was his mate. Their lips danced together and he pushed his tongue into her hot mouth, wanting her to feel what it could be like if it were their bodies entwining instead of just their mouths and lips. Gods, he needed to feel this woman surround him, become part of him. His woman.
I found my mate.
Her body molded to his. She went on her tiptoes, wrapping her arms around his neck. Their groins collided and she moaned as she rubbed her lithe body against his. Kerrick tugged her head back, hand gripping her lustrous curls and growled, “Mine. You are mine.”
She stared back at him, eyes heavy lidded with lust. But he could see something shift in her mind, her expression was less panicked and more determined. She leaned back in and nipped his bottom lip, giving him more of the wanton creature she’d become in his arms.
“Say it,” he growled. “Say you’re mine. Say it.” He didn’t even know her name. The only thing he knew was that she was crazy and thought she was some sort of shifter bogeyman assassin. But he didn’t care. She was his delusional little psychopath and he was keeping her. “Say it.”
“Ssh, I’ll say it.” She leaned towards his left ear, nuzzling her lips and nose along his jaw line.
“Then say it.”
“I—”
“Yes?”
“I quit.”
“What?”
She slammed her knee into his groin and shoved him away from her. The pain was excruciating. “I resign from the position of Incendiary, not that you even knew what that was,” she said without any further explanation, the lithe and wanton woman vanishing into the ether, leaving this cold and emotionless being staring down at him. The woman that would be his mate turned to walk away but stopped when she reached the gate, looking back over her shoulder. “And I am not your mate. I am not your anything.” With that she dashed away from the compound and into the surrounding forest at a dead run.
Kerrick groaned and cupped his balls, pain radiating from his poor, abused groin. “Demon woman,” he muttered, shaking the pain off and rising to stand and watch her run. “I’m in love.”
“Kerrick!” Aaron shouted, running over to him with about a dozen soldiers on his tail. Kerrick didn’t even care how potentially embarrassing the situation could be, his soldiers seeing their leader brought to his knees by a stranger. It didn’t matter where mates were concerned. All embarrassment was well met and sometimes joyfully endured. He’d endure a lot worse for a mate to say she was his and he was hers.
“I always said I would be the one to find my mate, Aaron. But I was wrong,” Kerrick said, his Alphar power leaking into his voice as he prepared to run. “She found me.”
She may have gotten the drop on him, as the fading pain radiating in his groin could attest to, but the vicious woman was his mate, and he wouldn’t let her get very far.
As Irisi would say in one of her more darling moments, fucking-balls-shit-fuckety-fucktard-dickwad-shitfuckers. Mated? Mated to the Alphar? Of all the rank balls of shit fate had thrown her way, this one had to be the most malodorous. Mated to the Alphar of North America.
The Alphar with his wide shoulders and strong arms. He’d been wearing a simple blue Henley with gray slacks. He had been barefooted. His waist was tapered like a swimmer and under the clothes she could see the powerfully taut muscles that lined every inch of his masculine body.
Stop thinking about his muscles.
But she could not stop. Just as she could not stop running away from him, a force the strength of an erupting volcano urging her to get as far away from him as she could. An image of his body as he advanced on her across that lawn flashed in her mind. Oh, but Gods, that body. The power in his frame alone had beckoned to the Wolf within and urged her to lunge and rip his clothes off. She’d never responded to anyone so viscerally in all her life, her twenty-five years as a human included.
Within one instant of
Learning to Kill: Stories