Chapter 13 Mated
Mated
LOTHAIR
My mate.
He looked gorgeous, sprawled on my bed, all long limbs and hard muscles.
Caressing his face, I lingered with my thumb on his lips. He wasn’t making any promises, but he was here, and he wasn’t pushing me away.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
His chest lifted with a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m…processing.” He smiled crookedly and stroked my wrist, holding my hand to his face as he kissed my fingers.
“I feel like I should apologize too,” I said. “I didn’t handle it well this morning.”
Terrance scoffed softly. “You looked like someone had died.”
“I figured it out in the middle of the night. I woke up plastered to you, dick hard, the ridges tingling. It took me a few minutes to put two and two together. Then I couldn’t sleep, waiting for you to wake up and freak out. But I had time to think about it, and I’m glad it’s you.”
A little crease appeared between his eyebrows, so I bent my head and brushed my lips over his heart. “You’re a good man,” I told him. “A better person than me.”
Closing his eyes, he shook his head but didn’t say anything.
I didn’t expect him to protest. The differences between us were obvious and immense.
“We need to make some changes,” he said after a while. “Plan for next week.”
“I was hoping we could follow through on our original plan.”
“Which is?”
“Let’s forget about it all until Monday.”
He frowned deeper. “The threats against your life are not theoretical anymore, Lothair. The person who attacked you today could do it again.”
“With all the extra guards your boss sent, we’re safe here. We’ll deal with it on Monday.”
“That’s tomorrow.”
“We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
He hesitated, studying me like he wanted to look inside my head. He was going to be stubborn about this, wasn’t he?
“Terry, please,” I pleaded, “let’s forget for twenty-four more hours.”
“Why?”
“You said it yourself that you need to process.”
His eyebrows flew up. “And you don’t? Didn’t you call the mating, and I quote, fucking shifter bullshit just this morning?”
“I guess.” I laid my head on his chest, and he hugged my shoulders. It was easier to say certain things when he wasn’t looking into my eyes. “But that was when I thought you were going to reject me.”
“One can’t reject one’s mate.”
“Not if it’s an omega, a proper dragon mate. But what about two alphas?”
“We are proper mates. I’m not going to push you away, Lothair.” A sliver of annoyance made it into his statement. Maybe he couldn’t reject me. But he might resent me. The possibility made my heart ache.
“I don’t feel like I’m losing anything,” I said. “I wasn’t looking for an omega mate to start a family with. But you…”
“I wasn’t looking either. I thought I had plenty of time for that.”
“But?”
“I assumed that would be my future.”
His dusky rose-colored nipple sat right in front of my eyes. I stroked his pec and circled his nipple with a finger.
“Are you disappointed?” Why did I ask that? I didn’t want to hear his answer.
“No.” His voice was firm, and some of the tension in my belly loosened. “Just overwhelmed, I guess.”
“Right. Processing.”
“But…families have many forms,” he said quietly.
Shit. I should not get into this discussion with him. I didn’t have the slightest clue what to say. I didn’t want kids. Not now, anyway. A family.
Then his stomach growled loudly, and I laughed, grateful for the distraction. “I need to feed you.”
“We didn’t have breakfast.”
“We can have breakfast now.”
“It’s lunchtime.”
I shrugged. “We’ll call it brunch. Eggs, bacon, coffee.”
Terrance groaned. “Yes, please.”
He stood in the kitchen, leaning on the counter and watching me as I scrambled eggs and fried bacon. He’d put on gray sweats and a T-shirt and looked so cute I wanted to lick him.
“We need to talk to my boss… about our situation.” He gestured between us.
“Then we’ll tell him tomorrow. We can book a meeting, and I’ll come with you.”
“We’re not leaving the property unless we have to. No extra meetings.”
“Then invite him here.” The eggs were done. I moved them away from the burner with one hand while I flipped the bacon pieces with the other.
“I could.” He hesitated. “If you’re okay with that.”
“Of course.”
“He might insist on me not being your bodyguard anymore.”
I was about to say something offensive, but the toaster popping noisily stopped me. I took a few breaths while Terrance plated toast and eggs.
“What if I insist that nobody else but you can come anywhere near me?”
Terrance’s lips twitched. “That would be a very sudden change to your lifestyle.”
Was he joking?
“I mean it, Terry.”
He braced himself on the breakfast table with both hands and gave me a stern look.
“You want me to be serious? How about this? I can’t both fuck you and have you pay me for protecting you.”
“Why not? I enthusiastically consent to both. In fact, if you fuck me hard every morning, I’ll be more likely to follow protocol during the day.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m not having this discussion with you on an empty stomach.”
We sat down, the tension between us palpable. He would be stubborn about this—I could see it happening. He would insist on stupid rules and make it impossible for him to keep working for me.
“By the way, you’ve already promised you will follow the protocol and the extra security measures,” he said between bites. “You were quite vocal about it.”
I swallowed a mouthful and forked up a heap of eggs. “Under the condition you’d stay.”
“Why are we even having this argument? I want to keep you alive; you want to stay alive. We’re working toward the same goal.”
“Exactly my point. Why should our being mates make you in any way unfit to keep working for me?”
“Would you want to be employed by someone you were in a relationship with?”
“Cassidy and Hassel are your employers. I’m just a client.”
He bit into his toast, shaking his head. After chewing and swallowing, he muttered, “You’re being a pain, Lothair.”
Then it registered what he said, and I grinned. “We are in a relationship.”
But Terrance didn’t smile back. He dragged his hand over his face and reached for his coffee cup. “I need to call my boss.”
I would have been adamant about waiting until Monday, but Terrance was brooding. When he suggested inviting his boss over today and laying it out for him, I agreed. Devon Hassel arrived at three.
The compact, wiry omega had such an air of unwavering professionalism he terrified me. If Terrance could be annoying with his insistence on rules and protocols, I imagined Devon being three times worse. I sat down next to Terrance on my patio sofa with a sense of impending doom.
“I understand you must be shaken, Lothair, but I assure you that the grounds are safe. Aside from your guy at the gate, I have three men patrolling and surveilling the property. Terrance supervised the checkup and upgrade of your security systems even before the incident. It might take a few days to find the perp from this morning, but it’s far from impossible.
While the car and license plates were stolen, he’s been caught on several cameras around the neighborhood. ”
“Erm. I’m fine, thank you,” I said. “I trust you with handling the entire situation. This is not why we need to talk to you.”
He narrowed his eyes, looking slowly from me to Terrance and back.
“Is there an issue?” he asked.
“Not the kind of issue you might expect,” Terrance said. “But I wouldn’t have asked you to come here on a Sunday afternoon if it weren’t serious.”
Devon leaned back in the armchair and stretched his legs in front of him.
“I’m listening.”
“We’re mated.” Terrance blurted out the sentence, tensing next to me as if he was bracing for impact.
Devon tilted his head to the side, his expression blank. “Beg your pardon?” Hints of an old accent made it into his voice. Was he originally British?
“We’re mated,” Terrance repeated. He gestured between us awkwardly.
Since Devon didn’t react in any way, I felt the need to clarify. “Terrance and I only realized this morning, before the incident, that we are mated.”
Frowning, Devon leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He glanced around. “To whom?”
“To each other,” we replied in unison.
His eyebrows flew up, and his lips parted. He waggled a finger in the air, pointing at us. “You two. You are mates. Like fated dragon mates. Really?”
He spluttered out a laugh.
Terrance scowled. “Do you find it funny, boss?”
To Devon’s credit, it was a little funny, especially considering how much Terrance hated me in the beginning.
“Sorry.” Devon pursed his lips and took a deep breath. “This will take some getting used to.” He still seemed to be suppressing laughter.
Terrance let out a frustrated grunt, then he cleared his throat. “As you can imagine, it puts me in an awkward position since Lothair is my client.”
Devon exhaled slowly and smoothed his expression. “Yes. I hear you.”
Then it looked like they were both waiting for the other one to say something because Terrance stared at Devon questioningly while Devon looked from me to Terrance and back with a slightly confused frown.
“Okay,” Devon finally said. “Are you like…bonding?”
Terrance winced. “It seems like it?” He looked as uncomfortable as I’d ever seen him, and I’d put him in lots of weird situations since he’d started working for me.
“Like, you can’t stay away from each other, feel protective and possessive of each other, the…uh”—Devon gestured vaguely toward his groin—“physical changes.”
“I…do feel intensely protective of Lothair.”
I glanced at him, melting at his confession. “You do? Aww.” I wanted to kiss him, but he threw me an annoyed look.
“But we don’t seem to be experiencing the, uh, irrational urges you usually hear about,” he continued. “We can be apart for short periods of time. It’s not pleasant, but we can. I sense that my dragon knows another dragon alpha isn’t as vulnerable as a human omega mate would have been.”