Page 13 of Rejected By Blood (Mated in Silence 2)

We could get through this together.

As soon as we dropped the cool-and-collected act and put down our invisible shields.

Didn’t seem like that was going to happen anytime soon.

“Eat a little with me, Jillian...mate. My wolf will be all squirmy and demanding until you eat. Um, Shane, there’s a plate for you too.”

That had to be a step in the right direction.

He was blaming it on his wolf.

Fine. I would bite.

I sat next to him, and we ate out of the same bowl. It was almost too polite--too icy. We both acted like robots, never touching, never meeting each other’s gazes.

Shane finished his plate in record time and washed up his own plate.

Of all days to feel lonely, surrounded by my mates, this was not the day. I needed their comfort and their reassurance.

My wolf wanted a lot more, but she would have to stuff it.

“Jillian, I’m going to sleep outside again, as my wolf. I’ll stay by the front door so that…” He looked at Dean who didn’t look up at him. “I just don’t want to invade your privacy. Good night.”

He placed a chaste kiss on my cheek and left. My wolf whined inside me for all that had happened today and for missing her newer mate.

Dean yawned but didn’t move from his chair. He just sat there and stared at the fire. No reading. No writing. No teaching Jillian to write.

He just sat there like life had rendered him unable to do anything else.

I knew he was not familiar with shifter culture for the most part, but he had mentioned something about someone else he knew being in a harem.

He must’ve thought I was a horrible female and mate.

I wrote a note on the board and set it in his lap.

I’m going to bed.

“Wait, Jillian. I’m coming with you. I just want today to be over.”

If I could talk, I would’ve reamed him out for that comment. He wasn’t the only one suffering. He wasn’t the only one having a shitty day.

Maybe it was good I couldn't speak.

I changed into my pajamas and crawled into bed at the same time as him. It wasn’t that big a bed but as he turned his back to me, he might as well have been on the other side of the continent. I shivered in my cold loneliness and prayed the night would erase this day.

Chapter Thirteen

Dean

“What did I do now?”

Two days had passed since Shane had essentially moved in. Or rather outside. He still slept outside our home as if I couldn’t protect my mate, but he ate with us, and whenever he wasn’t working on whatever he did for the pack--no I didn’t know or care--he was hanging around the place.

As had become my habit, when things got stressful, I cut more wood. So much more wood. And that’s what I was doing when Jerad tracked me down. Not far from the compound, a few trees had fallen in a bad storm early in the winter, and I was making sure it didn’t go to waste. It was like a regular day but on steroids.

I’d been turning a tree trunk into kinding with my axe and trying not to think of it as Shane who, according to my mate, was also her mate. And yes, I’d known this was a thing, sort of. I’d had a very odd conversation once back home on the topic and thought it was just the craziest thing ever for a woman to have more than one boyfriend or husband...mate, I now realized.

Some of my friends had been shifters.

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