He met my gaze and his lips twitched. “From that look on your face, you know what I was about to say. Let me remind you, emphatically, that it’s a dream. When I wake, I’m as horrified as you.”

“Thank God.”

He arched a brow. “Can you honestly see me living in a cabin? It’s a symbol, obviously. An impulse. Not to carry you off into the woods and raise a pack of squalling brats. Just to…be with you.”

“The instinct to mate.”

He gave a low growl, and I braced for an argument, but he only turned his gaze toward the window, as if he’d already figured out what the impulse was, and just hated hearing it put into words.

“It’s understandable, isn’t it?” I said. “You’re fifty years old with no children. The animal instinct to reproduce is sure to kick in—”

“So I start having caveman fantasies about the first woman in prime childbearing years to cross my path? In some ways, I wish to hell that’s all it was. A biological imperative that randomly fixed on an appropriate target.”

He stood and walked to the window, his back to me.

“I used to hear other werewolves talk about it,” he said. “The problems of living solitary lives. Fighting the urge to find a mate and settle. I’d commiserate, if it was to my advantage, but even as I was listening I was calling them fools. Weak. Convincing themselves it was an instinct because they didn’t have the balls to admit the truth—that they wanted a wife and kids and a picket-fence life. I’d never felt the urge to stay with a woman until morning, let alone for life, so I was living proof there was no mating instinct. The truth was, it seems, that I just hadn’t met…”

He let the sentence fade, and stared out into the night. The silence dragged out past seconds into minutes.

“Damned inconvenient, isn’t it?” I said finally. “That’s the problem.”

He glanced my way. I got up and perched on the edge of the coffee table.

“You’ve been on your own since you were sixteen,” I said. “Since your father died. There hasn’t been anyone. No lovers. No friends. No one you couldn’t cut ties with in a heartbeat…and wouldn’t kill if they got in your way. Then you joined the Pack, but you’re still ambivalent about that and tell yourself it’s a business arrangement and keep social contact to a minimum. Now you have me. Someone who might expect some kind of commitment from you in return, a commitment you might—horrors—want to give. Damnably inconvenient.”

He gave a hoarse laugh. “You can’t resist, can you? Even this you can turn into ‘Karl thinking about himself again.’”

“Am I wrong?”

He met my gaze, then turned back to the window. “Damn you.”