Jarod nods slowly, a slightly stunned look on his face. There’s no need to ask if she’s sure. Aislinn knows he can scent her feelings and desire as clearly as she can his. He knows that she’s also keeping herself back from him, in this moment, with as much force as she can summon. Scared, yet not scared. And ready to make him her own.

“I can’t announce this to a group,” she tells him shakily and with real remorse, the emotional storm inside her kicking up. “I know it’s the Lupine way, but... I just can’t.”

They broached this a few nights ago, well past midnight as she lay awake, caught up in wanting him while being afraid of opening the door to the nightmare memories and dangerous vulnerability. Jarod roused alongside her, perhaps sensing her tossing emotions and seeming to read the war going on inside her. They talked through the night, and she finally told him, raging and storming as she sobbed into his hard shoulder, exactly what was done to her.

“That was violence,” Jarod said, holding her tight as rage on her behalf coursed through him. “That wasn’t mating.”

Aislinn’s thoughts sweep back from the memory to the present as tears glass her eyes and Jarod’s fingers gently touch her arm, light as gossamer, as if he knows how fragile this moment is. He coaxes her around to face him, then reaches up to caress the side of her face.

“There are no rules in this for us,” he says, voice low and unfailingly kind.

Grief kicks up in Aislinn. “But... I know it’s important for you. To...honor the Lupine ways.” Aislinn can’t say more. She can feel the flare of grief in him, as well. His people, dead. His parents, his younger sister, murdered. And, in light of all of his terrible trauma, it pains her to have to say no to this most basic of Lupine traditions—the announcement, to the entire pack, of a couple’s desire to take each other to mate.

Tears glisten in Aislinn’s eyes. He’s being so kind, but she’s asking too much of him. She’s always asking far too much of him.

Jarod embraces her loosely, his amber gaze on her searching as a tear slides down her cheek. “Aislinn,” he says, “sometimes tradition needs to yield to something greater.”

She manages a faltering smile. “Like true love?”

Jarod returns her smile. “Yes. Like love. It always needs to yield to love.”

And that’s when Aislinn begins to cry in earnest, her sense of safety enlarging.

“I love you,” she says, her heart opening wide even as fear tries to close it back up. His strong arms wrap around her and she can feel his smile against her hair, and then his kiss on it as she clings to him.

“I love you too,” he says, adamant.