Chapter 1 #2
I laughed dryly, the sound like sandpaper in my throat. “Let me guess. My dear grandmother is the evil mastermind.” The migraine intensified, a steady drumbeat behind my eyes.
“Yes, but how—”
I cut him off. “My grandmother is a bitter, vengeful woman. A couple of years ago, she tried to hire me to work for her—and offered me millions, actually. When I refused…” I snorted, the sound more feline than human.
“Let me put it this way. She was not pleased. Ever since, she’s been working overtime to sabotage my work and business connections, waging all-out war against me.
I guess she’s deciding to move to plan B—wipe me off the board completely. ”
I tightened my fingers around the phone, but I wasn’t scared of or intimidated by Tabia. She had no love for me, nor I her, not after what she’d done to her own daughter—my mother—and to me. The memory of my mother’s funeral flashed through my mind. Me alone at seventeen, Tabia nowhere to be found.
“So there’s bad blood between you two,” he observed, mastering understatement.
“Yup.” My tongue clicked against the roof of my mouth. “Somehow she knows that I’m close to a breakthrough, and she’s getting fucking desperate to stop me.” A savage smile curved my lips. “And I’m determined to destroy her Big Pharma empire.” My cheetah rumbled with approval at the thought.
“Anyway, enough about my family drama. Brody… he’s one of your pack enforcers, right?
” I asked, massaging my temple. The OIA brief was dense with information about the Black Forest pre-feral symptoms crisis and the key players in the area, but right now my brain was fried from twenty hours of travel, the details blurring together.
“Correct. Brody’s also our resident botanical expert. He owns and runs Thornbern Brewstillery, and in his spare time, he has been crafting a tonic that temporarily eases the pre-feral symptoms. His knowledge might complement your scientific approach. Anyway, I’ve got to go. See you in town.”
Our call ended abruptly. I spotted my luggage making another turn on the carousel.
I shoved my cell into my front pocket and hoisted my stuff off the carousel with a grunt. Striding through the small airport, I stopped when my phone pinged. Pulling it out, I read a text from Brody.
brODY (TEXT): I’m outside, Dr. Dhahabu.
Just for fun, I took a selfie with an exaggerated pouty look and sent it to him. A small rebellion against the day’s tension—see, I can be unprofessional too. When I saw his next text, his selfie, my fingers twitched and I almost dropped my phone.
My lungs seized mid-breath.
The airport around me blurred at the edges, sound receding until all I could hear was the thundering sound.
That face.
Those eyes.
Twenty-five years older but unmistakable. Like a ghost stepping from the shadows of my nightmares.
Brody. The name hit me now with cruel irony.
When Quinn had mentioned it on the phone, it had meant nothing to me.
How could it? We’d never exchanged names or personal details when we’d met.
Just primal recognition. The electric jolt of “mate” that had burned through my blood like wildfire before he’d rejected me and then walked away.
For years, my nightmares had featured a nameless betrayer whose face I couldn’t forget, whose scent lingered in my memory. Now fate had given him a name and brought him back into my life again.
My knees buckled as something wild and foreign erupted inside me, clawing up from depths where I’d buried it under years of careful control.
I slammed a hand against the wall, fingers splayed, struggling to remain upright as my feline half stretched and yawned, breaking through chains I’d spent decades forging.
Her presence filled every corner of my consciousness, pushing against the boundaries of my skin until I feared I might shift right there in the terminal.
The familiar burn started at the base of my spine, racing upward with terrifying speed.
Mate, she purred, the word rippling through my mind with such visceral pleasure that saliva flooded my mouth. A sound I’d silenced since that day in Kenya now returned with the force of a tsunami breaking through paper-thin walls.
The protective way he’d looked at me when he’d shifted back to human form, naked and fucking perfect.
The shocked expression on his face before he told me, “You’re my fated mate.”
Then the soul-crushing devastation when he rejected me and turned his back on me like I meant nothing.
No. Not mate. Never mate. Betrayer, I snarled back at her, forcing her down with a viciousness born of two decades of practice. My mental claws dug into her, shoving her back into the cage I’d built specially for her.
A wave of nausea hit me so hard I had to swallow bile.
My hands began to shake, not with desire but with pure, undiluted rage that turned my vision red at the edges.
Every old wound, every carefully formed piece of scar tissue over my heart, was suddenly ripped open, raw and bleeding.
Years of careful healing undone in an instant.
What the hell?
No… No… It can’t be.
My jaw clenched so tight I could hear my teeth grinding.
Heat flooded my body. Not the warmth of attraction but the burning fire of fury so intense I could taste metal on my tongue—copper and rage.
I suddenly became aware I was standing completely still in the middle of the airport, my breathing so rapid and shallow I was on the verge of hyperventilating.
A child gave me a curious look as he passed, tugging his mother’s hand.
“Get it together, Rozi,” I whispered to myself.
Forcing my leaden legs to move, I exited the airport through the automatic doors that hissed open like a warning.
And right outside the glass doors was him, leaning against a black SUV with beefy arms crossed, looking like he’d stepped straight out of my most conflicted dreams.
He towered next to the SUV, at least six foot four of solid muscle and barely contained power.
His military-short black hair couldn’t disguise the wildness underneath, the predator lurking just beneath human skin.
A black T-shirt stretched across his chest like a second skin, outlining planes and ridges that I remembered from a lifetime ago.
His jeans hugged thick thighs that tensed slightly as our gazes met—gray eyes locking on mine with an intensity that stole my breath.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed him. Two women with rolling suitcases slowed their pace, openly staring as they passed.
One of them actually licked her lips, whispering something to her friend that made them both laugh.
My enhanced hearing caught her words, “I’d climb that like a tree.
” A businesswoman in a crisp suit did a double take so dramatic she nearly walked into a pillar.
Even the elderly lady waiting for her ride couldn’t help but steal appreciative glances, her weathered cheeks pinking slightly.
My cheetah snarled beneath my skin, and my hackles rose in territorial fury. Mine, she insisted, though I vehemently disagreed. The primal possessiveness that surged through me was as unwelcome as it was powerful, a biological imperative I couldn’t fully control. I had no claim on him.
I had no claim on him.
Wanted no claim on him.
Yet my fingers itched to claw the eyes out of every female whose gaze lingered too long, my nails extending slightly before I forced them back to human form with a painful effort of will.
Years of anger, and my treacherous body still recognized him as a mate, every cell vibrating in recognition, every sense heightened and focused solely on him.
My brain automatically cataloged the changes the time had carved into him—threads of silver at his temples that caught the late-afternoon sun, lines at the corners of his eyes that deepened as his pupils dilated, recognizing me across the distance and decades.
His scent carried on the breeze that my body remembered even when my mind wished to forget.
My eye caught something else, a subtle tension in his left hand, the way he shifted his weight as if favoring that side.
I noted it automatically. An old injury?
A recent wound? But I couldn’t focus on those details, not when every cell in my body screamed in recognition of the mate who had rejected me, leaving me to piece myself together from fragments.
My vision tunneled until all I could see was him. The same man who had walked away, leaving me holding the tattered remains of what should have been unbreakable.
One heartbeat, he was a stranger. The next, he was the wound that had never fully healed.
Fuck. My. Life.
Years of building walls, of proving myself, of becoming someone who didn’t need anyone, especially not him. And now fate had thrown us back together with the subtlety of a wrecking ball.
Something primal and forgotten surged beneath my skin, a current of recognition that raced through nerve endings I’d numbed years ago.
My chest burned from the inside out, each heartbeat pumping fire through veins that suddenly felt too small to contain it.
A vibration started low in my throat, unbidden and horrifying, the beginning of a purr—my body’s instinctive response to his presence before my brain could slam down on the emergency brake.
I swallowed hard, choking off the sound before it could escape.
Inside my mind, my cheetah half stretched like she’d awakened from a long slumber. Her purr echoed between my ears, drowning out the airport announcements, my rationality, everything except the triumphant sound of her satisfaction.
Our fated mate has returned, she whispered through our mental link.
He’s not our mate, I snarled back, mental claws extended. He lost that right when he left me behind.
But my traitorous body wasn’t listening, already attuning itself to his presence like a compass finding true north.
Blood rushed in my ears, and deep in my core, an ache began to build that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with a primal need I’d spent years pretending didn’t exist. My skin felt too tight, too hot, too sensitive, every nerve ending suddenly awake and screaming his name.
He’s back in my life.
And I’m so completely, utterly screwed.
His nostrils flared slightly as if he could smell my distress, my fury, my unwanted arousal. His lips parted as if to speak my name.
I had two weeks to prove my treatment worked, to save eighteen unmated males from losing their humanity completely, and to do it all while navigating a town that already hated my family name.
Oh, and to avoid the fated mate I’d spent a lifetime trying to forget.
No pressure… none at all.
I took one step forward, then another. Toward my past, my future, and, quite possibly, my destruction.