CHAPTER TWO #2
Finally, his house came up through the trees. He and his brothers had moved to Stone Creek to start over. They’d purchased almost a hundred acres on land no one wanted—or could use. They could use it. To run. To build a new life. Make a new pack.
He slowed once he reached the porch, shouldering the door open, and setting her on her feet. He kept a hand at her waist until her legs could hold her. Or that’s why he told himself to do it. Not because he didn’t want to stop touching her. She stepped back and looked at him.
All of him.
She made it about halfway down his body before she caught herself, and then her eyes snapped up to the ceiling and stayed there.
“Okay. You’re—that’s—there is a lot of—” She waved a hand in his general direction, cheeks going pink. “Pants. Do you own pants? Please tell me you own pants.”
Pants. Who needs pants with mate in the room. The wolf let out a wicked chuckle. She looked. She liked it. She is looking at our cock and her scent just got sweeter. She wants us even if she is trying to hide it.
“Bedroom,” Roman said, already moving, because the pink climbing up her neck was not helping his problem, and neither was the fact that she was still sneaking looks and terrible at hiding it. “The first aid kit is under the kitchen sink. Towels are in the drawer next to it.”
“Kit. Sink. Towels.” She announced it to the ceiling. “Doing that now. While pants happen.”
He came out of the bedroom wearing sweatpants—the wolf sulking the entire time—and came back to find her at his kitchen table with the kit open, towels stacked, and her composure firmly back into place. She pointed at a chair.
“Sit.”
Roman had not taken an order from another living soul in six years. He sat.
“Ella Scott,” she said, tearing open a pack of gloves. “Since you’re going to bleed on my hands, you should know who I am. I’m a nurse at the hospital in town.”
“Roman Matthews.”
“The Matthewss?” she asked.
“I guess.” Roman shrugged his shoulder and regretted it at once.
She took out a bottle of sterile water and wet a towel and got to work.
Everything about her changed the second her fingers touched his skin.
The babble shut off as she leaned in close, and Roman fixed his eyes on the far wall and thought about fence posts. Rows of them. Straight, boring rows.
It didn’t help. She was warm and she was close, her scent all over him where he’d carried her, her thumb braced against his collarbone while she worked, and the wolf was narrating nonstop.
Her hands are on us. Put them lower. Put them on our cock. She is so close. Her breasts are brushing our arm. We could lean forward and taste that mouth. We could have her on this table in under a minute. She would be so soft under us. So wet. We can already smell how interested she is.
Fence posts, Roman thought, grimly, shifting in the chair. So many fucking fence posts.
She drew back slightly when he moved. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” he growled, and she just looked at him for a moment.
“It’s a through and through. You’re lucky. The bullet missed the joint, missed everything that matters. But you still need a hospital.”
“No hospitals.”
“You were shot.”
“No hospitals, Ella. It will heal on its own.”
She looked up. His tone, or her name in his mouth—something made her forget to be a nurse, and her eyes were green and very close, and they dropped to his mouth and got stuck there.
And he knew. Knew she was thinking about what his mouth would feel like on hers.
He was thinking the same thing. Only more in depth.
Like what his mouth would feel like on her shoulder, her neck.
Her breasts. The swell of her stomach. Her fucking pussy.
He wanted to bury his face there and stay until she came on his tongue twice.
Then he wanted to flip her over and take her from behind so he could watch that perfect ass bounce while he fucked her.
“Right because you’re a shifter. You’re all dumb-ass stubborn. Men. Males,” she muttered as she placed a gauze pad over the wound. “Every man who comes into that hospital held together with baling wire and spite.” She smoothed the tape flat over the bandage.
He didn’t say anything, just let her work.
“So. Poachers. That’s what I walked into. There’s been talk at the hospital all year—out-of-state money, illegal trophy hunts. I just never figured I’d hike into the middle of it. And then you came out of nowhere and got shot. Which was insane, by the way. They had rifles. What were you thinking?”
So she thought he was a bystander. Some local wolf who’d blundered into her bad day and paid for it. She didn’t know her scent had drawn him, made it impossible to ignore her or the danger she was in. That he would have gladly given his life to protect her.
She was his mate.
And she didn’t know.
He scrubbed his hand over his face. “Wasn’t thinking much.”
“Clearly.” She pressed the last corner of tape down, and then her palm stayed flat on his shoulder after the job was finished. She didn’t seem to notice she was doing it. He noticed enough for the both of them. “Don’t do it again.”
Yeah. That would never happen. If she were ever in danger again…
“They saw your face.”
Her hand came off his shoulder in an instant. “What?”
“They saw your face. You can identify them.”
She immediately shook her head. “No. No I can’t.”
He watched her walk through it—witness, faces, trucks, men who’d fire at whatever stood between them and their goal—and watched the color drain out of her cheeks while she did. The logic lined up all by itself. She was a witness.
“You’re staying here,” Roman said. Not an offer. A low growled order. He heard it leave his mouth—the wolf behind it—and knew he should soften it and didn’t. Couldn’t.
Ella stared down at him. Fear crossed her face with stubbornness right behind it, and then something underneath both of those that made her look away first.
“No, I’m not. You can take me into town and I can file a report with the sheriff. Just because you rescued me—”
Roman stood up, towering over her. The wolf was still too close to the surface, scraping under his skin, furious that she had even suggested walking out the door and putting herself in the reach of the men who had hunted her.
“Make no mistake, little mate. I didn’t rescue you. I caught you. Now you’re mine.”
Her eyes went wide as she took in his words. “What are you talking about?”
“You are—”
The front door exploded open and two enormous men came through it fast. Even as he registered who was entering his house in such a dramatic manner, he was pushing Ella behind him, his eyes glowing, his fangs dropping.
Mate. Protect. Mate.