I caught up to Jonah at lunchtime. He was surrounded by a handful of wolves who seemed to be utterly enamored with him. My stomach twisted, and I felt trepidatious in approaching him. He had promised to get to know me, but… I couldn’t help but look back on Noah’s broken promise to me and worry that it was a family trait.

Only one way to find out, I supposed.

I approached the group a bit cautiously as they loaded their plates with today’s lunch spread. It was a pasta bar, filled with spaghetti, fettuccini, and rigatoni, with a variety of sauces. I snuck in at the end of their group, listening to the conversation as I silently loaded my own plate, mixing both the red and white sauces together. The women, mostly in their forties and fifties, it seemed, but with a couple I recognized as being closer to my age, were asking so many questions that they overlapped.

“What made you decide to become a vet and learn all of this?”

“Won’t that make it hard for you to be alpha once your father steps down?”

“I still don’t think that I get how to properly do a butterfly bandage; do you think after lunch you could show me again?”

Jonah’s shoulders were stiff as he scooped a spoonful of diced chicken onto his pasta, and a polite smile was plastered to his face. I doubted the other women could tell that it was fake, but having had a few conversations with Jonah myself, could tell that he was severely uncomfortable. He clearly didn’t want the attention.

I chuckled to myself as I contemplated whether or not to let him keep sweating, or try to come to his rescue. I decided to throw him a bone, and see if he’d pick up on it.

“Jonah,” I called to him as I grabbed a bowl of salad. His eyes snapped to mine, and I thought I saw relief in them. “Seems like your session this morning went well.” I couldn’t help it; I had to tease him, just a little bit. His eyes narrowed at me, and I couldn’t help the grin that crept onto my face.

“It did. These ladies picked up things quite well,” he answered. The women around him tittered, clearly flattered by his praise. It was an effort not to roll my eyes. “Eat with me?”

I had to keep my amusement in check. No one would understand if I just burst into giggles. So I nodded and said, “That would be great. Want to go outside?”

Jonah let me lead the way once we had finished loading our plates. There were a few picnic tables in the inner courtyard, and I directed us towards one that had the least amount of debris on it. It was chilly, but the sun was shining overhead and no wind ever made its way down here. In a few minutes I’d start to warm back up.

“It seemed like you might need rescuing,” I noted as Jonah sat down across from me.

“Yes; thank you for that. Had I known that they’d follow me around like that, I never would have offered to teach them first aid.”

I laughed. “I’d think you’d be used to women fawning over you,” I admitted. “You can’t tell me that hasn’t happened before.”

Jonah shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Usually, my personality is enough to keep people away.”

“Ah, yes. Your defensive shield of asshole-ness.”

He gave me a condescending look. “Asshole-ness?”

I nodded, scooping up a forkful of pasta and shoving it in my mouth. Jonah stayed quiet as I finished my bite. “Yup. It was working on me up until yesterday when you showed that other side of you who’s actually a decent human being. And on that note, I wanted to thank you.”

“For being a decent human being?”

“No, for offering another option to the women.” I put my fork down and stared at my plate. “I know that you probably don’t care, but now there’s very little chance of anyone taking this out on me. Noah’s solution was…well, a bit extreme. ‘Fight or leave’ and all that.”

“You shouldn’t care what people think of you,” Jonah said softly.

I shrugged a shoulder. “I generally don’t, but…sometimes people start to take things out a person, and that’s what I’d rather avoid.”

“What do you mean?”

“Being ignored. Purposefully…not sabotaged, per se, but more like…making my life just that little bit more difficult.”

“This has happened to you before.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah,” was all I said. I started picking at my pasta, swirling the noodles around in the sauce. I didn’t need to share with him the fallout after I caught Adam cheating on me. For whatever reason, I was made out to be the villain, and for about a year the older female wolves would made snide comments, shut me out, and generally be bitches. It was never enough for me to really complain or have any evidence to bring up to my father.

Jonah caught on that I didn’t want to talk about it, and he dropped the topic.

“So,” I started after a few moments of awkward silence. “How’s your training actually going?”

“Well enough,” he said, taking a bite of his own food. “They pay attention and try, which is all I can ask for. And if it turns out that some aren’t cut out for it, they’ll still be useful fetching supplies or helping someone else. The time isn’t being wasted, which my father hates.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. He likes everything to be concise, which was a bit hard to convince him of last night, actually.”

“So why bother?”

“A few reasons. One, my brother was definitely wrong in his idea and didn’t want to admit it. So a part of me wanted to prove that his idea wasn’t the best solution.”

“But it wasn’t,” I argued.

“You and I know that. But it took my father a bit more convincing. And, having more than just myself as the medical staff in the event of a huge altercation is always a good thing. It means fewer wolves die or lose limbs.”

I shivered at the thought. No, being a part of that was not where I was meant to be.

“That bothers you,” Jonah pointed out.

“I can deal with bloodshed in the moment. But as soon as I think of someone sticking me, or anyone else, with a needle? Yuck.”

“You’d rather cause the wounds than heal them.”

“No, I’d rather do my part to help keep the wounds from happening in the first place,” I corrected, pointing at him with my fork. “Anyways, let’s change the subject, shall we?”

“What do you have in mind?”

I grinned. “What’s your favorite color?”

He gave me a withering look. “Surely there are better questions you can ask me.”

“Fine,” I sighed, wracking my brain for a good one. “Tell me about your worst breakup.”

Jonah immediately started coughing, and I worried for a moment that he was choking. He took a long drink of his water. I waited patiently for his answer.

“I’m not answering that.”

“Why not?” I considered the possibilities. A handful came to mind, so I started listing them off. “Have you never had a girlfriend before? Are you gay? Asexual? Or—”

“Stop, Eliza,” he demanded, interrupting me. I looked at him, at his slightly pink cheeks and his inability to meet my eyes. Something clicked in my brain. And while I wanted to ignore it, dismiss it as an impossibility, I couldn’t. I had to find out if my hunch was accurate.

“It’s because you’re still in love with her, aren’t you?” Jonah’s head snapped up to look at me, his dark eyes boring into mine, all the confirmation I needed. I nodded to myself, pursing my lips, and gathering my plate. Suddenly, my appetite was gone.

Jonah’s hand reached out and grabbed my wrist.

“Wait.” His voice was a bit hoarse. I put my plate down, willing to wait to hear his answer. He ran a distracted hand through his hair, making it stand up in all different directions. “She…”

It was clearly hard for him to get the words out. So I reached forward and grabbed his hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. “Hey,” I whispered. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“You should know this,” he responded, giving my hand a return squeeze. “She…she died.”

My heart skipped a beat. I wanted to say something, but knew that there was nothing that would ease the hurt he clearly still felt.

Jonah took a deep breath. Slowly, he started speaking. “We were teenagers. I had just turned eighteen, she was seventeen. We used to sneak out at night and run as wolves in the forest around where we lived. We’d done it a thousand times. But there had been an ice storm earlier in the day. We thought nothing of it. But as we were running, a tree branch broke. And it…”

I gave his hand a reassuring squeeze and told him, “You don’t have to tell me. I understand.”

He looked up at me then, his eyes looking like they were on the verge of tears. This was an old wound, yes, but one that still hurt.

“I couldn’t save her; I didn’t know what to do. The basics I’d been taught wouldn’t help her. So I…” He took another steadying breath and looked down as he said, “So I had to leave her there to get help. And by the time I got back with someone, it was too late. She couldn’t be saved.”

The guilt he carried was all but tangible. I stood up and walked around the table to sit to his left. I wasn’t sure how he’d want to be comforted, but damn it I was going to try anyways. I wrapped my right arm around his middle and squeezed, my left hand grabbing his arm.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I told him. It was unlikely he’d listen to me, but I said it anyways. “And I know it doesn’t always help to talk about it. But…I lost my mother when I was just a baby. So if you ever want to talk to someone, you can always talk to me. I know it’s not the same, but…” I shrugged my free shoulder.

Jonah turned his head and regarded me. “I appreciate that, Eliza. But it’s been a long time. Almost a decade.”

I nodded, removing my arm from around him and putting some distance between us. If he didn’t want to talk, I wasn’t going to push him. But I pulled my lunch to me from across the table and continued eating before it got any colder.

“Do you want to hear my answer to that question?” I offered.

“If you’d like to.”

“I think it’s only fair.” I took another bite of my pasta. Damn, this was good. “I dated Adam, Maddock’s younger son, back when we were seventeen and eighteen. What we had was good up until he decided to cheat on me.”

Jonah dropped his fork. It chatted against his plate.

“He cheated on you?”

His suprise was…surprising. “Yeah. That so hard to believe or something?”

“He’s an idiot,” Jonah stated, a bit angrily.

“Well, obviously.” I chuckled nervously. Why was Jonah upset about this?

“Just to be clear with you, as long as you and I are getting to know each other, I’m not talking to anyone else.”

“Oh.” I blinked up at him. “Um, that’s not necessary, Jonah.”

“But I’m taking this seriously, like I promised you. And to me, that means that I don’t talk to other girls.”

“Um, okay.” I paused for a second before hastily adding, “And I won’t be talking to anyone else, either. Not that there’s anyone here I’d want to talk to anyways.”

“What about my brother?”

I almost snorted, but managed to keep it an unflattering laugh instead. “No offense, but your brother can’t be bothered to keep his promises. So that’s a no.”

“I wouldn’t blame you, you know. Yeah, he can be a real dick, but he means well.”

“I’m sure there’s some truth to that, but my answer is still no.”

Jonah grinned at me then, and I felt my face heat. What was with him today? His reactions were so not what I was expecting, and it kept throwing me off.

We finished our lunches with a bit of small talk about the pack’s dynamics and how things generally worked. Jonah had a handful of questions that I answered to the best of my ability.

Walking back inside to the kitchen to deposit our empty plates, I got the stink eye from a few of the women who had been hounding Jonah when I had approached earlier. I glared right back at them. Jonah noticed.

He slipped an arm around my waist and pulled me close. It was oddly similar to how Noah pulled the same stunt with me yesterday in front of Adam. But Jonah made me feel protected, not uncomfortable.

The women averted their eyes, visibly deflating. Message received, it seemed.

Jonah leaned in to whisper in my ear, “I hope you don’t mind, but that will help keep their claws sheathed.”

“At least for a few hours,” I whispered back. He grinned down at me and gave my waist a squeeze. I had to look away as I blushed.

This could become dangerous territory if I wasn’t careful.