Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 168701 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 844(@200wpm)___ 675(@250wpm)___ 562(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 168701 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 844(@200wpm)___ 675(@250wpm)___ 562(@300wpm)
I break away after a second, feeling like I’m about to spin-out. There’s too much to wade through right now. I don’t have the bandwidth for any of it. “Meet you at the job site, boys.”
“Meet us at Roxy’s for breakfast at eight and then we’ll head to the client together,” Mase amends.
I shake my head. “I’ll just meet you there. Need to get my head down, focus on something else.” Anything else.
“You should focus on your mate,” Tyson presses.
“Fuck off, Ty,” I tell him, glaring.
He holds my gaze, still unfazed.
“If you’re sure about the job,” Mase says slowly, offering me an out. “We could just-”
“I’m sure,” I state.
“Comin’ anyway,” Ty advises. “I wanna learn.”
“Whatever.” I shrug.
***
Instead of going to my place, I find myself at the store up the road from it. Her van is still parked there. The same van from all those years ago. I feel her presence in my chest, catch her scent in my nostrils and as it spreads through me, my gut churns and I have warring urges that I refuse to dissect.
Visions from seven years ago flash through my brain.
She’s dripping wet standing outside this van; we both are. She’s embarrassed, hiding her chest under her transparent dress. The next day, I saw her again in a field of flowers.
I shake the vision off and turn my attention to Lincoln, who’s on a bench outside the store, eyes and hands on his phone. At my approach, he looks up and is about to speak.
“You don’t need to guard her,” I speak first.
His brows crinkle. “Why haven’t you taken her home?”
I rear back at his pissed-off attitude.
“Even Grey took his mate home. Mated her already. You’re gonna risk her slipping through your fingers again? Covering her scent again?”
I flex my jaw muscles. “This is my shit.”
My shit that’s too close to me right now. I’m suddenly nauseous. My body wants to shift, to let my wolf burst forward. So I can run and run. Like that’d protect me from everything else trying to permeate. Take me away from here so I don’t go in there and do something stupid.
My cock goes hard again. Like a fucking traitor.
“It’s our shit and you know it. Deal with it.” He gestures to the van. “You should’ve mated her last night. Grey mated his this morning. The mating birth order’s all fucked up now.”
“So?”
Lincoln grinds his teeth.
“You got more to say?” I demand.
He stares without answering.
“I’ll deal with it when I’m ready. Or not, Linc. Stand down.”
My insides are disjointed. She’s too close. Her scent. Her emotions. I’m not supposed to feel her emotions until after the first mating. I push the sensations, the odd urges away, refusing to acknowledge them. But her emotional state claws into me like barbs. Magnets pull at me. Pull me in the direction of that camper van that I’m just fifty feet away from. Why does she have to smell so fuckin’ good?
I’m hanging on by a thread. Wanting to go to her. Rip her clothes off. Take her. Bite her. Knot her. Rip her to fuckin’ shreds and then explode in a storm of the blood and guts and pain that I’ve held in for all this time. Weep. Scream. Roar. Set everything ablaze and burn with it.
Linc’s nostrils flare. “What if she takes off again and you don’t get your answers?”
I say nothing.
Rage bubbles just below my rim. I need to vacate, otherwise it’ll boil over and who knows what it’d take to get me back on level ground?
I hear the door creak open. Her scent gets stronger. Before I have to set eyes on her again, before I take the chance I’ll do what Ty did to his mate, knowing I could easily rut her publicly in the gravel right now, I shift to wolf and bolt toward my place.
5
Erica
Ten Years Ago
Drowsy Hollow had been a big mystery most of my life. But as I pulled into the parking lot behind the dry cleaners it struck me that I could feel things there. It was penetrating that the town that was such a big mystery to me for all this time felt like home. It was small, quaint, and it felt very magical. It wasn’t something I could decipher, but I somehow just knew it.
I felt a pull. And I’d felt strange and similar pulls toward places in the past. Forests. Gardens. The water. Old trees. Aunt Lyrica had been telling me this was all natural. That I love windy days. That I prefer being barefoot. That I adore the smell of rain. Earth. Touching nature. Listening to leaves rustle.
She explained that to the north of Drowsy Hollow was a wolf shifter settlement. A town to the east had once been heavily populated by vampires but now it was a little bedroom community with just one or two. To the west, it was rumored to have once been a stomping ground for visiting fairies from a parallel universe. On the fringe of the town there was a haunted section of woods that Aunt Lyrica told me I’d learn about later, because we were stewards and needed to keep the entity haunting the woods confined.