Page 26 of The Alpha's Silent Mate

If I didn’t know by now how much Shay cared, I would now.

It doesn’t take him long to grab a shirt someone must’ve left behind and tear it into strips, which he uses to wrap my ankle. The tight pressure makes me suck in a sharp breath, but the pain doesn’t last long.

The process can’t take more than a few minutes. But by the time he’s rising from his crouch, I’m losing my battle to stay awake. I don’t know what time it is, nor how much sleep I had before my nightmare, but it doesn’t feel like I had nearly enough.

“Nearly done, and then you can sleep,” Shay murmurs before pressing his lips against my brow.

I don’t understand what else he means until he grabs a thin brown towel from a wooden chest at the bottom of the bed and sets to work wiping the rain and mud from my face and hair.

When he sinks into a crouch in front of my chair and his eyes drift to my body, my hands tighten around the fur that I’m holding closed around me.

“Lexa?”

All he wants to do is wipe the mud and the dirt from me. I know that. But the same shyness that invaded my body at the lake rears its ugly head. Shay says nothing else, just waits with the towel in hand.

Keeping my eyes on his face, I release my death grip on the fur and let it fall to my waist.

I hold my breath when he lowers his gaze. Heat fills his eyes as he brushes my hair behind my shoulders, and the tension gripping me eases enough that I can breathe.

He wants me.

“You’re so beautiful,” he murmurs, a note of wonder in his voice. “I can’t believe you’re mine.”

His words touch my heart. They blast away all my lingering embarrassment about a body I’ve never viewed as anything but ordinary, and I smile.

He smiles back.

There’s something about his smile—or maybe it’s the coziness of the cabin, or it’s just him—but it seems the most natural thing in the world to kiss him.

The same heat fills his eyes, so I know he must be thinking of it too.

When he leans toward me, I lick my lips in preparation for his kiss.

But the second before his lips touch mine, a wide yawn nearly cracks my face in two.

As his husky laugh fills the room, heat burns my cheeks.

A second away from him kissing me, and I yawn in his face.

Great, Lexa. Just what a guy wants in a woman.

Still chuckling, he sets to work drying my body. “Kisses later,” he says. “Sleep now.”

* * *

Maybe it’s the cold that wakes me. Maybe it’s the fact I’m alone in bed.

A frown creases my brow, because I didn’t think Shay would leave me, especially without telling me where he was going.

But as I sit up and my fur slides down, the cold makes me grab for them, shivering already.

The fire, which burned so hot and bright the night before, is dark and cold.

Now Shay’s absence makes sense.

If he woke and found that the fire had gone out, he would go and collect wood so I wouldn’t wake up cold. I know Shay enough that he wouldn’t have wanted to leave me alone for long.

But that could have been five minutes ago, or an hour.

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