Their eyes met and Pam swallowed around the bit of bagel stuck in her throat. Oh lordy, what had she gotten herself into? She stared at him, the dark pools of his eyes enticing her to dive in.
He nudged the notepad and broke the connection. “As per orders, I’ve got adventure activities planned for each day, but I’ve added to them. This list is the things that are normal for wolf mates to experience around each other. I thought we could work our way through some of them—sort of see how things go, and still get in the activities you signed up for originally.”
He leaned forward and took her hand, his expression shifting from flirtatious to contrite. “I want to say one more time I’m really sorry I didn’t ask you straight out if you wanted to get involved with me. I should have done things differently.”
Wow. An unasked-for apology from a guy? Pam sat for a minute not sure what to say. “Okay.”
She glanced at the paper. He’d drawn five circles on the page, overlapping them in the middle like a malformed daisy. Paired words filled each circle.
Mental link
Chemical attraction
Physical connection
Emotional attachment
Complementary interests
Pam hesitated. He was taking this damn seriously. “Chemical attraction? Isn’t that the same thing as physical connection?”
TJ shook his head. “Not at all. One leads to the other, but I can assure you they are very different.” He brushed the back of his knuckles against her cheek before tucking her hair behind her ear. “This one might be hard to prove—heck they’re all going to be tough, but this one might be the most wolfish. I’m guessing a bit, since I only know what I’ve been told about wolves’ experiences. You being human…” He shrugged.
“So you don’t know exactly what you’re trying to prove?”
His eyes flashed. “Oh, I know exactly what I’m going to prove. That you and I belong together, without any doubt whatsoever.”
Pam pushed back her chair slightly, feeling caged by his intensity. She grabbed the notepad and held it between them, dragging air into her lungs to try and calm the blood racing through her.
“Okay, chemical. In short that means? What?”
TJ took a slow, deep inhalation and moaned. “I am never going to be able to do that without getting hard. Okay—what it means is you smell right. I’m not talking about your perfume or your soap, but you.” He closed his eyes and gripped the table tightly. “Just the smell of you makes me go weak-kneed. It makes me want to pick you up, carry you to bed and make love to you for hours.”
Pam shivered, erotic images flashing in her mind.
He opened his eyes. “But it also makes me want to sit beside you for hours and listen to you tell me about your favourite food, and your day at work, and stories about when you were growing up.”
Her stomach clenched before she deliberately relaxed it. No way he wanted to hear that kind of crap.
“So it’s different from seeing someone at a bar or a dance club and getting turned on? Or for that matter, watching Gerard Butler in a movie and feeling the dire need to jump him?”
He rolled his eyes. “What is it with you chicks and that guy? No, not quite the same thing. More like—what would you do if you met him in person?”
She laughed. “Probably freeze.”
“Right, and when we met, you wanted to…?”
She thought back to before the wedding. To the almost overwhelming desire to get to know him more intimately. “So we like how each other smells. I don’t know if that’s enough to prove anything to me.”
TJ sat back and sipped his juice. “As long as you agree there is something—magnetic—between us.”
She nodded slowly. That much she would confess to. It would also explain why no matter what insane thing he did, she responded the wrong way.
TJ tugged the notepad from her fingers. “Eat, the day is wasting. That’s not the item on our agenda for today anyway.”
Pam blinked in surprise. “It’s not?”
“Nope.” He topped up her coffee and raised his mug in a toast. “To working our way through the mate list.”
Hide and go seek. She was playing hide and go seek in the Yukon bush with a werewolf. Pam tucked her legs a little closer to her body and made sure nothing was sticking out.
They’d spent the morning hiking to an abandoned miner’s cabin and poking around for artifacts. After lunch he’d casually proposed this game, and now she sat in the branches of a tree, her body pressed against the trunk. TJ walked straight toward her like she’d left a trail of breadcrumbs for him to follow. He grinned at her and held out a hand.
“You need to work harder at this or I’m going to think you’re not trying.”
“You’re cheating. You’ve got lupine senses, don’t you, even in your human form?” There had to be a reason he’d found her so quickly. The last five times she’d hidden.