Chapter 7
Promise couldn’t believe she’d found her truemate the day after she arrived at the campground! And not only had she found him, but he was sexy as hell. Dark hair shaved on the sides and a little long on top, a rugged jaw covered with a day’s worth of stubble, and dark brown eyes like melted chocolate.
And he could freaking kiss!
She’d never been held so tenderly and kissed so expertly, but damn was she putty in his calloused hands.
Her wolf was turning somersaults and prancing like a show pony in her head.
She remembered the dream, and she slipped her hands under his shirt and up his broad back. He stiffened as she reached what she was looking for: the scar she’d seen in her dream.
“It’s you,” she said, breaking the kiss.
“Your mate?” he asked, his thumb stroking lightly over her jaw. His eyes were a beautiful scarlet red, and she suspected it was the color of his beast’s eyes. She wondered if hers were amber.
“No, I dreamed about you.”
“When?”
“Last night. Or it was really early this morning. It was a weird dream, but I saw a male with a scar on his back. I wanted to see if my dream really was some kind of prophecy. Wolves don’t have mating dreams.”
“Minotaurs do.”
“That explains it. My sister suggested that when I told her about my dream today.”
“Tell me about your dream,” he said.
She looked around, remembering they were outside, in broad view of anyone who might come by. Not that she cared if people saw her fondling her mate, but she wanted to get somewhere comfortable so they could talk.
“Have you eaten breakfast? I can make us something to eat and we can talk.”
“I haven’t, but I’ll only let you make me breakfast if you let me help.”
She smiled. “You got it.”
She took him into the cabin and to the kitchenette. “Your sister and Charlotte took me to town yesterday for groceries. Ally and Richard said I could eat with the employees whenever I wanted, but I didn’t want to always have to go on a walk to have something to eat.”
She opened the fridge and pulled out a small carton of eggs and a jug of orange juice. “There’s bread in the cabinet,” she said.
He made toast and filled glasses while she fried up some eggs and plated them with the toast. She didn’t have jelly but she had picked up butter.
While they worked, she told him about her dream. “So do you know why I dreamed about some kind of fighting arena?”
There wasn’t a kitchen table, so they took their plates, silverware, and glasses to the little living area and the comfortable couch and wooden coffee table.
“I do, actually,” he said.
When he didn’t keep talking, she prompted him, “Is it bad? You can tell me anything, we’re mates.”
Her wolf loved to hear that word. Mate.
The corner of his mouth crinkled in a grimace. “It’s not great.” He paused again, staring at his plate, then looked at her. “I don’t want you to be sorry that we’re mates.”
“I won’t.”
He stared at her for a quiet moment, then said, “Do you know anything about minotaur shifters?”
“No. I didn’t even know your people were real.”
“I don’t think there are a lot of us, actually. So it’s just me and my dad. But what makes our people unique is that we’re cursed.”
“Cursed like a fairy tale?”
He chuckled mirthlessly. “Kind of. The males of our kind are cursed to grow progressively more aggressive the closer they get to age twenty-five. It gets more and more difficult to return to human form when we shift, and sometimes the shift comes along suddenly and can’t be controlled. I’ve done things in my shift that I’m not proud of.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“So you’re having trouble coming out of your shift?”
“Not anymore,” he said. He rubbed the space over his heart. “I can feel in my heart that finding you has fixed all that was broken with my beast. I won’t be totally free of the curse until we’re mated fully, but already the aggression isn’t biting at my neck like it was before we met.”
“What happens if you don’t find your mate by twenty-five?”
“We shift and can never shift back. That’s the curse: to be a monster forever.”
“Geez, that’s awful.” She’d heard of curses before. The mountain lion pride that her friend Lyric was part of now had been cursed by a goddess ages ago, and until the curse had been broken, the males and females didn’t mate with each other because the females were cursed to never know love.
She put her fork down and reached for his hand. Her wolf let out a happy sigh at the contact. “I’m sorry you were dealing with the aggression of your beast. I feel like whatever you did under the curse of that aggression isn’t your fault.”
He looked like he didn’t believe her.
Inhaling sharply, he said, “I think the arena in your dream was related to my fighting.”
“What kind of fighting?”
“Underground shifter fighting…for money.” He explained that even though his dad had gone down a similar road as a young, unmated male, he’d cautioned Artem not to follow in his footsteps. “I didn’t listen of course,” he said with a wry laugh. “I knew my aggression was getting out of control once I turned twenty-four, but I thought I could handle it. I just killed a male I was fighting. I wasn’t totally sure I had until I woke up after getting choked out by some of the other fighters who were trying to keep me from killing the people watching the fights.”
She gave his hand a squeeze. “I’m so sorry you went through that. Do your parents know you fight?”
“Hell no. They’d be so pissed.” He scrubbed his free hand through his hair. “I found out when I woke up after the fight that the wolf I killed was planning to kill me. He wanted to be the best fighter and get the big prize money. It doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t mean to kill him and I’m still wrestling with guilt about it, but it’s chilling to think I went into the fight planning to actually just fight when he wanted me dead.” He shook his head. “I still can’t wrap my head around it.”
“I can understand your guilt at taking a life, but it also sounds like your minotaur wanted to come out to protect you because he wasn’t going to stop coming after you. Maybe you didn’t know for certain he wanted to kill you, but maybe your beast suspected it.”
He hummed, his brows rising. “I hadn’t thought about that. It was just instinct when my minotaur was trying to come out. I still took a life, though. Self defense or not. I don’t think I’ll ever really forgive myself.”
“I’m not just trying to make you feel better about something that you feel bad about, but I think if you don’t forgive yourself for what happened it’s going to eat at you. That’s no way to live, honestly. Regardless of what happened, I’m thankful that you were victorious in the ring, because if you hadn’t won, if that wolf had killed you? I would never have met you.”
“I’m glad for that too.” He smiled at her. “I need to talk to my parents about my fighting and I also need to quit.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t need the outlet for my aggression anymore. I don’t need to fight. I never liked it anyway, it was just a means to an end.”
“That makes sense.” She smiled. “Did you get that scar on your back during one of the fights?”
“I drove a four-wheeler down the mountain on a dare when I was twelve and cut my back open on some rocks. I wasn’t old enough to shift so it just scarred.”
“A daredevil, huh?”
“Maybe in my idiotic youth.”
“Okay, so I dreamed about you fighting. What did you dream about?”
“A bonfire. I saw you, but all I could really see was that you had dark hair. You were talking to me, but I couldn’t hear the words.”
“Our pack always has bonfires on the full moon. Maybe that’s why.”
“Makes sense.”
They ate and talked, not speaking any more about his fighting during what she figured were spectacularly bloody battles. She couldn’t believe that people paid to watch shifters beat each other up and even placed bets on who would win. She was definitely glad that Artem was going to quit because she didn’t want to worry about him.
Even if she could heal him with her venom.
She told him about being an apex, and how she hadn’t used her healing venom in ages until she’d helped her mom heal her friend Remy’s mate, Thyme.
“It’s so freaking noble to use your power like that to help people,” he said. He pushed his empty plate away and leaned back on the couch. “So much more noble than me punching people several nights a week.”
With a laugh, she leaned back on the couch and turned so she could face him. “The roads we chose in our lives brought us to this place, so I don’t have any regrets except that I wish I’d come here sooner.”
“I wish you had too.” His eyes simmered, the brown getting eclipsed by the red as the spicy leather scent of him made her stomach flip.
“What now?” she whispered.
He leaned over and brushed his lips across hers. “I’m supposed to be helping my dad look over some new four-wheelers I brought in last night. Would you like to walk over to the workshop with me and meet him?”
“Sure.”
He kissed her again. “Promise, I want to take you to bed and mate you right now. But we just met. And I haven’t even asked you to be my mate properly. I want to take you out tonight and then we can see where things go between us.” He gave her a curious look, his eyes darkening back to brown. “If you think I don’t want to strip you and find out what you sound like when you fall apart, you’d be greatly mistaken. Because it’s all I can think about.”
Her cheeks heated and her skin tingled. “It’s all I can think about too.”
“Later.” He rose to his feet and brought her with him. “You’re the definition of addictive, beautiful.”
“You are too.”
They left the cabin, hand in hand, and walked to the workshop. She couldn’t believe she was about to meet her truemate’s dad.
She couldn’t wait to call Rio and tell her the good news.
And her parents, too.
The hyena baro didn’t have a healer on staff, and that meant she’d not only found her mate but also a place she could be useful.
“This is the best day ever,” she said, their shoulders bumping as they walked.
“Wait until tonight.”
She shivered at his tone.
She couldn’t wait.