Page 69 of Just a Friend for the Lion
And I’m still nowhere.
How can I explain if she won’t let me close enough to speak?
How can I beg her forgiveness when she won’t even look at me?
So here I am.
Big bad Lion Shifter, camping out on the curb outside Pizza Girls like a lost dog with a bouquet.
Zero pride left.
Pun intended.
Maybe I should be embarrassed, but I’m not. I’m too far gone for that.
My heart’s pounding, my hands are sweating, and my Lion is pacing, snarling, shredding me from the inside out.
MJ isn’t just some woman I hooked up with.
She isn’t just a flingor a mistake.
She’s my mate.
My everything.
And I fucked it up so royally I can’t even blame her for running.
I can still smell her here—faint but lingering, like laughter, sugar, and the memory of her thighs squeezing tight around me while I bit down and marked her.
Yeah. Marked.
She’s wearing my mating bite, and being away from her is killing me. Literally.
That wasn’t sex. That was forever.
And she bolted like I’d branded her with a damn cattle iron instead of giving her my soul.
And to make matters worse? Tricia—my now ex-HR specialist—decided to fill her head with some bullshit about meservicingPride females.
For the record?
No.
Not now. Not ever.
I walked away from that life for a reason.
I don’t need anything muddying up my loyalty to MJ.
She is it.
She is the beginning and end of every damn thing for me.
And yet my mother—Gods help me.
I should’ve known better than to expect her to understand. She left me half a dozen voicemails, her voice cracking, wailing about how disappointed she was that I wasn’t fulfilling mydutyto the Pride.
That I wasn’t the Lion stud she always imagined I’d be.
