Page 18 of Mane Attraction
But as his scent enveloped her and the steady rhythm of his breathing lulled her into a state of dangerous contentment, Xelene couldn’t shake the feeling that their charade was going to blow up spectacularly in her face.
What am I doing?she thought drowsily, but with the wine warming her blood and Lev’s strong arm around her, she found she didn’t particularly care about the answer at that moment.
ELEVEN
LEV
Lev closed the door to Xelene’s guest suite with infinite care, his hand lingering on the ornate handle as he fought every instinct screaming at him to go back inside. The memory of her wine-flushed face against his shoulder during the ride home, and the way she’d melted into his embrace without her usual armor of control—it had taken every ounce of his self-discipline not to carry her to that bed and hold her through the night.
She’s my fated mate.She belongs in my arms.
But even intoxicated, Xelene would never have allowed such intimacy. The irony was almost unbearable—her brilliant strategy to clean up his reputation by pretending to be his girlfriend had played directly into the mate bond she didn’t even know existed. Destiny seemed to be aligning too perfectly, each piece falling into place with an ease that should have been suspicious.
As he walked the familiar corridors toward his private chambers, Lev couldn’t deny the truth clawing at his chest. Xelene was everything he’d never known he craved—brilliant, challenging, beautiful in ways that went far beyond the physical. Each moment in her presence revealed another facet thatcaptivated him, and another reason his lion settled with bone-deep satisfaction.
Gerri’s words from earlier echoed in his mind:I’ve seen shifters figure it out in less time than six days.Now he understood exactly what the cunning matchmaker had meant. The mate bond didn’t follow human timelines or logical progression—it simply was, instant and undeniable.
Damn that brilliant woman.
Lev had just entered his private chambers when urgent footsteps thundered down the corridor. He turned to find Benjamin rushing toward him, Janice close behind, both their faces etched with a gravity that sent ice through his veins.
“Lev.” Benjamin’s voice cracked slightly, his usual composure shattered. “I got called back to the castle. One of the servants found your father—” He swallowed hard, struggling with the words. “King Rorick is dead.”
The words hit Lev like a punch to his sternum, driving the air from his lungs. “What? Dead? That can’t be right.”
“Massive heart attack,” Benjamin continued, his green eyes bright with unshed tears. “His heart condition—the stress?—”
Lev’s world tilted violently. He lunged toward the corridor, desperate to reach his father’s chambers, but Benjamin caught his arm with surprising strength.
“He’s not in his room anymore,” Benjamin said gently. “The pride elders came and took him for the viewing preparations.”
“What?” Lev’s voice rose to a near-roar that echoed off the stone walls. “Why didn’t anyone call me?”
His gaze fell on his nightstand, where his communicator lay silent and forgotten. The device he’d clearly left behind during his haste for dinner, too caught up in thoughts of Xelene and making their evening perfect to remember something as basic as staying reachable.
I was at dinner while my father died alone.
The guilt hit him like a crushing weight, followed immediately by a rage so pure it made his vision blur red around the edges. His last conversation with his father had been tense and disappointing—another in a long line of Lev’s failures to meet expectations.
“I should have been here,” he whispered, then louder, his voice breaking. “I should have been with him, not with my mate at dinner while he?—”
The emotions crashed over him in waves—grief, rage, guilt, and a helplessness that made his lion pace frantically beneath his skin. Everything was falling apart. The pride would be looking to him now, expecting leadership from a man whose reputation was still in shambles, whose preparation for the throne remained woefully incomplete.
“You should get some rest,” Benjamin said quietly, though his own composure seemed fragile. “It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.”
Lev nodded mechanically, but as Benjamin and Janice retreated down the corridor, their whispered conversation fading, he stood frozen in his doorway. Rest? How could he possibly rest when his father was dead and their final interaction had been Lev missing yet another crucial meeting?
The stress I caused him,Lev thought, the guilt gnawing at his chest like a living thing.Missing that meeting with the elders this morning. He looked so frail today, and I was too selfish to see it.
The weight of responsibility that had always terrified him now crashed down with the force of an avalanche. The pride needed him. The Trial of the Sun loomed in just days. And he was still the same reckless fool who couldn’t even remember to carry his communicator.
With a roar of pure anguish, Lev grabbed the crystal vase from his nightstand and hurled it against the far wall. Itexploded in a shower of glittering fragments that caught the moonlight streaming through his windows.
“I’m sorry, Father,” he choked out, his voice raw. “I should have been better.”
The silence that followed felt suffocating. Lev wanted desperately to go to Xelene, to lose himself in her steady presence and find some anchor in the storm of his grief. But she was drunk and asleep, and he was too shattered to be anything but destructive.
So Lev did what he’d always done when emotions threatened to overwhelm him—he turned to the one escape that never failed him. His private bar beckoned from the corner of his chambers, bottles of expensive liquor gleaming like liquid amber in the dim light.
