Page 30 of Savagely Mated

Horns blare as I follow this psychopath into an alley where the chase ends abruptly as he pulls up with screaming tires, his bike horizontal to mine.

It occurs to me that this is probably a trap. There are a lot of hijackings in Eclipse. Crime is rampant here. But this guy is going to regret fucking with me today. I am sure of that. Nobody is going to notice a Delivery 2 Go driver’s death. They truly arethe house flies of the city, often swatted to the approval of all concerned.

The driver looks at me, still holding my foil-wrapped lunch like a trophy. I wonder if a bunch of people are about to come pouring out of these side doors, or if a shot is about to come from an upper window, but neither of those things happen.

The rider just looks at me. I look back. And finally, idiot that I am, I realize what I am looking at.

Not a man. A woman.

She’s too small to be male, and her jacket sits in a very feminine way on her, flaring out at the hips. Great. I’ve been chasing a random girl. Just what this day needs. More girl trouble.

I’m now even more impressed by her riding. Like most of the yellow-suited menaces who work for that company, she was really throwing the machine around like she didn’t care if she made it to the end of the day. The packages she has on the back swung wildly, but somehow have stayed attached. I don’t know how they pack things there, but someone should study it.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I shout at her.

“What the fuck is wrong withyou?” she shouts back, pushing up her visor. I can see brown eyes at a distance, narrowed in annoyance at me.

“You wanna die, is that it?”

“No, idiot. I wanted breakfast.”

She pulls her helmet off her head and takes a big bite of my burrito. I stare, stunned. There is no fucking way this is happening. What are the odds? How is this even possible?

“…Darcy?”

“Fuck,” she mouths through my food, her eyes widening as she finally recognizes me. I am wearing black leathers and a helmet, so of course she didn’t know who I was. In the few short hours since escaping us, this little menace has somehow gotten hold of a D2G uniform and bike and packages and taken to the streets of Eclipse to steal food.

“Don’t move,” I tell her, making my voice stern. “Don’t you fucking dare even think about moving.” I swing my leg over my bike and walk over to her, half expecting her to ditch the food and drive off. She doesn’t do that.

She takes another bite and looks at me. “What are you going to do? Drag me back to the other two?”

“That was the idea, yeah.”

She gives me a keen look. “You don’t want to do that.”

“I don’t?”

“No,” she says. “You don’t like me. You don’t want me all up in your business every day.”

I lower my voice, with a different inflection this time. “What makes you think I don’t like you?”

The tone does the heavy lifting, because she blushes and instead of taking another giant bite of my burrito, she giggles instead, as if what she has to say makes her feel nervous and uncomfortable. It would be cute, if it weren’t also absolutely insane.

“I can tell,” she says. “You’re always scowling at me, and looking annoyed.”

“We haven’t known one another long enough for there to be analways,” I point out. “First time we met, you got yourself into a duel with me. Second time, you stole my van. Third time, you’ve run away with my burrito.”

“You were giving me looks before I did any of that. You looked pissed off when the others said I was their mate.”

“Did it occur to you that the reason I looked annoyed then was because the idea of sharing my mate doesn’t sit well with me?”

She shakes her head hurriedly. She has taken another bite. She must be starving. She’s got to be absolutely exhausted, actually. We’ve run her ragged. Not a lot of sleep, and then running from us, and then whatever reason she has a delivery bike…

“I know when men like me, and you don’t like me,” she says once she swallows, speaking with the confidence of a girl who knows absolutely nothing about men whatsoever.

I want to bend her over that yellow bike of hers, pull her uniform… where the hell did she get that from? Anyway, I want to pull that down and go to town on her ass. I’ll show her what I want and what I like soon enough.

We’re still in the middle of the city in broad daylight though, and while horrific crashes and casual violence don’t draw much attention, you still can’t just fuck someone on the side of the road, even if you’re in an alley. Yes, we could have murdered each other; that would have been unremarkable. But sex? There are standards. Weird, backwards standards, but standards.

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