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wouldn’t tell us anything for weeks.  Then Tristan finally told one of the pride males what the deal was and he told us.”
    “We were scared for you,” Tristan said.  “We didn’t want to just come to town without knowing where you were, but aside from telling us about your father’s plans for your future, we had no clue how to find you.”
    “How did you find me?”
    “The mate of two of our pride members saw your address when she was helping Melody with her thank you cards.  If she hadn’t been nice enough to save your address, we’d still be sitting around with our thumbs up our asses wondering what was going on with you.”  Ray’s voice got tight as he spoke and Scarlett stiffened.
    Wes cupped her chin and tilted her face toward him.  “Don’t be upset.  We’re not mad at you.  We were just so freaking worried.”
    She blinked tear-filled eyes at him.  “I missed you so much.  I’m sorry.”
    “Don’t cry,” Wes whispered, but she did just that, turning in to him completely and burying her face in his neck.  He hated the sound of the sobs that made her whole body shake, and wished like hell that he and Ray had kept their mouths shut and just been thankful she was with them.
    Ray glanced at him with a frown, but said nothing.  Wes held Scarlett while she cried.  His cat paced in worry and he wished they were anywhere but in the truck at the beginning of an eleven-hour drive to King.
    Wes stroked his hand through her hair and gripped it lightly, pulling her head away from his shoulder to stare into her eyes.  “Baby, we’re here now.  We can put the past behind us and move forward from today.  You’re ours, right?”
    “Yes,” she whispered thickly.
    “We’re yours.  No one is forcing you to do anything you don’t want to do.  You’re not going to wake up tomorrow morning and go through a mating ceremony with a stranger.”
    “I’m still scared,” she confessed.
    “No one knows we’re going to King except our dad and our uncle, who are putting us up.  We’ll figure things out as we go, but the most important thing is that you’ll be safe and free to make your own choices,” Ray said.
    “I wanted to choose you before,” she said.  “I don’t want you to ever doubt that I cared about you.”
    Wes glanced at Ray and then kissed her forehead.  “We know you walked out because you cared.  It sucks because we missed you, but we know why you did it.  I love that you tried to protect us, but that’s our job now.”
    “You’re sure we’ll be safe?”
    “We wouldn’t take you to King if we didn’t believe it was the best place for you,” Ray answered.
    She leaned back against the seat and took both of their hands.  “Okay.  I don’t want to talk about wolves or my family for a while.  Tell me about your family.”
    Wes loosened his seatbelt and turned a little more to face her and kissed the top of her hand.  “What do you know about mountain lions?”
    “Not much except what Melody has shared.  I know that mountain lion females are bitches and that’s why her dad left King with her when she was a baby.”
    Ray exhaled.  “Mountain lion females aren’t just bitches, sweetheart, they’re cursed.”
    As Ray explained the goddess’s curse on the mountain lions from eons ago that compelled the females to use the poison in their claws to infect young females, slowly poisoning them and dampening their emotions until they became cold and cruel adults, Wes thought back to their own mom.  They’d only met her once, when they were eight, and their dad had taken them to see her.  It seemed to be a rite of passage for young males.  Their dads would take them to their birth mothers and then, when the mothers turned them away, they would know that there was no hope of ever connecting emotionally with the females.
    “Oh, that’s so sad,” Scarlett said, squeezing Wes’s hand.  “Your mom just ignored you when you were so young?”
    Wes felt a familiar