“Absolutely not,” she said, almost vehemently. “And no, it was fantastic. Beautiful.” Hell, her clit still tingled. “I just…” God, how did she explain without giving herself away? She never in her life imagined having to do this. She’d always thought her mate would know everything. Be like her.
“I understand.” He caressed her hip, comforting her.
“You do?”
“Yes.” He kissed her again, soft this time. “We will do this again, Paige.” His arms wrapped around her and hugged her tight.
She giggled despite it all. “Is that a threat or a promise?”
“It’s both, baby. No way have I even come close to having enough of you. I want to know everything there is to know.”
Paige closed her eyes. But what will you do when you have that knowledge?
Chapter Two
The one he’d chosen wasn’t near as beautiful. Not as…perfect. But then, she wasn’t her. Some would say she’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She hadn’t been, really. Luck had sort of handed her to him on a silver platter. He’d known what he had to do the second he’d seen her. Hadn’t helped the woman any that she bore some resemblance to her. He’d taken distinct advantage of what had been offered to him.
She’d let another man touch her. Fuck her. Mark her with his seed. He wasn’t stupid. He’d followed her, waited down the street while she fucked, and watched her leave his house. He really shouldn’t blame the man, who’d only taken what had been so easily offered.
He’d have to punish her for that. Remind her to whom she belonged.
He glanced at the barely moving woman at his feet. Too bad she hadn’t satisfied his lust for her. His cock still stood at half-mast, hungry for more. Based on the two full condoms currently finding peace at the bottom of the fishing pond, he should be sated.
Instead, he needed to come again. She’d fought and kicked at him, raked at his shoulders with her plastic nails. Made him work for what he wanted. What, by rights, was his.
No, not his. His eyes focused on the whore. She wasn’t his. The other one was. The one who’d been denied him three years ago. His lips curved into a grin. He’d taken care of one problem.
This woman was a cheap thrill, a substitute for the real thing. He’d known he would find her here tonight. Such a habitual creature. A shame.
She’d shown up as expected, jogging along the path well after dark, alone. He’d thought perhaps the blonde hair and the blue eyes might assuage his need. But she hadn’t been the right height or weight. Too short. Too fat. Fuck. Now that he thought about it, she wasn’t much like her at all.
The woman moaned. A trickle of blood seeped from one swollen eye. Another dripped from the corner of her lip to land on the dried bed of leaves he’d deposited her on. The moonlight lit up the pale skin of her ass, demarcating the clear outline of his hand where he’d slapped her one last time. He hadn’t torn her running shorts off completely. They were still twisted around her left ankle.
He’d hurt her. Badly. She might not live. Probably wouldn’t, in fact. Just as well. She hadn’t served her purpose. Hadn’t been enough like her to keep him satisfied.
He hadn’t wanted to kill her, but she shouldn’t have fought him.
Bitch.
Just like her. She constantly fought him too. Played hard to get, coy. Always sneered at him with her contemptuous, high and mighty…
He sucked in a deep breath. Best to remember what had happened those years ago hadn’t been her fault.
Besides, soon she wouldn’t treat him with anything but respect. Soon she’d be on her knees with her sweet lips wrapped around his dick, thanking him profusely for making her his. Thanking him for removing the obstacles in the way of their being together. She’d see the way of things quick enough.
The back of his neck started to burn. The skin along his arms and legs itched as if something were crawling beneath it. Time to go. The hallucinogen would wear off the woman shortly. It would be totally gone before anyone found her. He tucked his softening prick back into his pants and zipped.
He glanced again at the woman on the ground and kicked at her heel, effectively closing her legs. The stench of her sweat and blood mingled in the air. Her breathing was becoming shallower. More seconds were starting to stack up between each one.
He fisted his hand around the charm he’d ripped off her neck before slipping it over his head. A pretty little silver heart. It would come in handy at some point.
Paige’s heart still thumped in a wild rhythm after her run. Why in the name of sweet baby Jesus had she ever left her mate lying naked and hot from their lovemaking in his bed? So hot her womb still clenched in anticipation of the next time they’d be together.
Because you’re a pansy-assed, lily-livered idiot, that’s why.
Still furry, she padded up to the car parked in her driveway, where she’d left her clothes. The seemingly endless drive back to safe roaming land had had her vibrating in her seat. She hadn’t even attempted to go inside her home before shedding her jeans and shirt and shifting for a long postcoital run.
Tongue hanging out as she panted, Paige sat on her haunches. She had to tell him. This was one secret she couldn’t keep, obviously.
The old standby, Hi, I’m Paige and I’m a werewolf, probably wouldn’t be the best way to go.
She wouldn’t discount the chance he knew everything, though. He either worked for Caelan—in which case, how could he not know?—or he was a client needing their help—in which case, he might know. If Caelan employed Derek, then he had to understand the dynamics of a shifter or Caelan would never be able to trust him.
Excitement strummed through her.
Next step…convince him he was her mate.
Paige hung her head, willing her body back into its human form. Bones and ligaments popped, lengthened, her skin tickled as fur disappeared, her muzzle shortened, making her nose itch. Gravel gouged her knees for the few moments it took to reorient back into skin.
Gingerly getting to her feet, she opened the rear car door with the key she’d put on her front tire and stepped into her jeans. She slid her feet into her shoes to avoid the gravel of her driveway and tugged the shirt over her head. Her panties were still wadded up in her front seat, and she hadn’t even bothered retrieving the bra Derek had demolished.
She shouldered her laptop bag before shutting and locking the doors. The gravel crunched beneath her feet as she wearily trod the path to her front porch. Something caught her eye and she stopped and stared, not needing the daylight to decipher what she saw in the darkness.
“Not again,” she groaned. “Damn.”
Moving cautiously up the two steps, she stopped and glared down at the huge bouquet of Stargazer lilies sitting there.
The card attached read, You’re Mine.
Two words. Two measly words, innocuous on their own, downright eerie as they were, written in big, black letters on a four-by-six piece of paper attached to the vase.
Paige rolled her head from one side to the other and took a deep breath. The flowers were getting a tad old. Especially since this was the fourth bouquet this week. And with today being Wednesday, that meant she’d gotten one every day. She was getting damn tired of the little gifts.
If she hadn’t just met her mate and made love to him, she might start to think she really was being pursued by a mate. Except for the part where no shifter would ever go to such secretive lengths. They’d flat-out jump your bones and pronounce you theirs.
Unless a human was involved.
Like hers.
Who was even now probably lying in bed wondering why the hell the woman he’d made love to had run from him like her ass was on fire.
She cursed herself again for being such a pussy and taking off like a scared little girl.
Paige pushed the vase aside w
ith her toe. As if she didn’t have enough on her platter right now with work and the wedding she’d suddenly become part of a short week ago. Shit. Why not add a secret admirer slash stalker to the mix?
On Sunday, she’d gotten home from the pack picnic and found two dozen red roses tied with a red ribbon laid on the stoop. The note attached read, Yours. At first, she’d been giddy with excitement. What girl wouldn’t be? Getting flowers from a secret admirer ranked right up there with winning the lottery.
Okay, maybe not so much.
But then on Monday she’d come home from Trice Technologies to a vase overflowing with wildflowers. The ribbon said, Love Forever.
Yesterday there’d been tulips. Pink ones interspersed with some other little bitty white flowers. Always had been the message.
Today, looking at these flowers made her stomach turn because she had a stinky suspicion who really had left them. The thought made the romantic notion soar right out the window.
Thank God she hadn’t eaten much for dinner—she hadn’t been able to with her mate’s smell tormenting her every breath—otherwise she’d have a nasty surprise of her own for the poor, defenseless flowers. It wasn’t their fault some idiot had taken up an infatuation for putting bouquets on her porch. Paige decided she didn’t even much like flowers. In a few days they’d be dead, and then what did you have to remember the person who’d left them?
A spot right between her eyes flared and her wolf growled. Slipping the laptop bag off her shoulder and setting it on the porch, Paige reached up and rubbed at the sudden ache. Her secret admirer was starting to delve into an area more commonly known as harassment.
If she had any solid clue—past her niggling feeling of Tucker, the asshole who for some reason had decided he was her mate—as to who was leaving the gifts, she might be better able to handle them on her own. Now she had to go to Caelan, because she’d marked a man as hers. As Prime, he would need to know she’d bitten a human. He wouldn’t care, since his own mate happened to be human. Should she tell him about the flowers? She hated to go running to him for something so simple. Surely she could, would, handle Flower Man on her own.
The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and Paige got the sudden feeling of someone watching her. She sniffed, smelling her intruder’s cologne-laden scent on the wind, and had to command herself not to grind her teeth into oblivion.
Damnable ass. She so did not want to deal with Tucker Patton right now. Not while her body still smelled of her newly found mate and the aftermath of their sex.
She compared the man to scraping her fingernails down a chalkboard and then shoving an icepick underneath them. Shivering at the image, she tucked her fingers into fists. If Tucker so much as showed his face, she’d punch him in the nose with all intent of drawing blood. It was too close to her midnight snack time to deal with the stomach-curdling fiend.
He’d make her lose her appetite, skip the meal she desperately needed, and then she’d be cranky for the rest of the night and not get enough sleep. Tomorrow morning, after tossing and turning until the wee hours, she’d be pissy and snap at her coworkers. Craig would likely have a field day with the “must be her time of the month” crap.
Damn it. Think too much? Do not let the bully get to you. Paige snatched her bag off the porch and shoved the lilies completely out of the way with the toe of her Doc Martens. Going inside and shutting the door on the idiot was an easy way out of the upcoming meeting. She slid the key into the lock and turned the knob but wasn’t quick enough to slip inside.
“Paige-a-rooney,” Tucker crooned behind her. Though she’d smelled him, she hadn’t heard him approach. Not good. “It’s not nice to push pretty gifts away, especially when they’re from your mate. Maybe you’re in denial, is that it? Have you finally realized we were meant to be together and now you’re trying to ignore it by sweeping it all away?” Tucker’s hand gripped her arm above the elbow, keeping her from entering her home and pissing her off to no end.
Paige shuddered in revulsion. Without turning to face him, she ripped her arm free of his sleazy hold and very plainly wiped the spot clean where he had touched her. As a shape-shifting werewolf, she might be physically stronger than a human woman, especially in her wolf form, but Tucker could kick her ass in either form without blinking, and she wasn’t in the mood for another childish tussle with the jerk right now.
“You won’t be wiping my touch away after we fuck for the first time,” he growled.
Now she did turn, a gag choking her. Tucker slid a bent knuckle down her cheek and his nostrils flared. She refrained from flinching at his disgusting touch. An angry glow burned in his eyes.
“You’ve been fucking.” There was no accusation, but a heated statement of fact.
She swatted his hand away with enough force to make him yelp and tuck his hand against his chest, a look of astonishment replacing the anger on his face. Served him right. How dare he belittle what she and Derek had done together! He should count himself lucky she didn’t jab two fingers in his eye sockets. The idea had major merit. Take out a little steam on him, then slam the door in his face before slipping into a really nice hot bubble bath and having a nice glass of wine…no, make that an amaretto sour.
Nah. It wasn’t worth the bruises she’d receive because of his humiliated retaliation.
“So have you, by the stench of things.” She scrunched her nose against the reek of dirty sex radiating off him.
He shrugged, not in the least repentant. “She meant nothing. I was picturing you under me the whole time.” He nodded to the lilies. “You like ’em? I picked ’em out special just for you.”
Gross. The man was disgusting. Then what he’d said filtered through her sadistic vision of bloodying Tucker’s face. She’d known it was him with the flowers, hadn’t she?
“Fucking is for dogs and pigs like you. I’ve been making love. These are from you?” she spat. The stupid ass. The man really needed to take a hint. Paige was half tempted to stomp back over to the flowers and send them flying across the yard with her big shoe.
On second thought, Tucker would look much better tumbling head over heels down the two wooden steps than the flowers. At least they would make a nice addition to her kitchen table until they wilted and died the way she wished Tucker would. In a couple of days they would resemble what she imagined his dick looked like—shriveled and limp.
But since they came from his warped head, she cleared her throat, walked back to the flowers, scooped them up by the stems with both hands and swung them like a baseball bat at his chest, leaving a wet mark marring his olive-green T-shirt and petals falling to the porch floor. As an act of aggression, the fragile stems lacked punch, especially since the laptop bag hanging off one shoulder slid down to the crook of her elbow, but damn it felt good, and the look on Tucker’s face was absolutely priceless. Eyes going wide, he grunted, but otherwise didn’t flinch, not that she expected him to.
“Stop leaving them. I don’t want them, and I am not your mate. You’re clearly delusional if you think I am.”
He grinned, unfazed by her use of him as target practice, and stepped closer, turning her and pressing her face-forward into the front door. His lips grazed her ear when he spoke. “Oh, you are, baby. You are mine. Never forget it, either. And I better not catch you fucking any other man again. You won’t like the consequences of me erasing the smell from your body,” he threatened, smashing his hips into her until she felt the slight bulge of a semihard cock digging into the small of her back. If he were truly into her, wouldn’t he at least be able to summon up a full-fledged hard-on?
And she’d not wanted to tussle with him tonight. Shame. She was going to break the asshole’s nose and plant her foot as deep as she could in his crotch. Not even a werewolf was immune to having his balls crushed. If she thought there was any chance in hell of coming out of it unscathed, she’d shift and go after his throat, but she didn’
t relish dying tonight.
“Get. Off. Me. Now. Tucker,” she ground out. Getting Caelan involved was looking better and better. If Tucker didn’t refrain from this shit, she’d go to their pack leader in a heartbeat, tattletale or not. She might not have been part of this pack her entire life, but that didn’t mean she should be treated any differently.
Tucker wasn’t her mate, no matter how hard he tried to convince her. Unless a were mated with a human, the attraction between shifter mates went both ways.
At least, she’d always been led to believe it did. God help her if she was wrong.
“One of these days you’ll be begging me to stay on you, sweetcheeks.” He rotated his hips.
Enough was enough. With a growl, Paige shoved away from the wall, throwing her butt into his crotch, wishing for the first time ever someone had thought to create panties with retractable spikes just for situations like this. Not that it did any good—he still held her pinned to the wall. The dickhead needed to be neutered.
“I swear to God, Tucker, if you leave anything else on my porch, I will rip your head off and sh—”
“Ah, ah.” Tucker’s breath fanned over her ear. He covered her mouth with his palm, preventing her from finishing what she wanted to happen to him. “You have a potty mouth, little wolf.”
Paige turned her head to the side, dislodging his hand. “Don’t call me that.” She stabbed her elbow back, connecting somewhere near his not-so-firm abdomen, and grinned when he oomphed and stumbled back a step. It allowed her the second of freedom she needed to turn around and throw a right hook. Fuck the consequences.
Her fist caught him in the left eye as he tended to the area where her elbow had landed. He squealed like the pig he was. So this was how you succeeded in throwing unwanted guests off your porch. Tucker’s arms windmilled when one of his feet slipped off the top step. Paige crossed her arms, sucked in her cheeks and tapped a foot, watching until he landed in a sprawled heap on the walkway.
Ultimatum: Graham Pack Mates, Book 3 Page 3
