Page 12 of Mated to the Enemy
Fine, be like that.“Why were they after you?”
More silence.
“Well this is going places quickly,” he snapped, his temper fraying at her unwillingness to speak at all. Why were they wasting their time and energy protecting her?
And according to Kincaid, this was his mate! How was he supposed to trust her if she wouldn’t tell him anything at all about what was going on? Klaue wondered if perhaps the Hunter had made a mistake. After all, he’d openly admitted that it was the first time this sort of thing had happened to him. Maybe he’d read it wrong. There was no way Jessica could be his mate.
She was a human being hunted by House Canis, and also by a mage. Or together, they were both hunting her. He wasn’t sure, though his gut leaned toward the second choice. That beggared the questionwhy? What could she have done that would have a mage willfully working alongside the wolves? And not a weak mage either. One who could open gates in reality, the rents, and transport himself through them. That was no small feat, according to Kaelyn.
Klaue respected his Queen, but just then he found himself cursing her internally for assigning him to protect Jessica. He could handle the physical aspect. Guard duty was nothing new to him. He’d spent several years as one of the bodyguards to the late King when he was younger.
It was the espionage part, the interrogation, that he found difficult. Klaue was no intelligence agent. He wasn’t a spy. Yet it seemed if he was going to get any information at all from her, he was going to have to learn how to extract it from her. By any means necessary.
“Why did you come here?” he asked, changing his tactics. “What was your goal?”
She bit her lip, chewing on it gently while he watched, trying to decipher just what her features were telling him. A part of Klaue wanted to reach out, to help straighten some of her hair, to push it back out of her face. He wanted a clear look at her features. The soft curves of her face, the hard set of her jaw. The way her little upturned nose twitched every so often, quite likely without Jessica even realizing it.
Klaue wanted to examine it all. Up close.Okay, maybe Kincaid is onto something. She is stunning in ways I can’t even identify.That wasn’t enough to convince him, of course, and her attitude threatened to ruin it all. What a mess his night was turning into.
“Protection,” Jessica said at last. “I…I was hoping maybe you would protect me.”
“Why would we do that?” he asked, deciding that being nice wasn’t working, so perhaps he should make it clear that their protection wasn’t just tossed around. If House Canis wanted her that badly, he and his people were in danger.
“I don’t know,” she confessed before falling silent again as their order arrived, one of the kitchen workers dropping the two plates in front of them.
“What?” he said, only barely reining in the temper in his voice at the last minute, at the way she looked at his plate in disdain.
“I’m a vegetarian.”
This time, Klaue couldn’t hold back. But he wasn’t angry, he just laughed. “I’m not going to try and convince you to change. You enjoy the salad, but you’re in a house of meat lovers, Jessica. Better get used to it.”
“I’ll manage,” she snapped, plunging her fork into the pile of greens.
They ate in silence, neither one interested in speaking. Klaue devoured the pile of steak sandwich sliders and almost ordered a second plate, but he chanced a glance across the table and saw Jessica sagging. She was struggling to stay awake, he realized.
“Come on,” he said, getting up and motioning for her to follow.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere for you to sleep,” he muttered, unhappy with what he was about to do.
Still, they weren’t getting any further that night. Jessica had said all she seemed ready to say, and he wasn’t ready to start threatening her to speak up. Not yet.
With the Queen’s orders ringing in his ears, Klaue guided her to his quarters. Jessica tried to protest, but in the end, her exhaustion won out and she passed out on his bed instead of the couch. With a sigh, Klaue collapsed onto the extra-long sofa himself and was out within minutes.
Normally, he would stay up and guard her, ensure she didn’t try to run away or do anything else sneaky, but he couldn’t afford it. Not tonight. Her real motivations be damned, Klaue needed to get as much rest as possible.
Tomorrow, he started the Trials.
