Page 45 of Pretty Little Prey
“And her body wakes, hungry for me.” She couldhearhis grin. “I am a very happy wolf.”
“What about your king’s order not to touch me?”
“Youare touchingme, little mate,” he pointed out, silently chuckling. His chest moved up and down below her, jostling her so that her pulsing clit rubbed over his hard, thick thigh again.
“Is that a loophole?” she asked, trying not to pant out each breath as her folds grazed against that hard thigh of his. “I can touch you, but you can’t touch me?”
“I could touch you,” Kobe whispered into her ear, trailing his lips over her earlobe and neck.Shiver. “But Bastille would be angry.”
“When is henotangry?” She rolled her eyes before sighing heavily. “So, you won’t touch me then?”
Kobe blew a hot breath over her neck. “Moonbeam, I would die to touch you. The only one who tells me not to touch you is you.”
She blinked. “You would disobey him?”
“I have waited a long, long time for you,” he said. “You are everything. A light. My reason to live.”
She pushed up on his chest, gazing down at him in disbelief. “You hardly know me.”
“A mate is part of another—chosen, fated, and developed by life apart. I feel I know you as I know myself. We were made for each other. My mate would know loneliness. Maybe know what it means to feel abandoned.” As he spoke, he lifted a large hand and played with a few strands of her pearlescent hair. “Or feel doomed by what she is, the way I have felt doomed. As my mate, you are sure to understand this, yes? You feel the same?”
Lonely, abandoned, and misjudged for what she was?Yeah. She felt the same. Her chest tightened with emotion. “What happened to you?” she asked.
“My family—my pack—did not find me worthy. When I was…young, they left me behind in the woods. Told me I was to wait for them to come back and to guard our hunting grounds until they did.”
“They never came back?”
“Alone in the woods, it took my eleventh birthday for me to realize they never would.”
Luna’s heart wrenched itself in her chest. She felt his pain as if it was her own—some mate mumbo jumbo? He lost his family just like her, but not from any mistake he made to trust someone. Not like she had.
“How could they leave you? Or not find you worthy? You’re a born alpha.” She could scent the rare, dominant pheromones. “You’re huge and, uh, muscle-y—” His chuckle shook her again. “I mean, you’re strong, so few would challenge you as an alpha. And you are friends with the dark king.”
“I was not big and ‘muscle-y’ then. I did not know the king. Bastille did not choose us for our connections or strength,” Kobe replied cryptically.
“Then, why? Why the three of you?” They did not act like bodyguards or advisors. “Nikolai is not even a shifter.”
Kobe shrugged, seeming more interested in playing with pieces of her white-blond hair than answering questions. “He collects outcasts,” he said.
Outcasts? What was the story behind Sly and Nikolai? And why would Bastille find outcasts? That almost made him sound nice. Redeemable. Thankfully, she knew better.
“My mate smells of pure sweetness,” Kobe groaned quietly in her ear as he rubbed his nose down her neck.
His erection throbbed, twitching against her stomach as she laid on top of him. The heat of him seared through his pants, pleasantly burning her skin.
“I think you need a, um, a cold shower. Or, uh, a hot one,” she mumbled, blushing. Who wouldn’t blush at the mere size of him?My goodness. She wouldn’t be able to walk for a week.No sex with Kobe. It would delay my escape plan.
“A wolf stays hard around his mate. I could empty myself of cum, and the next second I saw you, I would be hard again,” he purred into her ear, still dragging his big lips up and down the tender skin of her neck.
“That sounds painful,” she commented. “And inconvenient.”
“It is said that the first few years of matehood are spent pleasuring each other.”
She gulped, unable to hide the way her hips rocked down, grinding herself against his hard thigh at his words.
“I do not know if years will be enough,” he rasped. “Centuries of you would not be enough. Want to suckle your nipples while I rut into you.”
“Kobe…”
