Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 161

Chapter 161

Jaxon

The reception is small. Family, close allies, pack members who belong in this room. Benji is moving through the guests in the arms of various people who clearly find him more compelling than the occasion, which he accepts as his due.

When he sees me across the garden he does the thing he does-the full-body lean toward someone he wants, the very clear communication of a five-month-old who has opinions about where he’d like to be.

I take him and he settles against my chest with the ease of someone who has established this as a recognized home base. Grabs my collar. Investigates. I breathe him in, letting the smell of his baby shampoo and lavender scented lotion and something unique that’s all Benji, calm me in a way nothing else can.

“I know,” I tell him quietly. “Long day.” He doesn’t disagree.

I just stand in the garden of Nicolai Woolf’s estate with my son in my arms and watch Skye and Nicolai move through their guests. He keeps his hand at her back. She speaks to people with the ease of someone who has learned how to belong in a room like this. She’s become someone who fits here.

She was always capable of it. She just needed to be in a room where someone wanted her to. I never made her feel wanted in any room.

My eyes follow her movements without permission. Then she looks over. Our eyes meet across the garden and she starts toward me.

She’s crossing the garden, smiling-the particular expression she has for Benji when she’s coming to collect him, warm and slightly tired and genuine. And my entire body freezes. Because I’m going to have to face her, and I have no fucking idea what to say.

I’m still lost in my head, frantically scrambling for words, and suddenly she’s close. Close enough that I can feel her presence, the way I’ve always been able to feel it-wolf-sense, something more than just ordinary perception.

And that’s when it happens.

I don’t understand it immediately. My wolf goes absolutely still-not the practiced stillness of self-control I managed during the ceremony, not the alert stillness of a threat assessment. The other kind. The deep, fundamental stillness of recognizing something but you can’t quite put your finger on it.

Then my wolf surges forward before I can rein him in. Not with possession. Not with the desperate pull of the old bond. With the specific, overwhelming certainty of something true snapping into place.

A bond.

Brand new. Different from the old one-nothing like the hum I spent three years running from. This is warmer. More peaceful than the desperate need I remember from last time, though that is there too. This is something every fiber of my being wants to run to.

My wolf knows what it is before I do, my human brain still wondering what the fuck is happening and how it can be happening at all.

I look at Skye. Her eyes have gone wide. And she’s stopped moving. Her breath has caught in her chest. I can tell by the way it isn’t moving at all.

She feels it too.

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We stand in the garden, three feet apart, just staring at each other. Benji is between us, completely unaware, of Course. Neither of us says anything. I don’t know for how long.

Then Skye says, very quietly: “Nicolai-”

But she’s not talking to me. She’s reaching for him. Her safe place.

She steps back. Looks at me with an expression I can’t fully read-shock and beneath it something else, something I’m not going to examine or name in this garden on this day.

“We need to-” she starts.

“Later,” I agree with a nod though letting her walk away is the last thing I want to do. “You should go back to him.

I mean it. Even though I hate it, I mean it.

That’s the part that surprises me-that I say it and mean it entirely. Not as strategy or performance. Because it’s true. Because whatever just happened-whatever this is-today is not the day to deal with it. Today is her mating ceremony. Today Nicolai Woolf made a commitment in front of everyone who matters to their world.

Today is not mine.

Skye holds my gaze. Something moves through her face that I don’t have words for. Then she nods, turns and walks back across the garden.

I watch her reach Nicolai. Watch him turn toward her like a sunflower turning its face to the sun, his hand finding hers automatically.

I watch as he looks down at her face. And then-slowly, with the careful attention of a man who notices everything and interprets nothing incorrectly-he looks across the garden. Directly at me.

He doesn’t look away. I don’t look away. We just stare at it for a moment.

He’s not looking at me with the rage I expect. Not with the territorial challenge I might have deserved. He’s looking at me with a question. A question nobody in this garden has the answer to yet.

Benji grabs my collar harder, making his thoughts on being ignored clear. “I know,” I tell him, not looking away from Nicolai.

Nicolai finally turns back to Skye. I finally look down at my son. And I stand in the garden with the new bond warm and undeniable in my chest and Benji’s grip on my collar and the full, impossible weight of what just happened, and I think:

What do we do now?

It’s a rhetorical question. Not one I actually expect an answer to. Because there only is one answer, really…

Who the fuck knows?.

Cara Anderson Author

Thank you for reading!

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