Page 7 of Slay All Day

I chuckled at her joke—I’d heard plenty of them over the years—and handed her a lid. “Do you want anything to eat before we head over to Connor’s house?”

She shook her head. “Nah, we can grab lunch later.”

“Sounds like a plan,” I agreed, lacing my fingers through hers. I scanned her from head to toe but didn’t spot signs that she was carrying any weapons. “Do you have everything you need before we go?”

“I’m ready for anything,” she confirmed, patting the pockets at the top of her thighs. Remembering the sexy sheaths she used to strap the blades to her legs got me hot as fuck. My cock was painfully hard even though I’d just had her in the shower. But I couldn’t do anything about it at the moment, so I shifted the hard length into a more comfortable position while she was walking down the sidewalk in front of me. She giggled, turning to grin at me and murmured, “Busted.”

“I have a feeling walking around with a hard-on is going to be a perpetual problem for me when you’re near.” I didn’t feel any embarrassment over my body’s reaction to my sexy mate. “And that I’m not going to be able to put much past you.”

She wagged her brows in an exaggerated manner. “I didn’t even sense that through the mating bond. It was just guesstimate on my part.”

“Mating bond?” Jake echoed from across the street.

Denica laughed and shook her head. “We’ve been outside your house for what? Thirty seconds?”

“There really are no secrets in a streak of tiger shifters.” I tapped under my ear as Jake met us in front of Connor’s house. “Hearing is the most acute of our senses.”

“Yet I didn’t hear shit about you finding your mate until now,” Jake complained, slapping me on the back. “Did you find her in the wilderness while you let your tiger free for the weekend? Maybe I need to take my own nature vacation soon.”

“Nope, I found her when she dropped from the sky right over there”—I jerked my thumb over my shoulder toward the middle of the street—“in the middle of the night.”

“Whoa. Hold up.” Jake’s gaze darted back and forth between Denica and me as recognition dawned in his eyes. “You’re the first of us to find your mate, and she’s a dragon shifter who is a vampire slayer?”

I flung my arm over Denica’s shoulder and grinned. “Yup.”

He whistled. “Damn, that’s badass.”

“What a difference nine hours makes,” Connor said from behind us.

We turned to face him, and I shrugged. “The best nine hours of my life.”

“Mine, too.” Denica leaned into my side and smiled.

“I’m happy for you both,” Connor offered his congratulations without approaching us. As unattached males, he and Jake knew better than to get too close to my mate. Shifters were territorial by nature, and those instincts were fiercest when they were newly mated. I had been told that the driving need to keep everyone else away would lessen a little once the claiming words were spoken, but I didn’t see how that would ever be possible. It definitely didn’t happen in the hour or so before the four of us were getting ready to leave for Pine Ridge.

“We’ll take two cars, in case we need to split up,” Connor decided.

My tiger went alert, eyeing the two males he considered to be family with suspicion. “Denica is with me.”

“No shit,” Jake muttered, holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Your furry ass would chase my car down if I tried to drive away with your mate.”

I couldn’t deny the accusation—not when it was one hundred percent accurate.

7

Denica

Trey’s flash of jealousy—as unnecessary as it was since I had zero interest in any man other than him—didn’t bother me. If we were around a group of single females, I would’ve been feeling territorial over him as well. But there was a time and place for everything...and this wasn’t the moment when either of us should be pissing figurative circles around each other.

I elbowed my mate in the side before looking at Connor. “You have a vampire problem, and I’m an E.V.I.E. slayer. The normal shifter hierarchy doesn’t apply here. I get that you're the alpha and Trey is your head enforcer, but I’m the one in charge of this situation until the bloodsucker we’re after has been neutralized.”

I was impressed when the tiger shifter inclined his head in acknowledgment of the accuracy of what I was saying. Many alphas had issues ceding control to a slayer, even when they were the one to call E.V.I.E. for assistance in the first place. Jake wasn’t going to be an issue since his inherent dominance level was lesser than mine. That only left my mate, who was bound to be the most difficult to convince because his protective instincts would be urging him to keep me safe. But he’d have to figure out a way to push those impulses down because I couldn’t afford to be worried about him trying to shield me while I was taking down a vampire who’d drained three humans in as many days. If he was following a pattern, we were in a race against time to prevent him from taking another life.

I waited until we were in the privacy of his car before I said, “You have however long it takes for us to drive to Pine Ridge to get all of the ranting and raving out of your system.”

He backed out of the driveway and pulled behind Jake’s car, following him and Connor down the street. “You think I have a problem with deferring to you in anything vampire-related when I’ve never faced off against one, and you’ve been dedicated to taking them down for God only knows how long?”

After he put it that way, I wasn’t sure how to respond without sounding ridiculous. It was easier to focus on the last part, so that was what I did. “A little more than a decade.”

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