Page 10 of His Runaway Mate

He smiles at me. The expression in his eyes is hard for me to discern. He is angry, of course he is. But he seems to be enjoying himself too. I can feel his energy flowing around me. He has so much of it. It is elevated and it is dominant, and I think there is some world in which he shifts right now and we’re all fucked. But he doesn’t do that.

“I just had this suit tailored,” he says. “And Fescue would be furious if I ripped it any further. In fact, the damage from that knife is going to annoy him.”

“I don’t care what a man with an herb’s name thinks about what I do,” I say.

“It’s actually a grass,” he replies calmly, as if we’re here discussing planting a fucking lawn.

The politeness is covering so much havoc. Every second he stays in the room with me is one I am even closer to completely losing control.

My heart is hammering in my chest. My body is going fucking wild with responses I cannot afford to let it have. This man is dangerous. Every inch of him. No. That’s too big a division of measurement. Every millimeter of him has something that could fucking ruin me in it. I can sense it.

He reaches out, grips me by the back of the neck and pulls me back toward him with a casually powerful gesture that makes me feel instantly possessed. Some part of me already belongs to him.

Fuck. No. This cannot go this way. My knees are going to buckle. I have to fight my body hard to keep standing up.

He draws me in toward him and I feel him lower his head. He drops a chaste kiss on my cheek that nonetheless makes me feel dizzy with need.

“You’ve only made this harder on yourself,” he murmurs in my ear. “I will see you later, mate.”

He releases me and shrugs his jacket on in one powerful motion before buttoning it in a deliberately unhurried way. Then he leaves, walking past my gun-wielding guards as if they are little more than kids with water pistols.

I am left with so much erotic energy charged inside me I feel as though I am about to go full fucking crazy. He just called me his mate. We’ve barely spoken. I thought I was being presumptuous about wanting to fuck him. I never imagined he’d acknowledge it so soon, or so casually, like it’s not a huge fucking deal, like both our lives didn’t just change forever.

CHAPTER 2

Rex

I walk through the transformed warehouse doing my best not to smile. I can hear the various shuffles and whispers of a pack of young wolves who should know better than to be doing any of this. The commotion upstairs has already rippled through them. Unspoken communication is a phenomenon in wolf packs. They won’t know the details of what occurred, but they can certainly already feel the general outline.

All eyes are on me as I leave. The same creatures who barely roused when I walked in are on high alert as I leave. The gossip mill is winding up.

They’ll say that I was thrown out, and perhaps I should feel diminished by the interaction, but I saw the shakes at the end of those guns, and I saw the caliber of the boys holding them. I could have quite easily dominated every single soul in that room in my wolf form. I chose not to, because I did not meet my mate to immediately lose her to a shootout.

She is not going anywhere.

As I step out the front door, I see the gleam of a barrel on the building diagonal. I came here alone, but apparently the pack did not allow that. Fescue, in particular, did not allow that. I imagine he sent them after me within a minute of my leaving.

I smile to myself. Sometimes I give myself the illusion of being an independent man, but the truth is, I am as bound to this pack as I am to air. Nothing I do happens independently of them.

An alpha is never truly alone.

I’d bet they converged on the location just as I did, coming from myriad places to make it seem more natural for anyone keeping lookout. I don’t think the Runaway place has lookouts. I think this place has digital surveillance, and a few boys more interested in playing video games.

It does make the fact that I was just held up at gunpoint a little more spicy. Suffice to say, if even one of those boys had fired their guns, all of them would have been dropped immediately.

My men showed great restraint, probably because they’d just gotten done watching me bare Nicky’s ass and whip it with my belt. Those little fuckers have no idea how collectively lucky they got today. They were much more convincing when they were numbers on a spreadsheet and emails in an inbox. There was an air of respectability to them. Runaway packs form from time to time. They usually turn feral and have to be dealt with, but this lot are going to be handled differently.

I hold my chuckle until I get into my car, where the tinted windows hide my amusement from the world. There my smile broadens.

I know one thing for sure as I drive away from the warehouse. I am going to have that girl beneath me, impaled on my cock, writhing and begging and screaming my name before the next full moon.

* * *

“You’re smiling,” Fescue says when he greets me at the door. “I take it you’ve dealt with the matter and will be returning to the reserve?”

“No,” I say, letting him take my coat. “I’m going to be in the city for a while, I think.”

“Oh?”