Page 70 of Wolf Claimed
“You didn’t know it would lead to this,” Tiernan said. “None of us did.”
“You did, or you suspected. I kept you from going after her.”
Alyssa gripped Rafe by his shirt and pulled his face down to her level. “Stop second-guessing yourself. It’s done. You would have only gotten yourself hurt or killed if you’d tried to stop them. Guns, Rafe. I know you heal fast, but no one survives a bullet to the head. You were right to let them interrogate me.”
“Four agents. I could have taken them.”
“And if you had? Even without killing them, you would have destroyed the treaty and possibly started a war.”
Rafe leaned into her like he wanted to kiss her while Tiernan watched from a few feet away, a lost look on his face. He didn’t attack Rafe or even growl.
“Your bond, Tiernan. Don’t you feel anything?” Maddox asked.
Tiernan’s head snapped up. “Leave. And take Rafe with you. I need to talk withmymate. Myblood-bondedmate.”
The shifter was staking his claim to her, after all. Alyssa still didn’t understand the nature of the blood-bond, of how possessive a shifter could be.
Instead of moving to Tiernan’s side as a newly bonded mate would, she lifted herself up and kissed Rafe, rather sensuously, given the moans that filled the air.
Tiernan paled.
Maddox seized the back of Rafe’s shirt. “Let’s go, Heir. They can’t talk with your tongue down her throat.”
“My tongue wasn’t down her—”
Maddox shoved Rafe through the adjoining door. “Yell if you need us, angel.” He slammed the door shut and leaned against it on his side while Rafe wandered into the room. Maddox was having a hard enough time walking away from Alyssa—as if he were giving her over to another male—and now he had to deal with Rafe, who looked lost and confused. Not a good look on an alpha.
“She kissed me,” Rafe said, stunned. “Twice. It’s been nearly two hours since they blood-bonded. I thought surely by now it would take, but it couldn’t have, or Tiernan would have attacked me.”
“And yet he said his wolf is under control. Maybe her being human affects the bond in ways we didn’t realize. Beyond weakening a shifter’s abilities.”
“But that’s just it,” Rafe said. “Tiernan said his abilities weren’t affected. If the bond didn’t take, then, she’s—”
“What?” Maddox interrupted. “Free to blood-bond you? Do you hear yourself, Heir? She’s not a toy that’s up for grabs by whoever wants her. And you said you don’t want to risk blood-bonding a human. Even if she didn’t compromise Tiernan’s abilities, it’s still a risk to any shifter, especially an alpha.”
Rafe sank to the bed. “Why the fuck can’t I stop thinking about her? Even when I knew she would blood-bond Tiernan, I thought of her as mine. And yet I never felt the need to challenge or kill him for touching her. Just the opposite. I practically threw her at him. That’s not something a mate would do.”
Maddox slumped against the door. He knew all too well how Rafe felt and he’d been asking himself some of the same questions. He’d thought she was destined to blood-bond Tiernan, and that he’d have to forget his growing attraction to her, but his feelings only intensified with time. The fact that the blood-bonding didn’t seem to take, at least not fully. . . Fuck, Maddox wasn’t sorry at all. Like Rafe, he had renewed hope that Alyssa would be his.
Rafe angled his right ear toward the adjoining door. “She’s mad.”
Maddox had been trying to tune out the conversation, to give Alyssa and Tiernan privacy. “It doesn’t matter that the blood-bond isn’t a strong one. She and Tiernan completed the ceremony. She’s his now.”
“Listen to the conversation over there. She seems to think otherwise.”
“You’re not her mate,” Maddox said.
“And yet I know she is mine.”
“That’s the alpha in you. You fucked her, so now you think you have a claim to her.”
When it came right down to it, he felt exactly the same as Rafe. Alyssa was his.
But she was also Tiernan’s.
And Rafe’s.
Shifters didn’t share a mate.
