Perhaps it was because of his preoccupation with the pups at his feet that he didn’t sense her; she knew he had cut off the connection between them, even though she had felt the lingering touch of it in the long three months they had been apart. Or perhaps it was simply that she had learned, like a creature of the wilderness, how not to be seen or heard.
She watched in silence as he crouched among the pups who plunged at him with youthful, oblivious abandon. They were still small and clumsy, new to their world, blunt muzzles, round heads, and tiny flap ears bobbed and flashed at Luke’s feet. He let them chew on his fingers and attack his knees, lost in a place where things were simple.
It was one of the wolves who sensed her first. The great head of the she-wolf lifted, she growled softly in warning.
Drowning in pups, he looked up. Joey saw him stiffen, then raise his head as if to scent the soft spring breeze. And then he turned his head, slowly, so slowly, as if he were afraid of what he would see.
“Luke,” she whispered.
For an instant they were utterly still. The bond sputtered like a candle, flared and dimmed. Joey coaxed it to brighter flame, knowing it was Luke who feared to let it wake.
His eyes were fixed on hers, brilliant and unreadable. Joey drank in the sight of him, though she had never forgotten for an instant, she felt her heart begin to pound and watched the hard, closed planes of his face slowly alter.
“Joey.”
Only one word, yet it held all the things she saw at last in his eyes fear, yearning, need. Hope. And something else she didn’t dare say, even to herself.
But he waited, waited while the wolves watched her like a jury prepared to pronounce their verdict. Twelve sets of eyes judged her solemnly. And she was the one to break the tableau, starting into the clearing on unsteady feet. The bond flickered hesitantly.
Luke rose to meet her, sloughing puppies with gentle hands. He took a step forward, and all at once the she-wolf surged to her feet and stood before him, stiff-legged, tail high. A low growl of warning vibrated in her throat.
It was enough to stop Joey halfway across the clearing, halfway to Luke, though her gaze never left his. The she-wolf growled again, more ominously, a slow, unexpected anger, anger that was almost pride, urged Joey to take another step.
“Look into her eyes,” Luke said softly. “She knows you. Don’t let her dominate you.”
Joey forced herself to look away from his eyes to meet the she-wolf’s lambent stare. Inexplicable feelings lose in Joey, instincts that made her bristle and brought an answering growl to the back of her throat. She let the instincts take over. She spoke to the wolf deep in her mind, without words.
Yellow eyes blinked, assessed, and, after an interminable moment, looked away. The she-wolf lowered her ears, turned her back, and drifted away to the far side of the clearing.
And then there was nothing between her and Luke, nothing at all.
She moved forward, one step and then another, until she was picking her way among round little bodies and felt the warmth of fur brushing against her legs. Her eyes flooded with inexplicable happiness as the pups growled ferociously and tumbled about her feet. They were warm and soft, dark fur like down, all savage innocence, they accepted her wholly.
“They’re beautiful,” Joey whispered.
“Yes,” Luke agreed, though his eyes were only for her. “Yes.”
A thousand emotions trembled between them, filling Joey’s senses to overflowing. Words came from somewhere, from some other Joey who had the ability to speak.
“I’ve come back, Luke,” she said. “I’ve come back to where I belong.”
For an eternity he said nothing, only gazed at her with his heart in his eyes. “Joey,” he said at last, as if he, too, had forgotten the use of human language.
She attempted to say what he could not. “I tried to stay away,” she murmured. “Tried to convince myself that everything that happened here…” She shook her head “It wasn’t any good. I belong here. To this world.”