Page 11 of Possessive Mate

“Well, we’re werewolves, and I didn’t hear you coming so you must have been creeping,” Elena insisted, leaning back a little to fold her arms over her chest defensively.

“What’s the matter?” Hanson asked, eyebrow raised in such a way that it made Elena bit the inside of her lip. Why did he have to be so damn good-looking, especially when he looked at her like that with that frustratingly cocky brow and that little quirk in his half-smile? “Do I make you uncomfortable, love?”

His expression deepened, and Elena would have liked to claw it right off his damned beautiful face.

Instead, she tightened her arms around herself and simply growled low in her throat. “Do not call me love.”

Hanson’s brow lowered. He crossed his own arms and leaned against the nearby wall, somehow just a little closer to her than he was before.

“Maybe we need to stop bumping into each other like this,” he suggested, the cocky tone of his voice just as frustrating as his stupid face.

“Agreed,” Elena snapped, and with that she barged right on past him, shouldering him out of the way.

The second she did so, she regretted it. The simplest of shoulder touches roused the air between them, causing his scent to waft so violently up into her nostrils that it was impossible to ignore it.

She quickened her step, racing for the stairs and the safety of the guest room beyond. She’d lock herself in if she had to in order to stop herself from doing something horrendously stupid.

But even as she slammed the guest room door shut behind her, still listening for any sign that Hanson might have followed her, she breathed deeply.

Why did he have to smell good enough to eat? Why were her fangs aching to protrude, just so that she could graze them over his rock-hard abdominal muscles before trailing lower…

Fuck! Stop it! she snapped at herself, pinching her thigh until it hurt. She had to do something to stop the fluttering in her insides, the pounding in her chest, the spinning in her mind.

There was no way she could allow herself to be thinking of anything like that. She couldn’t allow herself to feel any of what she was feeling.

One minute she had been about to weep for all she had lost, and then the next second, on bumping into him, she had been like a bitch in heat, angry and frustrated and more than ready to be bent over the nearest table and fucked within an inch of her life.

Guilt gnawed at her insides, fighting the butterflies in her stomach. She shouldn’t be thinking like that. How could she betray her mate that way? Poor Jason. He had done nothing to deserve any of this.

“Damn it!” she growled to herself, throwing her sunglasses at the bed so she could wipe away the tears that had started to fall.

Maybe she should never have come to Nightstar, after all.

Chapter 5 - Hanson

Elena’s scent remained in Hanson’s nostrils even when he slipped out through the kitchen and into the gardens. Barely managing to acknowledge Bonnie’s greeting with a wave, he stormed across the patio and over the lawn.

The wolf inside him was clawing at his insides, desperate to get out and turn right around, to get back to her. The scent of her was just too intoxicating. It made him feel all manner of things he would rather not feel. Besides, she was Eddie’s sister, and the way he had been looking at him for the last few days didn’t suggest he would be too thrilled if he went anywhere near her.

He couldn’t afford to rile one of the senior members of the pack, whether she was just plain distracting or not.

Somehow, she was even more than that.

He stopped in the small rose garden at the bottom of the lawn, hidden behind a large hedgerow, and closed his eyes in an attempt to calm himself, but all he could see was her face. Her beautiful face and that goddamn infuriatingly stubborn expression.

How could she possibly say he was creeping around? What right did she have to be such a damned bitch toward him? And why did it make him want to grip her by the throat and take her right there in that fucking hallway?

Growling, his eyes still closed, he ran his fingers through his hair and pulled on the roots until it hurt. Even that couldn’t rid him of the memory of her. She continued to glower back at him behind his eyelids, her arms crossed, her gaze never leaving his. It was almost as if she were still standing right before him.

But the ache in his chest told him she wasn’t. From the second she had left him, he felt empty inside. And the tone of her voice worried him. Something was upsetting her. He was certain of it. And he suspected, deep down, that it had absolutely nothing to do with him. At least, he hoped that it didn’t, because the thought of upsetting such a beautiful creature angered him.

Nobody should ever make someone like her feel anything but adored.

His fingernails elongated into claws, digging painfully into his palms as he dropped them to his sides. What the hell had she done to him? He wasn’t some soppy, love-sick idiot who couldn’t get a she-wolf out of his head, especially one he had never even laid a hand on.

He’d gotten downright freaky with more than a handful of female wolves in his time, and he’d even felt the slight stirrings of something that might possibly be love, but it had always ended the same way, with him realizing he had been a fool.

He was a fool now, but not because he thought he loved Elena. How could that even be possible? The only words they had spoken to each other had been frustrating and awkward and aggressive. And besides, he had only laid eyes on her twice, a couple of minutes a time.

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