Mate Bond

by Jennifer Ashley

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” she said.

  Bowman didn’t wait. He heaved himself up and seized her, pulling her onto the bed. He hooked his hand under her left thigh, and Kenzie landed straddling him, bracing her weight on her knees, hands splayed on his chest.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” she repeated.

  Bowman thumped back down to the mattress, transferring his grip to her wrists. A feral smile spread across his face. “You can’t hurt me, Kenz.”

  His arrogant confidence heated her blood. “Want to bet?”

  Bowman rose on his elbows, his eyes glittering. “Give me your best shot.”

  Kenzie very carefully moved her hips forward. The brush of his cock at her opening made her shake, and she started to lose all her good intentions.

  “Come on,” Bowman said impatiently. “I can’t lie here all day.”

  He’d said a similar thing to the pseudo-groupie last night. His gruff command had flared Kenzie’s anger then, but now that he directed the words to her, it excited her beyond belief.

  The feral in her responded to the wildness in him, his need to have her, never mind the pain.

  “Touch of a mate, Kenzie,” he whispered.

  Kenzie lowered herself slowly, the feeling of him sliding inside her blurring all thought. She sucked in a breath, remembering in time to not rest her full weight on him.

  “That’s nice,” Bowman said, his eyes growing heavy. “I feel better already.”

  Kenzie had no answer. Bowman was big, filling her, finding her empty spaces. Her head went back in silent joy, and he rocked forward and curled his tongue around her nipple.

  The heat of his mouth warmed, banishing winter. Kenzie raised her head so she could look at him as he lay back again on white robe and sheets, his warrior’s body beautiful despite the incongruity of the splint.

  Her innate need to heal him worked through even her lust. She made sure she put no weight on his hurt limb, and she reached back to touch his leg, hoping that would help.

  Bowman’s growl broke through her fog, his gaze intensifying, the lines of pain leaving his face. He focused on her, and her alone, his eyes gray like the winter sky.

  Kenzie’s body felt heavy, her breasts full; where he filled her felt stretched and wonderful. Bowman flicked his tongue once more over her nipple, pulling it between his lips, releasing it after one tug.

  His powerful hands caught her hips, urging her to ride him. His raw body and intense strength was trapped beneath her, but Bowman wasn’t tamed. Far from it. His fingers gripped her thighs, his hips moved in time with hers, his gaze held hers and wouldn’t let go.

  “I thought you said you could hurt me,” Bowman said as he thrust hard up into her. “Not even close, sweetheart.”

  Challenging her, was he? Kenzie increased her own thrusts, Bowman’s words fading as she sped up to meet him. He got up on his elbows again as he thrust into her as hard as he could.

  He was proving he wasn’t debilitated, Kenzie realized. Kenzie could stagger outside afterward, looking sated and content, and the story would spread through Shiftertown that Bowman’s wounds hadn’t slowed him down one bit. And, if any of his enemies decided to burst in, hoping to catch him when he was vulnerable, they’d see him servicing his mate at full strength.

  They’d certainly get an eyeful. Kenzie’s head went back once more, her hair brushing her shoulders, the silken touch of it erotic. Just as erotic was Bowman, now gripping her thighs, his fingers tight on her soft flesh. Her breasts moved with their rhythm, and every time she looked down at Bowman, he caught her gaze in his strong one and held it.

  He was holding her with his gaze when Kenzie’s climax overtook her. She forgot about being gentle and ground away at him as wave after wave of joy flooded her.

  Bowman snarled—a long wolf snarl, the sound tearing out of his throat. The next moment, Kenzie felt his seed flood her, the life of a strong male Shifter filling her and completing her.

  Perhaps another cub would come of this, Kenzie thought in hope as she collapsed on top of him. Bowman caught her, his arms coming around her to cradle her and keep her safe. A cub, she repeated to herself muzzily. She longed for that most of all.

  * * *

  Kenzie was heavy on top of him, and Bowman’s leg itched like crazy, but no way in hell was he going to push her away.

  The most beautiful thing in the world was Kenzie stretched out on him, her dark golden eyes half closed in afterglow, her tight body relaxed in a way she didn’t relax any other time. She was a fine armful, her breasts cushioned against his chest, their heartbeats on top of each other’s.

  Bowman held his breath, waiting for the warm spike in his heart that other Shifters had told him about, the almost-pain that meant he and his mate were bound forever.

  It didn’t come. It never had. Exhaustion was there—he and Kenzie always tore it up in the bedroom—but the mate bond eluded them. The Goddess testing them, maybe? Telling Bowman he wasn’t building enough bonfires to the God or meditating hard enough?

  Whatever reason the God and Goddess and the wide universe had for denying Kenzie and Bowman the mate bond, it hurt. He knew it hurt Kenzie too—she was simply good at hiding it. Their Shifters also weren’t happy that their leaders shared no bond. Instability could come of that, and they knew it.

  Kenzie raised her head and looked down at him. Bowman saw the sorrow in her eyes, knowing she was searching for the bond and not feeling it either.

  Instead of comforting her with words, which Kenzie wouldn’t want—she never wanted to talk about it—Bowman stroked her hair. He loved the color of it—dark brown with golden streaks, like the sun on polished walnut.

  “I need your report, Kenz,” he said softly. Getting back to business would calm them both. “What did you find out this morning?”

  Kenzie snuggled down to him again, which did nothing to help Bowman’s continued hard-on. The last thing he wanted was to talk about the terror of last night, but they couldn’t blow it off. A danger existed that they had to find and destroy.

  His hardness deflated a bit, however, as she described the creature’s disappearing scent and her and Jamie’s conclusion that it had been shoved into a semitruck and hauled away.

  “By other Shifters?” Bowman asked, still smoothing Kenzie’s hair.

  “We couldn’t tell,” she said.

  “I know. I’m thinking out loud. Or by humans? And why?”

  Kenzie pressed a warm kiss to his throat. “I was more interested in the how. What was that thing? Was it real?”

  “It was real.” Bowman flexed his toes and grimaced. “It tore up my leg, smashed Cade’s truck, and laid out half the Shifters of Shiftertown.”

  “You know what I mean. I hear people can build some cool robotics, but it wasn’t mechanical. We’d have scented that.”

  “That leaves something born and bred. Remember what happened to Tiger.”

  Tiger was a Shifter now living in the Austin Shiftertown. He’d been bred by humans using an experimental process Shifters still didn’t understand. The experiments hadn’t gone well, however—all the artificially inseminated Shifters had died except Tiger, who’d been the twenty-third attempt. The researchers had abandoned him, leaving him alone in a cage, barely fed, for years, and he’d pretty much gone insane.

  But Tiger, while he was big and powerful and larger than most Felines, was still more or less normal size for a Shifter. After he’d been freed, he’d taken a human mate, a woman named Carly, and Carly so far had no complaints.

  Shifters had originally been created by the Fae a couple thousand years ago. Genetic engineering had been invented in Faerie far sooner than humans had figured it out, but it had been blended with magic, as everything in Faerie was.

  The Fae had merged humans with big, powerful animal predators—Bowman didn’t really want to know the details of how they’d done it—and produced Shifters, creatures with human reason and pure animal instinct.

  After Shifter
s had banded together and defeated their Fae masters, they’d walked away from Faerie, choosing to live—covertly—with their human counterparts. Fae had started abandoning the human world by then, hating its cold iron, which for some reason weakened their metabolisms and killed them. Fae loathing for the human world had been the point of Shifters staying in it. No Fae to worry about equaled good times. Peace. Cubs. Life.

  Of course, neither the Fae nor the humans could leave them alone. Both were constantly doing something to get in the way of Shifter happiness, such as humans herding them into Shiftertowns and slapping shock Collars on them—the Collars had been invented by a half Fae.

  Shifters now had figured out a way out of the Collars, but it was a deep, dark secret. Removing Collars and replacing them with fake ones took a special process and was slow going.

  Bowman had tried to get Kenzie out of her Collar, but she was being stubborn about it. She’d argued that it was better to let the cubs and the weaker Shifters swap theirs out first. She could take the pain.

  And she could. She was strong, his mate.

  “What about this cop?” Bowman asked her.

  Kenzie lifted her head, her eyes dark in the sunlight filtering through half-closed curtains. “He seems all right. He wants to talk to you. I told him he could come over this afternoon.”

  “This afternoon?” Bowman half sat up, then ground his teeth as his leg throbbed. “Shit, Kenzie . . .”

  “I think he can help us. Cops have resources that we don’t.”

  “I don’t want humans in Shiftertown until I heal.” He couldn’t protect his mate, his cub, and his Shifters from cops with guns while his leg was in a splint.

  “No humans except cute veterinarians?” Kenzie asked with a sly look.

  “Give it a rest, Kenz.”

  Kenzie broke into a big, beautiful smile. “I can’t. I’m never letting you off the hook for anything, Bowman O’Donnell. The privilege of a mate.”

  “What is? Being a serious pain in my ass?”

  “Hell, yeah,” Kenzie said lightly. “I do it better than anyone.”

  “Not going to argue with you about that.”

  She looked seriously good too, sitting up and smiling at him, the clinging sheet falling from her. Kenzie had borne a cub, and her breasts were full and mature, her belly marked where it had stretched to carry his son. Bowman traced one of the stretch marks to where it disappeared on her side, then cupped her heavy breast in his hand.

  He’d gone through the mating ceremonies with her to keep her unruly clan from battling with his, but he’d have gone to her anyway, no matter what. Bowman couldn’t imagine having any mate but her.

  The ends of her silky hair brushed his fingers as he cupped her, Kenzie’s breath lifting her breast into his palm. Her eyes were half closed, gleaming gold beneath her dark lashes. Her nipple tightened, responding to Bowman’s thumb as he rubbed the smooth point.

  A knock on the door made Kenzie jump. Bowman slowly let her go and tucked his hand behind his head. “What?” he called.

  The door remained closed, but they both knew who it was. Ryan’s scent came to them, wrapping them both, completing them.

  Ryan was impatient, not distressed, so they waited to see what he needed. Being a Shifter cub, he’d never open the door without their invitation, knowing exactly what his parents were getting up to in the bedroom. He also had zero interest. The fact that his parents—and all adult Shifters—loved sex was to Ryan a character flaw he would put off acquiring as long as he could.

  “Dad,” he called through the door. “Can I go with my friends to Cade’s? He’s got the zip line done, and he says we can start riding it today.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Zip line? Goddess give him strength.

  Bowman started out of bed, was brought up short by his splint, let out a frustrated groan, and said loudly, “No!”

  “Aw, come on. Everyone’s going. Cade’s careful. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt us little cubs.”

  No, he wouldn’t. Cade was good with cubs, and all Shifters knew it. Bowman also knew that Ryan was playing up the cute cub angle to get his way. At age twelve, he was a master manipulator.

  “You’re leader’s son,” Bowman said, dropping back to the mattress. “No one will think less of you if you don’t go. They’ll think you’re smart for not doing something stupidly dangerous.”

  “No, they won’t.” Ryan’s voice came firmly through the door. “They’ll say I’m a coward. Leader’s son should be the first one on.”

  “Leader’s son shouldn’t be pushed around by a bunch of cubs,” Bowman called back.

  Kenzie was up, her naked body touched by winter sunshine. Bowman fell silent as he watched her lean over to sweep up her clothes. A stretch of her arms, and her shirt skimmed down her body, Kenzie glancing at him as she settled it over her breasts. Another bend, and her jeans slid up her thighs, over her smooth ass, hiding herself from him.

  “I’ll walk him over,” she said. “He’s right—leader’s son shouldn’t hold back from new things.”

  “Leader’s son shouldn’t break his bloody neck on a stupid idea of Cade’s.”

  “You’ll be all right by yourself, won’t you?” Kenzie asked. She was good at ignoring him. “I can have my grandmother look in on you.”

  Kenzie’s grandmother, Afina, was a clan matriarch, and didn’t have a high opinion of Bowman. She let her disapproval of everything he did, said, wore, and thought come loudly out of her mouth. Afina could insult him in Romanian and also Russian, or in English with a heavy accent, every word barbed.

  “No.” Bowman growled. “I’ll be fine.”

  Kenzie winked at him as she opened the door. Bowman was grateful the sheet had settled back over him, because that wink had him harder than the headboard behind him.

  “Of course you will,” she said. “Besides, I want to try the zip line too.”

  Another smile, and she and Ryan were gone, leaving the room empty, Bowman alone and feeling it.

  * * *

  Kenzie and Ryan walked through Shiftertown, which was a widespread neighborhood of small houses. The roads that wound through it were narrow, climbing up and down hills. Clusters of houses, families of clans clumped together, were scattered throughout, with woods and space between the clusters.

  Around this bend, it was Felines, Jamie’s family. The next, another Lupine clan. Down the hill, the roofs visible from where Kenzie and Ryan walked, Kenzie’s clan’s homes. The bears lived on the far side of Shiftertown, their houses the largest. Bear clans tended to be small—making up the lowest percentage of Shifters overall—but bears took up a lot of room.

  “Kenzie.” A muscular man in sweats came jogging up out of the woods to fall into step with her. “Hello, Ryan.”

  “Uncle,” Kenzie said cautiously around Ryan’s more friendly “Hey, Uncle Cris.”

  Cristian Dimitru was Kenzie’s mother’s much older brother. Kenzie’s father had been a lone wolf, clanless, his small pack and clan having been killed during the war the humans called World War II. Kenzie’s dad had been in a human army fighting the Nazi regime—the humans had not known they’d had Shifters join them.

  All that had proved, Cristian had said, was that bullets hurt Shifters as much as they did humans. Cristian had come across Kenzie’s father, wounded and alone, and Cristian had carried him home, his clan taking him in.

  Kenzie’s father had mated with Cristian’s sister, and died just after Kenzie had been born. His injuries and exposure to chemicals used in wartime had sickened him, and he’d never fully recovered. Kenzie’s mother, grieving from the broken mate bond and exhausted from bringing in Kenzie, had not lived much longer.

  Kenzie therefore had been raised by Cristian and her grandmother, Afina. They’d both loved her plenty, but she’d always known they’d considered her father weak. A fool, Cristian had said, to join the humans. Cristian’s clan had hidden out in the mountains during the war, waiting for the stupid humans to grow tir
ed of killing one another.

  That war had changed everything, though. Wild lands became fewer and farther between as humans took them over to feed a growing population. Automobile and airplane use became commonplace, erasing the quietude of the wild. It became increasingly difficult for Shifters to hide their true natures, simply because humans were everywhere, even in the lesser populated areas of Eastern Europe. Living behind an iron curtain made things even more difficult. A few of Kenzie’s clan had gotten out to Western Europe and the States, but they’d found themselves alone there.

  Once the wall fell in Berlin, things had begun to change even more, and Shifters had to make choices. Then Shifters had been outed. Kenzie’s clan was rounded up and shipped off to the States. They’d learned English on the fly, and had found themselves dumped in a high school gym in the state called North Carolina, where Kenzie had seen Bowman for the first time.

  Cristian spoke English with a thick accent, though his accent came and went depending on who he talked to and how much he wanted to manipulate them. When he was alone with his pack, he ceased bothering with English altogether, as he did now.

  “What happened last night?” he asked her in a dialect of the Transylvanian mountains. Ryan, in a hurry to rejoin his friends, slipped his hand from Kenzie’s and jogged on down the road toward Cade’s place. “My Lupines are giving me garbled accounts, and Bowman’s trackers won’t talk to me at all.”

  Probably because they didn’t trust him. Neither did Kenzie. She loved her uncle, but Cristian was slippery, had preferred the world when he was leader, and wanted to be leader again. He was still alpha of his pack, but he hated to be subordinate to anyone else.

  “You’re getting garbled accounts because we don’t know what happened,” Kenzie answered. “Whatever attacked us was huge and not normal. We don’t know what it was.”

  “And Bowman brought it down himself?” Cristian threw her a skeptical look. His hair was dark, but brushed with gray, the same color as his wolf’s fur. His eyes were a deep gold, like Kenzie’s and her grandmother’s. “Our fearless leader took down an animal ten times bigger than any Shifter? By himself?”