Bear to the Bone(64)

Then he swept her up in his arms again, kicked the door shut behind them, locked it with one hand, and carried his mate up the stairs to her bedroom.

Time to claim what was his.





16





Carrie loved the feel of Cage’s warm arms around her.

Everything he’d said made sense, in that way that things make sense when you have love to glue in the cracks left by reason.

As long as Cage loved her, as long as he really had been acting in her best interest, even when it had been misguided, then everything else could be worked out.

He’d really come back to protect her. Even made himself one of them just to end them for good, because he knew she would want it before leaving.

She caught her breath at the sacrifice in that, how it must have felt to put on the leathers of the men he had even more reason than her to hate, and how it must have felt for him to take her censure and anger over something that wasn’t true.

She didn’t blame herself either. She’d acted as if everything he showed her were true. That was part of her being trusting and always taking things at face value, and she didn’t think Cage wanted that to change about her.

He set her down on the bed, and his dark head turned to the side, looking at the window. Then he stood and strode over to it, pulling the curtains closed.

He looked back at her, dark blue eyes sparkling with excitement but a hard expression on his masculine, handsome face. Even in his stolen clothing, scratched from the fight, he was gorgeous. She got off the bed and walked to him, lifting the shirt to see his wound.

She gasped, not knowing what was leftover dried blood and what was actual injury. She pushed him to sit on the bed, and he frowned.

“At least let me take care of you, one more time,” she said. When he let out a growl of protest, his muscles flexing as he rested on his hands, she clucked her tongue. “I’m not making love to you with blood all over me.”

He nodded but didn’t look too pleased about it.

“You’ve waited ten years,” she said. “You can wait a while longer.”#p#分页标题#e#

She opened the cabinet under the TV and pulled out a small first aid kit. As she turned to stand, she felt strong, masculine arms around her. She caught the scent of pine and just leaned back against him for a moment, savoring it.

“So impatient,” she teased.

“Mmm,” he said gruffly against her head as he buried his nose in her hair. “I can’t wait any longer. I never did get to tell you everything about mates.”

“Oh?” she asked. “You can tell me while I clean up, then.”

He nodded, sitting back on the bed and pulling off his shirt, wincing only slightly as he threw it to the side.

She knelt in front of him on the bed and pulled out an antiseptic wipe and started rubbing. She’d cleaned Cage up before, so it was almost kind of an intimate, familiar sensation. It said something about their relationship that they could wipe up blood as a kind of foreplay. She supposed it was just because they’d been taking care of each other as long as she could remember. They were truly bound together in that way.

“Tell me about mates,” she said.

He put a hand in her hair, playing with a strand as he twirled it around his finger, his serious, intense eyes on hers as she wiped at the wound on his side.

It was already nearly healed and didn’t look bad at all once cleaned.

“Amazing,” she said, pulling out another wipe to clean the rest. She enjoyed the feel of his rippled bumps of muscle under her fingers.

He caught her hand in his and kissed the knuckles as she looked up at him.

His eyes met hers. “To mate means to take you forever. I claim you in a way that means no other shifter will look at you. I claim you in a way that means I’ll never look at another woman, even though I never did before. It means you’ll be a part of me, bound to me, and never able to leave.”

“I already was, silly,” she said.

“I’ll come inside you without anything between us, and when we come together, that will complete it,” he said.

“That’s why you were so careful about a condom,” she said. “I thought you just didn’t want kids.”

“I would love kids with you, Carrie,” he said. “But we don’t have the same fertility rates as humans. Not as bad as bears in the wild, but not great.”

She shrugged. “There are other ways to be parents. I just want a life with you, whatever that means.”

He hugged her close. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear you say that. If you really want, we could stay here in Winter Falls. We don’t have to go.”