Page 24 of Purchased

“Do you remember your pack? Or anything about your parents?”

Her face goes quiet and solemn again. Once again, I have chosen the wrong conversational path.

She does not want to talk about herself. I will not get information by bald questioning. I’ll have to get in touch with the director of the orphanage for information. I don’t even know her last name. Does she?

“What’s your last name?”

She shakes her head and utters something like a curse under her breath.

“You’re not going to tell me anything about yourself?”

She sighs and looks at me as if I am stupid. “I don’t know anything about myself. Everything I ever thought I knew, I got told was a lie. So there’s nothing I can tell you about myself, not that I know is true.”

I make another mental note to kill the director. The man clearly knew precisely what and probably who he had in his custody. He should have reached out to the relevant packs to find her an appropriate home, a place for her to be raised among her own kind. Instead, he hoarded her for money, denied her truth, had her drugged into submission, and caused potentially irreparable damage. He hurt my mate. He will suffer for it.

I want to fuck her.

Even in the midst of sympathy and defensive rage, I feel the need to be inside her. It feels wrong, to need her so deeply, to be so consumed with desire that the tragedy I see in her eyes and every line in her face cannot take priority in this moment.

But she does not want to talk about it. She cannot tell me more than she knows, and the truth of the matter is, if this mate bond is as strong as I feel it to be, she wants my cock far more than she wants my questions.

Our bond demands consummation.

She is lost. Adrift in the world. Separated from her kind. Separated from herself. Our mating will bring her back.

Perhaps that is why, in spite of all the human tendencies to treat someone like her as a victim who should not be touched, my only desire is to take her, to be inside her, and to claim her as my own. It is entirely natural for me to be consumed with need for this perfect creature who is the mate nature, in all her wisdom, made for me.

All my life I have been told how it feels to meet one’s mate, how it is to finally feel complete, to know that the search is over. We won’t entirely enjoy that feeling until we have mated, until this sweet but spicy thing has spread her thighs for me and welcomed me into her depths.

But still, I am restraining my most animal passions out of concern for the fact that they would probably frighten her if she had any idea how intensely I want her.

Her lips quirk into something faintly reminiscent of a smile.

“You’re looking at me like you want to eat me.”

“I do want to devour you, but you’ll stay intact.”

She shifts on the bed, looking at me with the wide eyes of prey. That is not the reaction I want to arouse in her. I want to see her anticipation, her need. I don’t want her to be afraid of being with me intimately.

It all raises the question yet again. The question I don’t think I can survive not knowing the answer to. The question that drives me, torments me, and commands me to find an answer to it no matter what.

How did she shift without having been mated by me?

I want to ask her again who she has slept with, but I know how that question will come across. It will seem like petty jealousy. It will diminish me in her eyes, and that I will not have.

It is a question only I am struggling with because for the moment, I am sure the pack assumes we consummated quickly. They do not know that she shifted on her own accord, that she fled me in a wolf form I had never seen before. Maybe the boys put two and two together, the fact that she was in her wolf form and I was not in the room, the fact that I hadn’t mentioned needing the painkillers immediately, and was talking about the whole thing as something that was yet to happen.

That doesn’t matter. What does matter is someone has been where only I should ever have been.

Jealousy sparks through me at the same time as concern. Something must have happened to her before I met her. Something terrible, perhaps. A lone wolf may have smelled her out, decided to take advantage of her. I can imagine her being loose in the Scottish wilds, roaming restlessly, eager for any acknowledgement of her true self.

A female wolf cannot shift for the first time until she has been mated. That is common knowledge. It is also widely regarded that it has to be a fated mate to trigger the shift, but that is where the whole argument starts to become gray. Some insist that only a true soulmate can bring out the beast in a female shifter, but nature is a messier creature than that. She makes a lot of spares. She revels in options.

It may be that we each have only one true fated mate, one who brings us the full joy of connection, the depths of animal soul connection, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy others to lesser degrees. According to nature’s design, it is always better to breed with a lesser option than to avoid breeding at all.

I look at Beatrix and am tortured by the notion of someone else putting so much as a finger on her.

“Have you been in love before, Beatrix?”

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