Page 22 of Monster Mate

Maybe soul mates were a load of crap. Maybe they weren’t. She wasn’t sure.

What she did know with absolute certainty was that she was going to fuck Riordan. And soon if she had her way.

Because there was no way she could stay in the friendzone with a man of his caliber.

All she had to do was work up the nerve to tell him how she was feeling. Easy, right?

She wished.

CHAPTER 14

Something was different.

Riordan could feel it. He couldn’t identify it, but he could feel it in his bones.

Something had changed in the way Roxie responded to him. They’d had what he would consider normal conversations throughout the day. It had been lovely. Just being with her, doing normal things that any other couple might do together, felt so…right.

Then, at some point during lunch, it was like a switch had flipped inside her, and suddenly, she was…off. She’d barely looked at him the rest of the day. And she’d gnawed her thumbnail practically down to the bone. He’d noticed she only did that when she was feeling anxious.

He'd been wracking his brain ever since to figure out what he could’ve done or said to upset her. But maybe it hadn’t been him at all. Maybe it had been the stares of the strangers at the diner.

He’d grown accustomed to the looks of disgust, fear, and occasionally blatant sexual interest that often followed him when he was amongst humans. But she wasn’t. Maybe seeing the way everyone looked at him reminded her what her life with him might be like. She’d always be on display, like an animal in a zoo.

But whatever was on her mind, she wasn’t in any hurry to share it. She’d been quiet throughout dinner, which had been an adventure in and of itself.

Winston had prepared what he called beanie weenies, which consisted of some sort of processed meat-like product mixed with lumpy brown goo. It looked like an odd mix of vomit and diarrhea on the plate, so Riordan hadn’t been able to make himself try it, despite Roxie’s assurances that it was good. He’d made himself some pasta and had called it a day. Winston had merely shrugged and slid a plate in front of Waldo, who lapped up the brown disaster with gusto.

After that, Winston and Waldo passed out on the couch during Jeopardy. For a moment, Riordan worried that Winston had died, because he’d been mid-sentence, shouting out an answer when he’d slumped over and fell into unconsciousness. But Roxie assured him this was not an isolated occurrence. Winston’s typical bedtime was 7:30ish until baseball and NASCAR season, when he would stay up until nine. So, with that in mind, Riordan had resisted the urge to hold a mirror up under the man’s nose to make sure he was still breathing.

Now Riordan was sitting in the reading nook with Roxie as she thumbed through a book she clearly wasn’t actually reading. She was right next to him, and somehow still a million miles away.

He cleared his throat and instantly felt guilty when she flinched. “Can we talk about what’s been bothering you since lunch?”

She let out a deep sigh and closed her book. “You noticed, huh? Why am I not surprised?”

“Everything you do fascinates me. So, when you’re not yourself, I notice.”

She glanced up at him from underneath her lashes. “That’s what I don’t understand. You barely know me. How is it that you notice so much?”

He shrugged. “It’s possible that I’m more attuned to your emotions than I would be to anyone else’s.”

“Because of the mate thing?”

“Because of that,” he agreed quietly.

She stretched over, replaced her book on the shelf, then crossed her legs into the lotus position to face him. “I’m just confused by this whole thing.” She gestured between them.

His brow furrowed. “Our…friendship?”

Roxie let out a frustrated growl that reached into his pants, grabbed his cock, and gave it a good, firm squeeze. “That’s just it. I want to be your friend. I want to get to know you. But…OK, I’m just going to spit it out. I’m super attracted to you, and half the time we were together today, I was thinking about fucking you until neither of us can walk straight for a week.”

Riordan’s brain short-circuited. All his synapses fired and fizzled out at once, like a transformer getting hit by lightning and raining sparks as it burned. Some distant part of him realized he needed to respond. But he’d swear on his life he couldn’t think of anything but 2.1 seconds.

That was the amount of time it’d take to teleport her to his bedroom and get her naked.

She threw her hands up. “See? And now you look horrified. You probably think I’m an idiot since I’m the one who pushed the whole friends agenda to begin with.”

He wasn’t sure his brain was working yet, but his body was. Because when she tried to stand up and move away from him, he managed to snag her wrist and tug her back until she tumbled into his lap. She let out a breathy gasp as her ass met his erection.

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