Chapter 3
ROZI
A little over thirty minutes drifted by without a word between us. Thank goodness. One moment, heat crawled up my neck as memories of Kenya flashed unbidden. The next, ice flooded my veins when I caught his eyes in the rearview mirror.
I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper, focusing on the physical pain rather than the storm raging inside me. Anything to keep from screaming or, worse, crying in front of him.
Each minute in his presence felt like sandpaper against my nerves, wearing down the carefully constructed walls I’d built over two and a half decades. My feline half kept prowling restlessly beneath my skin, purring whenever his fragrance drifted toward me.
Traitor, I hissed at her silently.
She merely flicked her metaphorical tail and continued her contented rumbling.
I shifted in my seat, his aroma of sandalwood, citrus, and male musk making it increasingly difficult for me to concentrate on updates I was making to my presentation.
The confined space of the SUV had become a torture chamber of sensory overload.
Each breath filled my lungs with his distinctive essence, triggering memories I’d spent decades trying to forget.
The leather seat creaked beneath me as I shifted again, desperate to find a position where his presence didn’t dominate my every thought. No such luck.
“If you’re thirsty, there’s a bottle of water in the door compartment back there,” he said for the second time.
Ignoring him, I continued typing on my laptop.
What a fucking asshole.
How dare he act like what he did to me was no biggie?
His dismissal had left me hunched over my journal in that Kenyan tent, frantically scribbling theories.
Subject rejected mate bond upon visual confirmation.
Hypothesis:
Physical appearance unsatisfactory?
Voice too assertive?
Intelligence intimidating?
I’d cataloged every perceived flaw with clinical precision, searching for the fatal defect that made even a destined mate turn away from me.
At night, I’d pressed my fist against my sternum, trying to ease the physical ache where something vital had been ripped away. The emotional wound had scarred over eventually, but it stung now with renewed pain, as if his proximity were ripping open old tissue.
Being rejected by a fated mate rarely happened in the shifter world, yet it had happened to me. One conversation with me and that fucker exited left.
After that kind of wound, it took me years to rebuild my confidence, and now, at forty-three years old, reuniting with him again was like a horror movie, starring me.
My fingers trembled against my laptop keys, betraying the calm I fought to project. I couldn’t even roll down the window without seeming affected by him.
My throat constricted as if invisible hands were tightening around it.
The claustrophobia of being caged with the one person who’d taught me the cruelest lesson of all, that even the universe’s so-called perfect match saw everything I was and decided I wasn’t worth the trouble of staying.
And deep down, that simple truth hurt like a motherfucker.
“Rozi…” he began.
“It’s Dr. Dhahabu,” I replied, being a petty Betty, but I didn’t give a shit.
“About what happened between us…” he said.
“I’m over it and you. I don’t want to talk about it.” You absolute bastard. The statement came out clipped, precise, surgeon sharp.
“Then I’ll do all the talking,” he replied, a dangerous edge creeping into his speech.
“I’d rather you didn’t.” I returned to typing furiously on my laptop, the keys clicking in rapid succession like tiny gunshots in the tense silence.
“Me rejecting you was an asshole thing to do. It was me, not you.”
My head snapped up. “Seriously? The ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ speech? Two decades later? That’s the best you’ve got?”
“I was eighteen,” he said, his voice cracking slightly.
His hand trembled as he ran it through his hair.
“I was afraid I’d inherited whatever weakness made my father abandon me.
Afraid that loving you would destroy me the way losing my mother destroyed him.
When I caught your fragrance in that savanna, when every cell in my body screamed mate, I felt like I was drowning.
I ran because I thought I was poison to anyone who loved me,” he said, his voice thick with raw emotion.
Something in his tone, the naked vulnerability beneath the confession, reached past my armor and touched a place I’d kept locked away for so long. My throat tightened as I watched him struggle, this powerful alpha male suddenly looking as lost as the abandoned boy he must have been.
“Do you know what it’s like?” I whispered, the words escaping before I could stop them.
“To believe you’re fundamentally unlovable?
That there’s something broken inside you that makes people leave?
” I wrapped my arms around my middle, suddenly cold.
“You aren’t the only one with daddy or mommy issues.
When my father disappeared, I spent years trying to figure out what I’d done wrong.
What flaw he’d seen in me that made me so easy to discard.
Then my mother buried herself in her research instead of seeing me, and when she died… ”
I swallowed hard against the burning in my throat. “When my grandmother couldn’t be bothered to take me in, I finally understood. It wasn’t one thing. It was me. All of me.”
I met his stare in the rearview, letting him see what no one else ever had, the scared child inside. “Then you found me in Kenya, and for one perfect moment, I thought maybe the universe had finally sent someone who would stay. Someone who would see all of me and choose me anyway.”
The old pain ripped through me anew, tears I’d refused to shed for years finally burning behind my lids. “But you didn’t. You looked at me, really examined me, and you still turned your back. Do you have any idea what that shit did to me? It confirmed everything I’d always feared.”
I angrily blinked back tears. “So don’t talk to me about poison, Brody. I’ve spent my entire life believing I’m toxic to anyone who gets too close.”
I wanted to hate him. God, how I wanted to.
My chest ached with the effort of holding on to the rage I’d nursed for years.
“Rozi, I panicked,” he said, gripping the steering wheel tightly as his eyes flicked to the rearview mirror to catch my expression.
“You panicked?” I asked, leaning forward between the front seats. My fingers dug into the leather headrest. “That’s your excuse?”
“Yes.”
I sat back against the seat. Okay, he wanted to have this out, right here and right now. Let’s do it.
“After saving my ass from a pack of frothing-at-the-mouth spotted hyenas, you declared ‘You’re my fated mate,’” I reminded him. “Directly followed by an ‘I can’t have you’ statement. And then you vanished without a fucking explanation. And your excuse is that you panicked?”
There was a beat of silence, and I impatiently waited for his response.
“Shit. I’m fucking this up… again,” he replied.
“Big-time,” I said.
“Let me start at the beginning,” he offered.
I sat back with pursed lips.
“You couldn’t have known this,” he said, “but my parents were fated mates. When I was eleven, my mother died.” His jaw clenched.
“My father… he completely fell apart. The mate bond that had been their strength became his destruction. He couldn’t function without her.
One day, he drove me to my grandmother Una’s house, left me on her doorstep, and never looked back. Just gave up on life and on me.”
He took a deep breath. “The day I found you surrounded by spotted hyenas, I was out for a run in my wolf form. I was stationed there on a United Nations peacekeeping mission—my first deployment with Special Forces. That morning, I’d taken advantage of a rare day off to run free, to feel something other than the constant vigilance required in a conflict zone.
And I knew instantly by your scent that you were my fated mate.
At that moment, all I could see was my father’s face when he deserted me.
All I could feel was that same cataclysmic bond forming between us. ”
I understood the devastation of suddenly losing someone you loved, especially at a young age, but that was no excuse to make me a casualty of his fear, particularly when he never even bothered to explain himself.
“I was terrified of becoming my father—of either hurting you or being destroyed by losing you,” he admitted, his words rough with emotion.
“I didn’t believe I deserved a mate, not when I carried what I thought was my father’s weakness inside me.
I convinced myself I was protecting you by disappearing, breaking the cycle before it could begin.
I never gave you the choice or even the explanation you deserved,” he finished quietly.
In the rearview, he briefly glanced my way, his expression filled with remorse. “I’ve regretted that decision every day since.”
I snorted, watching the back of his head from my position in the rear seat. “You’ve regretted that decision every day?” My words emerged low and dangerous. “What utter bullshit.” My laptop snapped shut with more force than necessary, the sound echoing in the confined space.
“You know what’s ironic about your story?” I said, staring at his reflection. “When I was ten, my father abandoned my mother without explanation. She was a genius researcher, but that betrayal destroyed something in her.”
I observed his focus flick to the rearview, then back to the road.
“She buried herself in her lab after that. Meanwhile, I was essentially raising myself, learning that love is just another word for goodbye.”
My cheetah awakened. I pushed her down viciously, shifting away from the center of the back seat as if to create more distance.