Page 34 of Unforeseen Mate

He shook his head. “Not you. You may think you want to do that, but you have no interest in being anyone’s prisoner.”

“Even yours?” she teased.

“Most especially not mine. I may have forced the claiming, but if I hadn’t, I would have persuaded you to become my mate.”

She watched him chop peppers, onions, and ham, and shred cheese before cracking eggs, beating them together and pouring them into a hot skillet, moving them around before adding the other ingredients, flipping the concoction and tipping it out to form the perfect omelet.

“I keep asking myself why I’m not freaking out. Dragons, hellhounds, and other shifters, oh my.” He chuckled as he cut apiece of the omelet and fed it to her. “I mean, why did I just kind of accept all of this as old hat?”

“You’ve been trained to look at the evidence and accept whatever it is that it tells you even when it is in direct opposition to what you’ve been told.”

“But still…”

Hayden took a bite of the omelet. “But nothing. Tell me, did you believe Strode right off the bat?” She shook her head. “What made you believe him?”

“He made me watch him as he shifted and then flew around his manor house. And even though I’m still a little foggy about how we got off Lundy Island and how we got here, I’ve seen you in your hound form and what I think I remember experiencing correlates with legends I’ve read about.”

“Exactly. You didn’t just accept point blank what you were told. You looked at the evidence, questioned its veracity and then made an informed conclusion as to what you’d been told.”

“Why didn’t I die?” she asked without any foreplay.

“Because you chose to live. Oh, I can give you a lot of scientific reasons, but the basis for all of them is that you chose to live. I gave you a choice, and you chose a life with me over an eternity in paradise.”

She took the last bite of the omelet. “Was biting me?—”

“Claiming you,” he corrected.

Fallon nodded. “Was claiming me the only way to save me?”

“I believe it was. Our healer did not think you could be saved, but he didn’t know the strength of your character.”

“If I’d been a hellhound or another shifter, do you think he’d have thought that?”

“You heard Oslo.”

“Yes. Your people don’t want me here.”

“My people are suspicious, and they don’t know you, but I am alpha here and my word is law. You will be treated with, at the very least, civility and respect.”

“Maybe you should just take me home,” she said sadly.

“Not only will I not do that, I can’t. Or rather I could, but if I left you there, you’d die. As my mate you are now tied to me, to the Hollow, and to the Underworld. Your body will adapt, and you will need the atmosphere of the In-Between in order to live. At least half of your time will need to be here.”

“So, six months in each place?” she asked.

“Approximately, but not all at once. Just on average fifty percent of the time here and fifty percent on Earth.”

“Like Persephone?”

He nodded.

“So does that make you Hades?” she laughed.

“If you like.”

“Not so fast. I asked you a straightforward question. Are you Hades?”

“It isn’t as cut and dried as you might think. Many people have called the hellhounds gods, but we never were. Hades may well have been what ancient people called the alpha of the hellhounds, which at the moment is me.”

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