Page 6

Roan

“Does this look right to you two?” I asked, standing back, almost running straight into a family in the process.

Sometimes good things weren’t pretty.

“We need a sign. Everyone has a sign.” Benji looked around with his hands on his hips.

“That’s it. We didn’t order a sign.”

All three of us threw our hands up. A sign.

Harlan marched to one of the crates. “Okay, but we have business cards and info cards. At least we have those.”

“At least there’s that.”

All morning, my wolf had been restless. I’d run him until almost midnight the night before after lying there in my bed, not able to sleep. He was pushing all kinds of emotions at me. Excitement. Nerves. Happiness.

It could be the farmer’s market? Maybe he was excited to get out of the house but the emotions were so erratic, that it was hard to pinpoint the reason.

No matter the reason, he needed to calm the fuck down.

“What else can we help with?” I asked. Harlan had everything arranged, and already someone was at the table perusing his display.

“I’m good if you two want to roam around.”

“Come on,” Benji said, clapping my shoulder. “There are corn dogs. I fucking love corn dogs.”

We made our way to the area where all the local food trucks had made a semicircle.

All of them had delicious-sounding food, but Benji got us a corn dog each as an appetizer.

It cracked me up. Benji was the son and heir, if he were legitimate, of one of the most powerful alphas in the shifter world.

Some would consider his father royalty. And here he was, fawning over a deep-fried hot dog.

According to other shifters, our pack and our existence couldn’t be more shameful, so why not?

Eventually, we settled on cheese-steak sandwiches and sat at a picnic table to enjoy them. I thought feeding my wolf and walking around would give him some relief from his antsy disposition, but it only furthered his unease.

Something was going on with him. I knew it had been a while since I let him run freely, but I’d gone months in the past and he was fine.

“Maybe it’s all the people,” Benji said. His eyes widened. How did he know what I was thinking?

“What?” I asked. “Maybe what’s all the people?”

“I don’t know.” He rubbed a circle with his fist in the middle of his chest. “My wolf has been weird the last few days. Mostly yesterday and now today. Maybe he doesn’t like being around all these people.”

“Did he act this way the last time we came to the market?” I purposefully left out the part where my wolf was right in the same place as his wolf. We were a pack, but there was a marked difference between me and other wolves.

My wolf could be a bit…brooding.

Rightfully so. By his calculations, we should be not only mated to our omega by now but have cubs running around every corner of our home.

To him, we were running behind, and he gave me shit for that fact every chance he got.

“No. Huh.”

Funny. I had no answers for how my beast was acting either.

“Let’s go walk around some more.”

We picked up a few things while perusing the booths.

I bought some heirloom fall seeds in hopes that my fall garden would fare better than the summer one.

I tried. I did. Lately, I read more articles and watched more videos about gardening and farming than anything else, but the harder I tried, the less my plants produced.

We saw a booth selling chicks. Maybe chickens would be more my thing, but there were endless booths selling chicken eggs here. I needed something no one else sold.

I chuckled to myself. And something I was actually good at.

Sure, I contributed to the pack with my day job, but working at a desk sucked the soul right out of my wolf. It may have been silly of me to think, but there had to be more for us. A way for my animal and I to be happy.

“Roan.” Benji hit me in the abs.

“What?” I asked, smacking him back.

I looked at my packmate and was surprised to see him pale. The back of his neck had turned red. His breaths were shallow. “It’s her.”

“Who?”

I followed his line of sight to a booth a few down from the one we were at. A female stood there.

Not just any female.

A breathtaking, heart-stopping omega.

Auburn hair. A smile that could light up the whole world.

“You know her?” I choked out. My throat had gone dry.

“I want to.”

I wanted to as well. My wolf roared inside me so loudly that I almost clapped my palms over my ears to drown it out.

“Let’s go over there,” Benji said. “What if she’s…”

“Okay.”

Sure, we could be attracted to a female. There were loads of beautiful females, but a pack knew their omega by scent. Her scent would tame the most feral of beasts. Make a rogue feel like he’d found home.

I’d never really felt at home. Not with my mother. Not as a child. Even now, we had a home, but there was something missing.