Mates: Prequel (Claws Clause 0)

She was afraid.

Of him.

So he turned tail, realizing that his life had changed even more than he thought. Serving as second in his father’s pack all his life, Maddox was used to being the biggest and baddest of big, bad wolves. This woman wasn’t only the mate who’d be at his side. She would eventually bear his pups, too, while helping him guide the pack as the Alpha female, whether she was human or not. This woman was all of the things he wanted, but never reached for because it was useless to dream while she was just a promise of what could be.

And now he found her.

This woman… this nameless stranger had the power to make him retreat, already far stronger than his wolf would ever be.

She was the woman who had tamed his beast with only her scent.

He smiled.

She was his mate.

Or, she would be.

Colt’s exasperated sigh and no nonsense reminder that Ants frowned on Para’s abducting their mates kept running through his head. His brother wasn’t wrong, damn it, and he knew better than to give into his wolf’s urges. If he threw the woman over his shoulder and ran off with her, he would only scare her more.

He had to be sneaky. He had to be smart.

He had to convince his wolf to give the man a chance to woo his human mate and make her see that there was no better partner in life than an alpha wolf shifter.

She was a human. She worked with humans, interacted with humans, lived near humans.

He didn’t know how she would react to his being a shifter. It was bad enough that a big, brawny, muscular man with tanned skin, golden eyes, and danger coming off of him in waves had spooked her by tracking her in the park.

He knew what he saw when he looked in the mirror. Shaggy dark hair, a permanent five o’clock shadow along his square jaw, big golden eyes, and a scowl that could curdle milk when he was in a mood.

No wonder she was terrified.

Maddox didn’t want to scare her again. Introducing her to his wolf? That might be a little too much for her.

His mate was obviously skittish. She was probably nervous, too.

And, well, she technically didn’t quite know she was his mate just yet.

Take things slow. Take it easy.

He was playing for keeps. The stakes? They’d never been higher for him.

But Maddox was a wily hunter. He brought his first deer down when he was a pup of barely two years old. Though his mate was infinitely more important, and much smarter than an average deer, he knew how to stalk his prey unaware.

And he proved it by not getting caught watching her once.

The first few weeks after he followed her home, then to work, Maddox continued to keep an eye on her from afar, learning everything he could about her.

Her name, he discovered at long last, was Evangeline Lewis.

Evangeline was twenty-three years old, thankfully single, and an only child to a couple who were obviously pro-human. Maddox initially feared that his mate would be, too, but he observed the easy way she mixed with humans and Paras both whenever he followed her throughout the downtown.

So she wasn’t afraid of all shifters, he decided. Just him.

It made him more determined than ever to go ahead with his plan to pretend to be a human. An Ant. If only because it would guarantee that he eventually got on her parents’ good side, Maddox tamped down his wolf, took a deep breath, and finally grew a pair in order to walk up to her for only the second time.

It took every bit of nerve he had to pretend to bump easily into his mate on her way out of her local coffee shop almost four weeks from the day he first sc

ented her.