Page 37 of Betrayed Pregnant Mate

“They are tolerating me, because they feel bad for me.”

“Linnea loves you.”

“Linnea loves everybody.”

I let out a frustrated growl, scooting closer to him gathering his hands to my chest.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I rasp.

“When should I have told you?” he asks, bringing his eyes to mine, and they look so tired, so completely worn out that I just want to cradle him in my arms. The rage from earlier is gone, leaving something empty and soft in its wake. “That day, in the hospital, when I realized?”

“In New York?” I ask, eyes widening. “You knew that soon?”

“Yeah, Veronica,” he laughs again, relaxing his hands. “I knew the first time I looked at you, but if I told you, you wouldn’t have believed me, and probably would have had me locked up in the psych ward.”

“Okay,” I say, nodding, thinking of the person I was then and how I still don’t quite believe all of this now, “that’s fair.”

“Then, I was…gone,” he says, “and the next time I saw, you, I was becoming aware of the fact that you were one of the people I kidnapped and locked in a basement. I was pretty sure you didn’t want to hear that from me. And still, I didn’t think you would believe me. And then, everything happened so quickly with the vamp bites, and I felt like there was nothing I could do. I didn’t want to tell Maisie,” he says, a tear sliding down his cheek as he looks away from me, “but I should have. It would have been better than condemning you to this.”

“Percy,” I say, and this time, when I scoot forward, I’m practically in his lap. I reach out, running my hand through his curls, laughing, when I realize he still has his fake side burns on for his werewolf costume. I peel them off slowly, and he grimaces at the ground.

We stay like that for a moment as I set them off to the side.

“Aris and Linnea are blood-bonded,” I murmur, “right?”

“Yeah,” he says roughly.

“And they’re making it work. So—what? It can’t be that big of a deal, right?”

“It feels like a big deal,” he says, his throat working, his eyes dragging up to me. “Does it feel like a big deal to you?”

“I think about you all the time,” I admit, closing my eyes. “I can’t stop thinking about you. I don’t know why or how any of this is happening, but the one constant thought has always been you.”

Percy exhales, hard.

“Veronica,” he laughs, “I haven’t stopped thinking about you since the day I saw you in the hospital.”

“Then why did you leave?”

He closes his eyes, taking a long, slow breath.

“You heard the way Maisie talked about it—a human with a shifter. It’s unheard of, and that’s for a reason. It just doesn’t work. Human bodies are too weak to survive…intimacy with a shifter. It could cause major damage, or even kill them.”

“I don’t feel weak,” I say, realizing, that as I saw it, it’s true. I feel stronger than I have in a long, long time. “I feel strong. And it didn’t hurt me last time. What hurts is the way this feels.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, “it does.”

“So, let’s do something about it,” I say, breathing hard, my core already warming at the thought of what might be coming. “I won’t be here forever, and when I leave, I’m assuming some of those feelings will go away. But while I’m here, as long as you need the blood transfusions, I don’t see any reason why we can’t scratch that itch.”

“Scratch that itch,” Percy says, his voice rough.

“Yeah,” I say, moving so I’m straddling him. He sucks in a sharp breath when I reach around to my back, pulling on the single, velvety cord that’s keeping my dress laced up. When it starts to unravel, the dress loosens in the front, falling forward, and I feel Percy go hard underneath me.

My pussy throbs with need, already aching for him.

“Fuck,” he gasps, then, as though he can’t stop himself, he leans forward, pressing his forehead to the middle of my chest. I cry out when he takes one of my nipples in his mouth, biting around the edge the way he knows I like.

Because he knows what I like. Because we’ve done this before.

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