Page 37 of His Runaway Mate

“Stay.”

He delivers the order firmly and warmly. There’s no escaping this inspection and there are a thousand filthy painful things I’d rather him to do me in this moment.

“Please,” I whine.

“Please what?” He smiles the question at me. The bastard knows exactly what he is doing.

“Let me go.”

“Oh, sweetheart, I will never let you go.”

Something in my stomach flips. He says it with such casual intensity. When I think about it, it makes total sense. I am his mate. Fate has bound us together. He has claimed me.

I don’t know why I thought he would let me go. Maybe because he let me run the first time we were together. Now I think he has been toying with me this entire time. Seeing what I will do with the limited choices he allows me to make before drawing me back in for this internal inspection.

Then I remember I am not helpless.

He has his weaknesses too. He has a desire for me that drives him inexorably. He might be pretending to be intellectually drawn to me, to want to plumb my emotional depths, but I know, deep down, it is his cock he wants to sink inside me.

I lunge forward and snap my teeth at his neck. I catch flesh, bite it hard.

He lets out a surprisingly high-pitched yelp, caught by surprise. He did not expect aggression from me. He thought I’d kneel in place and let him take me apart.

But I have a piece of him now in my mouth.

“Gods, mate,” he snarls. I feel him bristle and harden. I feel his hand at the back of my neck, gripping hard enough to pull me free.

“You are a savage little thing,” he says, inspecting me.

He has no idea what is inside me. He has no idea that I just revealed the very thing he’s trying to discover. There is blood where I bit.

“No biting,” he says. “Not like that, not the kind that draws blood.”

“Sorry,” I demur as he gets up.

“Stay on your knees,” he directs me, while calling for the doctor. He’ll need an antibiotic. Humans have filthy mouths. And even worse minds.

I stay on my knees, and I wait for the doctor to come up to the room.

There’s conversation outside the door, then they both come in. I start to get up, but Rex hits me with a curt:

“Stay.”

I feel two sets of male disapproval directed at me from behind as the doctor, with his black bag, begins his examination of Rex.

“She bit you rather harshly, sir,” the doctor says. “Might be worth giving you a prophylactic antibiotic shot to avoid it getting infected.”

* * *

Rex

There was fury in that bite. There was even a hint of frenzy. She pulled back at the last moment, but I felt the energy. That was more shocking than the bite. She really wanted me to stop holding her in place. She wanted to hide what lay inside her. In trying to force me away, she laid it all bare.

There’s something different with my mate. Something wrong, maybe. Copper and iron again. It keeps circling my senses where she is concerned.

The doctor does his thing, gives me a shot, puts some antibiotic cream on the wound, and dresses it. While this is happening, Nicky tries to look around.

“Face the chair,” I tell her. “Do not turn around. There is nothing for you to see here.”