Wild Beast Mate(11)

“Yeah, I know.” Dewlyn appeared at more then one mating party and had tried to make contact with Rey. After the pool incident, when I carried her home, she treated me with silence. Dewlyn didn’t do silence, Dewlyn spoke her mind, so I knew she was hiding something. I didn’t want to think of the possibility Dewlyn had welcomed a human man, not only because I’d break my fasting stretch and have to eat the fucker who ignored my collar around her neck, but also because there were evil humans out there. Dewlyn might be braver than some of the men I knew, but she was too young not to be manipulated by the older and more cunning of her kind.

I knew this firsthand.

The older and more cunning had once pitted Jamie and me against each other.

We were young, stupid, eager, and didn’t know better. Luckily, we had Goner, our late brother, who kept us together. When Goner died, Jamie and I lost our glue.





Chapter Four





Dewlyn



“Mmmm,” I mumbled, and rubbed my face to clear out the sleepy haze. Groaning, I stretched and wished a forklift would open my heavy eyelids. When I managed to peel them apart a little, a blurred image of brown leather was the first thing I saw. It took several minutes after my eyes finally blinked wide open to recognize the scent of a man stuck in my nose. Vice. I jerked up, then back down, banged my forehead on something hard. A hand patted my back, and under my forehead, his chest rumbled with soft laughter.

I groaned, realizing I’d slept stretched on top of Vice on our living room couch, and he’d tied my wrists, then hooked them over his head. I tugged. “Untie me.”

“Good morning, mate. Easy there, you’ll break my neck.”

“I wish.”

“I know. It warms my heart you want to kill me.”

My forehead thumped his hard chest, and I shook my hands to emphasize my point.

“Don’t trust you,” he said. “The rope is permanent during the taming phase.”

“So that’s where we’re headed. Taming.” The beast bitch taming, he meant. The alien beasts brought their own Tineyan culture with them. I didn’t know everything about the beasts, but I knew more than an average human. Often, the beast males treated their human mates as they would a beast bitch, their female. Taming of a female bitch meant keeping her indoors, providing for and protecting her while she got used to her new mate. It also meant Vice would walk around naked, make plenty of body contact in hopes his body heat and maleness would trigger my mating instincts, make me warm and needy so I could give him those much-coveted beast babies.

Except Vice knew taming only worked with beast females, because one, they were animals and went into heat where they had to get it from males or suffer pain, and two, I’d convinced myself I hated Vice with all my heart. But after months of stalking me, I guess he’d grown desperate. Still, I said, “It won’t work.”

“It’ll work.” He cupped my chin and pushed my face up so our eyes locked. When they did, flecks of pale red sparkled in his, and judging by the growing hardness against my belly, Vice was a happy beast. He smiled. “It will work. Nothing else has worked. I’ve courted you, I’ve tried to understand you, I’ve done everything I could think of to make us work, and I failed. So now, I’ll do it my brother’s way.”

“I will never mate with you, Vice. I hate you from the bottom of my heart.”

Vice smiled, seemingly unperturbed. “You will learn to love me.”

“It’s not teachable.”

“It is.”

I sighed and pulled my bound hands over his head, then rested my elbows on his chest. I rubbed my eyes, inconspicuously wiping the drool from the side of my mouth. Pushing away from his chest, I sat back on my heels, and nestled between his legs.

Vice sprawled on the brown leather couch. The only other furniture to sit on was a new, also brown, leather recliner under the window next to the door on my left. The smell of new leather furniture lingered in our large house, which probably hadn’t been aired out in a while. Random papers and handwritten notes littered every surface. I craned my neck to see the kitchen. The dishes piled in the sink told me Vice had obsessed over finding me since I’d left and had completely neglected the house. I liked this house. I’d named it after my crazy Aunt Jane, the woman who’d advised me to run away after Vice had visited my home and proclaimed me his mate. I didn’t believe that Aunt Jane was crazy anymore, but at the time, I had, so I didn’t listen to anything she’d whispered as I packed my bag, ready for a move into the white house. “Take to the skies and never return,” she’d told me. “That house buries girls like you.”