Page 98 of The Wild Wolf's Rejected Mate

JUSTUS

I hardly sleep at all,and I’m up before the sun to get hot water for Annie’s tea. I don’t know how long we have, and time is nipping at my heels.

I wake her up by being as loud as I can when I come back from the bonfire, and despite her blurry eyes and grumpy face, I can’t feel bad. I don’t want to miss a second with her.

She grabs whatever is at hand to cover herself and ends up under a haphazard pile of yesterday’s gown, a quilt, a thermal blanket, a pillow, and the sheet that she kicked off the pallet in her restless sleep. My den overflows with the scent of her approaching heat, so thick and delicious on my tongue, so heady.

I can’t afford a fuzzy head. If this is all the time I get with her, I want to remember it all. And I need all my wits to convince her to stay, or at the very least, if nothing else, not to fuck up the mating like I did last time.

I wracked my brain all night for a strategy. Flowers seemed to work, so maybe Max and the other happily mated males are onto something. I don’t want to leave her to rustle up chocolates and treats, though, and it just doesn’t seem like enough.

How do you make a female fall in love with you? In one day, maybe two if you’re lucky?

“Tea,” I say, ducking and cautiously entering the den.

She rubs her eyes, frowning, and makes grabby hands. I smile and pass the tea. She still has the spark from last night. Good.

She sips and tries to raise herself to sit cross-legged, but the blankets are hopelessly tangled, and there’s no way to sort it without spilling the tea. She glares down at the messy pile of blankets around her, her willowy arms raised, the mounds of her lovely breasts showing over the hem of an old patchwork quilt.

She looks like a princess from a picture book with one of those big, poofy dresses, but even better than that because her hair is a complete wild mess, and instead of sparkles and satin, she’s surrounded by my things, saturated in my scent. She looks made for me.

Shewasmade for me, so I must know somewhere deep down how to make this work. If I were a female, what would I want?

I am not going to think about Annie slipping her graceful fingers into her wet slit while she bites her bottom lip and whines my name. That’s not helpful. I am going to stop picturing it now.

Right now.

Fuck.

I get up, turn my back, and rummage in the basket like I’ve got a sudden basket emergency.

What would I want? Well, I would want pants for a start. I couldn’t stand walking around in a bedsheet.

I paw through the contents of the basket with renewed purpose. I have a pair of pants with a drawstring that’ll do for her, and a thin sweater I wear when it’s too cold to go shirtless but not cold enough to go full fur. It’ll hang off her, but it smells like me. Maybe she won’t mind.

I noticed how she has the blankets piled close to her nose so she can tuck her head and take a good whiff of my scent. I’m doing the same, but since her scent is so thick in the air, I’m pretty much breathing twice as fast, once for oxygen, once to soothe the need gnawing in my belly. It’s not doing much for my clarity of thought. I root right past the pants I’m looking for twice before I grab them.

“You can wear these,” I say, setting the sweater and pants on the edge of the pallet. “And then we can—”

We can what?

What do females like to do? Long baths in the stream with no one asking them for anything, talking with the other females, hell, I don’t know—Lelia likes throwing knives with the males. Ashleen likes dancing and cards. Mabli likes propping her feet up and tippling from the flask of moonshine she keeps in her knitting bag.

None of this works for courting. What do I like to do? My mind is blank.

I like her. Annie. My pretty, perfect mate.

She gazes up at me with big brown eyes and delicately sips her tea, a knotted hunk of hair sticking up from the side of her head. I would love to do anything that this female would let me do.

“We’ll do the rounds,” I say. That’s all I can think of. We’ll do what I usually do.

Why is this so hard? It’s Fate, right? And nature. I’m supposed to be born knowing how to woo this female.

Annie stares at me. She’s set her tea down on the floor, and she has the shirt in her hands. Oh. She wants me to leave so she can change.

“Right,” I say, wiping my palms on my canvas pants. Well, I’m proving Plato wrong, moment by moment here. My soul hasknowledge of jack shit, at least when it comes to females. “I’ll go.”

Her scent sours.

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