Page 13 of Wolf's Wild Woman

“Is sex always like this?” she asked quietly.

“Between us, yes.”

She’d never know what it might be with someone else. I’d kill any man who tried.

“What makes you think we’re mates?”

My hand stilled at her question, and she turned to look at me.

“We just met, Taylor. Shouldn’t it take more than a chance meeting? We barely know each other.”

“I know what I know,” I disagreed. “You’re my mate. I knew it the moment I scented you in that parking lot.”

“You scented me?”

She seemed uncertain about how to feel about that.

“Your unique scent draws me like a moth to the flame. You burn me alive. We belong together. Can’t you feel it?”

I wanted her to say yes. I needed that yes. Instead, she turned in my arms. My cock slipped free. When she lay on her back, she reached up and ran her fingers over my beard. “What happened?”

As my mate, she deserved no less than the truth. She needed to know who I was, and that included where I’d come from and what I was capable of.

“My mother gave them to me the night she tried to kill me.”

“She…” Rebel shook her head in denial.

“Yes,” I told her. “My father didn’t want anything to do with her or me. He’d set his sights on another woman for his mate and couldn’t have his lover and her bastard son messing stuff up. Not for the alpha. So he threw us out of the pack. He eventually consented to let her back in on one condition. She got rid of the child.”

“I thought my mom was a bitch,” Rebel said, tears filling her eyes. “But at least, she kept me. I had a home and a pack.”

“Your mom is a bitch. Mine was worse.”

“Past tense?” she questioned.

“She tried to hang me. Thanks to her ineptitude, I managed to work my chin under the rope and take the pressure off my neck. I might have died anyway, but luckily, I was found. Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t before my skin was shredded. It healed eventually, but I’ll always have the scars where it tore open.” Just as I’d always have this voice.

“How old were you?”

“Five.”

“What about shifting? Wouldn’t it have healed you?”

“I was too weak from blood loss. The woman who found me did everything she could to keep me alive. Luckily for me she knew what she was doing.” Still, it had taken me nearly a year to shift. Maybe if I’d been older, more attuned to the animal within me. But I’d been young, unsure, just learning about who and what I was.

Tears spilled from her eyes, and she wrapped around me as if trying to protect the boy I’d been. It was too late for the boy, but I could give her the man he’d grown into. The good and the bad. All of me.

“Tell me her death was yours,” she demanded. “Tell me you hunted her down and killed her for what she’d done.”

I nodded. “Both of them. I didn’t grow the facial hair until after that. I…I wanted my scarred face to be the last thing they saw, wanted them to know. I walked away after that. Wandered around, picking up work when and where I could until I came across Bastion, his sister Belinda, who most of us call Bee, and Cyan.”

“They took you in.” It was a statement, but I continued anyway.

“Bee was actually the one who approached me. Walked right up, put her hand on my chest, and told me I’d do. Then she turned to Cyan and said I’d be his right hand. Told me to guard him closely. A week later, I saved Cyan’s life when he was attacked by a group of wolves outside a bar. They didn’t count on me being there.”

“She couldn’t have known that was going to happen!”

“No, she couldn’t have known, but I think she had a sense something was going to happen. You’ll meet her soon. She’s different. I don’t know how to explain it, but she knows things you’d swear she couldn’t.”

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