Page 39 of Roar Letter Word

“Ilove you.”

The words hovered over them as they collapsed into each other’s arms. They were just words, but also, they were far more than that. They filled everything with a completely new meaning. This wasn’t just playing around. This was love. This was serious.

Mahes felt free. He had no more secrets from her, and he didn’t want to have any again. Maybe she didn’t really understand what it was to be a fated mate. Maybe she couldn’t understand it. But she knew that he felt it, and she had told him she loved him. That meant something. That had to mean something.

She loved him. His fated mate loved him.

Knowing that filled him with a lightness, a bubble of joy that he almost felt like he could float on. His hand slipped between her legs, and her lips pressed against his.

Addie stroked Mahes’s cock. The idea of a fated mate kept running through his head as she did, and he wondered how he could explain it to her. Or perhaps, if she already loved him, he just had to wait until she understood.

Sooner or later, she surely would, wouldn’t she? It wasn’t just that they had been forced together … he genuinely enjoyed being around her. He wanted to spend every second with her, and even if it wasn’t for the lion inside him that needed that constant proximity, he would have chosen to do so anyway.

But it wasn’t just that he enjoyed her company, either. Though he did, there was that constant driving need to be near her. He supposed it was a biological response to his fated mate.

The fact was, he both needed and wanted her in a way that sometimes confused and overwhelmed him. And he had been raised with the shifter lore of fated mates his whole life. Was it any wonder she couldn’t quite process such a complex idea just yet? Did it really matter if she couldn’t, as long as she loved him and stayed?

He kissed his way down her neck to her shoulder. One of those kisses turned into a careful bite. She gasped at the sensation.

“I’m sorry,” Mahes said. “I got carried away for a second.”

“No,” she told him. “I liked it.”

But that wasn’t quite what he meant when he said he was getting carried away. He was thinking about something entirely different.

He gave her a quick nibble on her neck. But it didn’t help. And no, he wouldn’t try to hide it this time. He refused to have another secret from her, not after all this.

“There’s another part of Nova Aurora mating you should know about,” he whispered into her ear.

She immediately turned onto her side to face him. “What is it?”

“It’s a tradition or maybe more of an instinct,” Mahes started. “A scratch, delivered by one partner to another, at the moment of climax. The mating mark.”

“You want to mark me?” Addie said. Her voice was higher pitched than normal, an uneasy tremble in the words.

“It's a way of showing commitment,” he explained. “Giving the mark means that a relationship is serious. I’ve left my mark on you, in a literal way.”

Her career was still on Mahes’s mind. After all, wasn’t wanting to do the mating mark now a reaction to that? Soon, she’d be in front of a crowd, singing love songs to all of them. He’d have to remember that she could do perfectly fine without him.

And that was fine. Of course, it was fine. He wasn’t some creep who needed a woman to be totally dedicated to him all the time. And yet, even though he knew it was fine, he still felt weird about it. He wanted something he could hang his hat on, something reliable.

What fit that better than the mating mark?

A part of him worried that he was bringing it up for the wrong reasons, but a greater part of him told him not to doubt himself. It was his instincts that had first told him this woman was his fated mate, and they would guide him as he loved her.

He laid one hand on her hip and the other under her cheek. “I would like to mark you. What do you say?”

“Do it,” she whispered.

Mahes somehow knew she would say that. And yet, he felt the urge to check.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said.

Mahes smiled.

“Wonderful.”

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