Mated (11 page)

Cole stepped into the kitchen then. He moved to stand between the two girls surveying the scene, his arms crossed over his chest. “Is everything okay?” His expression was closed.

“We’re fine,” Mara said.

“Jane?”

“I’m fine.”

He looked doubtful but let it go. “Jane, will you come with me back to my den?”

Her stomach did that thing it did every time Cole said anything that she could remotely interpret as a sexual come-on.

“Sure.”

She followed him quickly from the room, hoping Mara hadn’t smelled her reaction. She didn’t want the entire pack to know she had the hots for Cole. Though it was probably too late for that concern. Their sense of smell and ability to read emotions was uncanny.

When they were inside the den, he led her to the couch and gestured for her to sit.

“There are some things I’ve wanted to say to you for awhile now.”

“Oh?” Jane’s tongue darted out to wet her lips. Could she even have a coherent conversation with him right now? She struggled to keep her eyes on his face and away from more interesting regions.

“I no longer have any doubts. I know you’re my mate.”

The blunt announcement was like a physical blow. She felt herself pulled in separate directions. In one direction she was doing back flips, floating. In the other, she was curling in on herself, waiting for another sentence to start.

She’d spent years dreaming of a nice, normal relationship with a human male and forgetting all about the world of monsters. But a human had never been in her cards. When Rich had been killed, she’d vowed to stay away from her kind to avoid endangering any more of them. Still, it was difficult to close that chapter, to know the normal, safe life that would wake her from this nightmare was nowhere in her future.

“Well, say something.”

Cole was looking at her anxiously, as if he’d dropped down on one knee and proposed. In a sense maybe he had. Though she wasn’t sure it was a proposal, so much as a statement. If he genuinely believed she was his, whatever did or didn’t happen between them physically, she wasn’t going anywhere.

He took her hands in his, and she felt the electric current pass between them. When she looked into his eyes, they were expectant.

“I know.”

***

Normally humans lived in denial about their feelings, hiding behind masks far more effective than those of shapeshifters. But she felt it. He wondered how much vampire blood her mother drank during her pregnancy. Whatever the amount, it had been enough to link Jane to him, however remotely.

If he hadn’t seen her walk in the sunlight himself, he’d think her father was a vampire. But she would have been killed at birth and wouldn’t have been able to bear sunlight in any event.

He wanted to take her, mark her as his mate, and bring her fully into the pack. But that would require sex, and he was constantly aware of her history.

This moment was crucial; he could feel her hesitance, her anxiety. One misstep and he could push her away and lose her forever. “And how do you feel about that?”
Try to sound less like a therapist, Cole.

Her face was guarded. “How do you feel about it? I’m not a wolf.”

He growled. “Forget what Rhonda said.”

“You heard?”

“Yes.”

She looked down at their interlocked hands. “But I’m
not
a wolf. I can’t be what a wolf could be for you. I can’t share all the same experiences. I only have human strength. I’m not a leader.”

“Nevertheless, you are my mate. A true mate. I could choose to mark another wolf, but I would be empty. You don’t know how hard it’s been to not take what my instincts say is mine.” He heard her heart rate pick up, not from arousal, but from panic.

He pulled her back into his arms and stroked his fingers through her hair, conscious of his canines elongating, begging him to just mark her. Screw consent. “Talk to me. What’s going through your head right now?”

“Could you turn me? Make me like you?”

“Therian breeds are born, not made.”

She nodded and bit her lip, falling silent for a few moments as if weighing her next words. “What does all this mean? For me? If I didn’t want to be your mate would you let me go?”

His grip tightened on her, and he had to fight to loosen it and remember that although her pain tolerance was higher, she was still fragile compared to him. He didn’t want her more frightened. He kept his voice even, his words measured. “You don’t want to be my mate?”

“I didn’t say that. I just need to know.”

“It’s safe for you here with the pack.”

“As long as whoever is hunting the humans doesn’t eat me,” she said under her breath, but not quietly enough that he didn’t hear.

“I’ve watched them all when they’re around you. I believe it’s Ed, but I’ll have to catch him in the act. The rest of the pack for the most part has accepted you as family.” He couldn’t tell her what he’d found in the woods; there was no sense panicking her. It was his burden to bear.

“Do they know?”

“It’s not been stated aloud, but I think they sense the shift and the energy between you and me.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” she said. “What would happen if I didn’t want this?”

He wanted to growl at her. The wolf in him screamed to throw her down on the ground, dominate her, mark her for daring to question that her rightful place was by his side. But the man in him held the wolf in control. He refused to be just another monster in her life throwing his weight around.

It took every ounce of strength he possessed to say, “If you chose not to become my mate, you would live in one of the other dens here. You’d have your own space, and you’d be safe. Once I catch Ed and make certain you’re safe with everyone else.”

“But you wouldn’t let me go. I’d still be a prisoner. Don’t want to let go of your ten-thousand-dollar investment?”

He knew she was taunting him, pushing to see if she could make him angry. No, that wasn’t right. She was pushing to find out what would happen when he
was
angry. The full moon was fast approaching, and now wasn’t the time for her to be pushing buttons just to find out what they’d do. He took a few slow breaths, fighting against the primal urges that raged within him.

“You are not here because of Paul’s debt, and you know that. Whether I realized it at the time or not, I took you because you belonged with me. You are not a prisoner here. This is your home. As soon as it’s safe, you’ll have the key codes and free run of the place like everyone else. But you’re my responsibility to keep safe now.

“I can’t let you walk out that door and go wherever you would go, knowing at any moment something dangerous could snag you, that you could end up back with the vampires. You can’t possibly understand what it feels like to be a wolf, have found your mate, and then lose her like that. I won’t force you to be intimate with me. I won’t make you accept the mark. But you’re asking for more than I can give here, and I think you know that.”

He waited as she processed that information, as her heart started the slow trip back to normal.

“Okay.”

“Okay what? Okay you’ll be my mate or okay you’ll live in one of the other dens when I’ve made sure things are safe?”

***

Jane looked into his eyes as his hand moved to caress the side of her throat. She felt self-conscious when his fingers trailed over the bite marks Paul had left. In all her time with vampires, she’d never been with one who’d left visible marks.

The others had always healed their bites because they didn’t want her skin marred. Paul had been different. He’d wanted Jane to look like a big vamp tramp billboard. And he was the monster whose arms she’d walked right into.

Voluntarily.

Now she’d never be rid of the physical scars. She’d never be able to look in the mirror and pretend none of it had ever happened. A tear rolled down her cheek.

Cole’s thumb moved to smooth it away. “Shhhh. I’m not going to do anything you don’t want. Why are you crying?”

“It’s not you. It’s this.” She pointed at the ugly scar on her throat. “How will you be able to stand being mated to me when I’ve been marked up by a vampire like this?”

“That isn’t your fault.”

“That’s not what I asked. The vampires are your enemies, and you’ve got a visual reminder that more than one of them got there first.”

Cole bent his head to her neck and kissed over the mark. His tongue darted out to gently trace the scar. He murmured against her skin, “That. Isn’t. Your. Fault.”

Jane wasn’t finished. She didn’t know where it had come from, but she couldn’t stand the thought of almost having something good, only to have it ripped from her again. She pulled out of his embrace and took her shirt off, tossing it to the floor.

His nostrils flared and his pupils dilated, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. She removed the bra and shivered when she saw the feral gleam that lit his eyes

She closed the space between them, and suddenly his hands were everywhere. She whimpered softly at the contact then got control of herself, remembering her mission.

“Stop.”

She could tell it was a struggle, that he thought she was teasing him. But he removed his hands and fell back onto the couch, placing them on either side of his body, digging into the leather. He didn’t seem to care about the upholstery because his eyes didn’t stray from her.

She stepped closer. “What about this one, and this one, and this one?” She pointed to the various bite marks Paul had left on her. “Can you really stand to be with me, when I look like this?”

Before she could say anything else, before she could even think, he’d swept her up in his arms. She blinked and they were in the bedroom. He tossed her on the bed and removed his own shirt before joining her, his eyes intense and locked with hers.

“Yes,” his voice rumbled.

He proceeded to kiss each bite mark. “These are scars. They aren’t a vampire claim, and they aren’t a wolf’s mating mark,” he growled. “They are battle wounds. These are the marks that prove you’re strong, that you’ve been through fire and walked out safe on the other side.”

“They’re ugly. They make me ugly.”

“No, you can’t think that.” He flicked on the lamp. “Am I ugly?”

Jane hadn’t stopped to notice before, but Cole had a few scars of his own.

“We heal fast and rarely scar, but sometimes there are things that leave a permanent mark.”

She found herself riveted to the scar slashing across his stomach, a wound that would have killed him had he not been a wolf.

“What happened?”

“I was eighteen, and the pack alpha was raping my mother. I killed him and in the process got this little souvenir. He was bleeding out and dying and still sneering at me because he knew it would scar. But I didn’t look at it that way. This is what I got in the process of saving my mother and becoming the leader. And those are what you got while surviving and becoming who you are.”

“Scars make a man look distinguished, but on a woman . . . ”

Cole quirked a brow. “Was that a joke?”

“Yeah. Lame huh?”

He just chuckled.

Jane crawled to the edge of the bed, ran her finger over the puckered mark on his stomach, and kissed it as he’d done with her.
All this could be yours, Jane.

His hands had moved to unbutton his pants. She put her hand over his. “Wait. Don’t mark me, okay?”

He looked like he was going to protest, but she interrupted him. “I want to see what this would be like with us. I can’t just hand my entire life to you yet. Please promise me you won’t mark me.”

He sighed, but nodded, the look on his face like she’d just asked him to go vegan.

Chapter Eleven

They were really going to do this. Jane stood in her jeans and bare feet beside the bed watching as Cole peeled the jeans from his own body. She guessed this was the part where she was supposed to follow suit, but she was busily cataloging her previous sexual history, trying to convince herself this was different.

All vampires, all in one way or another to protect herself. Was this what this was too? Fucking a man to gain protection?

The idea made her feel like a whore.

No, Cole was different. She felt connected to him in a way she hadn’t felt with the others. His protection wasn’t conditional on her sleeping with him. He’d made that clear. He’d patiently waited weeks, not pushing her toward anything too sexual. And she wanted him.

His hand slipped up to cradle the back of her head in that deliciously possessive way she’d always wanted a man––the right man––to hold her for a kiss.

“You’re thinking too much,” he growled.

Before she could respond, his mouth was on hers, a soft, devouring caress that made her mind empty all its contents except for him. She could feel the hard length of his erection pressed against her stomach, and her hand automatically moved between them to stroke him.