Page 24 of The Alpha's Forced Bullied Mate

Faye puffed up. “He literallybulliedme in front of you. Are you serious right now?”

Now I could see the true definition of her muscles, the sleek outline of her biceps and the striking texture of her abs. She was thick in many ways, but she was strong, too. Her thick thighs tensed up, appearing like she was about to pop a watermelon between them. I grabbed at the collar of my shirt and loosened it a bit as I got flushed again with another heat wave that didn’t at all feel like anger but something far better.

Something I wanted to get to before her parents chased her off again.

“It’s true,” I stepped in, “I did bully her.”

All eyes landed on me. Sara looked surprised, and Simon just looked bored. Cliff was like a deer stuck on a train track with the five o’clock speeding toward him. I clasped Faye’s hand at my side like it was the most natural thing in the world—because it was.

“I set up a prank with her brother,” I said while nodding to Cliff, “and we pulled it off in front of the entire pack. She was mortified.”

“She threw a tantrum over a silly joke,” Sara said with a polite smile. When she looked at Faye, the politeness dissolved. “You could have just taken the joke maturely. You didn’t have to ruin our house with thatstupidtornado.”

I frowned. “What are you talking about?”

Sara pointed at her daughter like she was part of an accused group of Salem witches. “That—that—thingthere got soupset about your harmless joke that she brought a tornado down from the sky and ruined our home!”

I glanced at Faye and thought about the thunderstorms, the rain, the hurricane winds this pack had suffered… and put it all together. “Oh.”

“Ohis right,” Sara announced proudly. “It was probably best that she ran off before she could do more damage.”

Cliff was turning red in the face as he squeezed his fists at his sides. “She couldn’t control her powers, Mom. If you had just—”

“Don’t you talk back to me.” Sara shot him a harsh look that shut him up quickly.

I growled. “Don’t you dare speak to one of my pack members like that.”

Sara gulped while focusing on me. “What? I just… He’s my son. I don’t—”

“I don’t care who he is to you, Sara. And I certainly don’t care for the way you’ve been treating my mate since you walked in here.”

Her gaze fell to Faye, filling with regret. When she focused on me again, her eyes were glossy, like she was about to cry. “I’m sorry, Alpha. I didn’t know. I just thought—”

“That Faye was here to take another round of word lashings from you?” I jabbed. “You make me sick with how you’ve disrespected your daughter—both back then and now.”

Sara frowned. “But you were the one who—”

“I’m the one who’s going to make things right,” I boomed, “and that starts with this—” I turned to Faye and held her handsbetween us with one hand while reaching for her face. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have ever done that to you.”

Faye looked up at me with those round wolf eyes, all that hazel-brown turning into a glorious gold and swirling with drops of lavender again. The air around us seemed to spark, electrified by what I’d said, charged with an attraction I couldn’t deny.

“I’m sorry,” I repeated in a lower voice. “I’ll make sure to always respect you from now on.”

Her throat clenched with another gulp. She stared up at me with this unreadable expression that I knew was reflective of her inner world being thrown into chaos. All that misery and distrust, all the time we’d spent in the car with her tied up in the backseat—it was gone. What was left was her and me, nobody else.

As her lips parted, she shivered. I held her hands tighter as she stood on her toes and whispered, “I forgive you.”

Chapter 8 - Faye

My heart was racing. My entire core was on fire, the heat growing and taking over until I was certain that I only wanted one thing right now.

Hector.

I heard the phrase leave my lips. It stunned my parents and my brother as intended. It stunned Hector the most, leaving him looking like he was wondering what he was supposed to do now.

I couldn’t believe I just lied to him. It wasn’t every day my childhood bully decided to kidnap me, hug me, and then defend me. And then he took it a step further by apologizing to me in front of the other two bullies of my childhood—my parents. Even my brother looked like he had stepped into an episode ofThe Twilight Zoneright along with me.

Did he really think I would forgive him that easily? Shoot, I knew these people wanted a show. They wanted their accolades and rewards for nothing. They wanted me to be the perfect fit, and I could see now what Hector was doing. He was trying to prove that he could make anything work—evenmeas a mate.

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