could have gotten at least some work in Darwin?”
“It’s hard to run a cash grab scheme if you’re well known in the territory.”
“But she was married—surely that would have come up during a records search?”
“No, because it was common law.”
I frowned. “But how would marrying you ease her pack’s woes?”