Howl For Me (Steamy Shifters)

I hired him for four days. His wolf had already decided on the rest of my life.

Four days in the backcountry with a guide who barely speaks.

No signal. No people. No way off this mountain that isn't him.

Decklan Moore is six foot five, all beard and shoulders, and he's said maybe forty words to me since the trailhead. But what he does say, I do. Step where I step. Drink now. Stay behind me on the switchback. It's about the mountain. It's about safety.

By the second day neither of us is pretending it's about the mountain.

He watches me like I'm the answer to a question he stopped letting himself ask years ago. And on a rock shelf at the bottom of a canyon, with the walls throwing every sound back at me, he finally tells me why.

He's a wolf. No pack, no people, three years of deliberate solitude on the other side of a door he shut himself.

And I'm his mate. Fated. A word his kind gets to say once in a life — and he wasn't supposed to get to say it at all.

He offers to walk me back down to my car before it gets worse.

I don't let him.

I came up here to figure out where I belong. Turns out the answer is two days from the trailhead, it has a low voice, and it says stay like that's the only word that ever mattered.

Fated mates. Lone wolf hero. Wilderness forced proximity. He tells her what to do and she likes it far too much to stop. Standalone, no cliffhanger.