Page 6 of His Runaway Mate

“I’m sorry,” she smirks at me.

If I couldn’t smell the fear, I might believe her bravado.

“We’re not interested in doing a deal with you. You left this place abandoned, because the city is too big for you to handle on your own. We’re actually doing you a favor.”

I smile at her with the indulgence a powerful predator shows a yapping pup.

“Is that right? Because from my perspective, you’re squatting.”

“Squatters have rights,” she says. “I think, if you call one of your fancy lawyers, you’ll soon discover that you don’t own this building as much as you think you do. Now. Get the hell out of my office.”

* * *

Nicky

Get the hell out of my office.

Those words hang in the air between us. That was a big swing, and it might turn out to be an even bigger miss. He could rip me apart if he wanted to, and we both know nobody would do anything about it.

I didn’t plan on meeting Rex Regent today. If I’d known, I would have worn something prettier, or scarier. My t-shirt has curses on it, but it’s a t-shirt and there is only so much aura you can have wearing a shirt and jeans. I can feel a whine inside me as the animal I try not to be responds to him.

This man is, well, he’s not a fucking man. He’s a fucking beast. I’ve never encountered anybody with such intense and pure alpha energy. He looks at me, and his blue eyes glint with a fierceness that makes my inner animal rouse in response.

He’s six feet five. They don’t explain to you how tall that is outside a basketball court. It’s basically like having a living giant stroll into your office. Some of the guys in my pack are large as well. Some of them might even be almost as tall as him. But none of them make me feel this way.

I keep my distance for a lot of reasons, one of them being I don’t want to have to look up at him too much.

I feel lightheaded and slightly high in general, like I just took a hit of something illegal.

I guess I knew this moment would come. When we turned down the acquisition, the lawyers politely threatened us that Rex Regent would make an appearance himself.

I told them that the stupid man with his even stupider name was welcome to try to change our minds. We have the law on our side. Human law. The kind of law that holds the world together. He knows it too. That’s why he’s here. If it wasn’t on our side, he would have put his weight against it and he would have let it crush us for him.

That’s what Regent does. It’s a company too powerful to notice what it is fucking up. But every princess has her pea, as my mom used to say, and I know that being small can also mean being mighty as long as you use your little leverage in the right ways.

He’s smoldering at me now. He could glower if he wanted, but he’s saving the intimidating alpha energy for another time. I saw what his brows did when he first laid eyes on me. He’d assumed I was a man. Men do that.

And now I feel a different energy from him. Something deeper, darker, something that makes me try to pretend it’s not there even while the core of me starts to melt for him.

I’m still not backing down. We’ve worked really hard on this building, and when we got here, it had obviously not been touched in years. We spent months and months renovating it ourselves using tutorials from the internet. Some of us even learned how to weld, for gods’ sakes. And now this rich fucking older man walks in and tells me the place belongs to him? Not going to happen. Not ever.

He looks at me with that stoic expression that I find unreadable.

“No,” he says. “You know what you need, little whelp? You need to be spanked. Long. And hard. You need to be taught how to behave…”

“You lay a finger on me, and you’ll lose a part of your anatomy you’re attached to,” I tell him. “You think you’re the first big guy I’ve dropped? You’re not.”

He takes several swift steps toward me, but before he can grab me, I pull the flick knife out of my pocket and press the tip of the blade low on his stomach, right above an appendage I know he likes. I press it forward hard enough to make a cut in the waistcoat. The blade is sharp enough to eviscerate him. I want him to know that.

“You just keep making this worse for yourself,” he chuckles darkly.

“Funny. I was going to say the same thing about you.”

He smiles down at me, and now I am so close that I don’t have any choice but to look up at him. His dark hair falls forward around his face, framing his eyes. I am absolutely transfixed by him.

But he’s an asshole. He’s everything I’m trying to fight against. And he’s not doing himself any favors by walking in here like he owns the place—well, I guess he does own the place, but that’s not the point.

He reaches out and cups my chin, resting the pad of his thumb on my lower lip in a gesture that feels more intimate than if he’d outright kissed me.