The Alpha's Mate (8 Sexy, Powerful Shifters and Their Fated Mates) Page 8

  “Let’s play a game,” he whispered into my ear.

  I shook my head, already knowing what he was going to do to me. “No, no, what if they hear?”

  “Whoever it is will only hear if you scream,” he said.

  Crouching back down between my knees, a slow, hot lick went from the bottom of me to the top and I bit down hard on my lip to keep from squealing.

  Patient, consciously slow breaths helped a little, but when two fingers went in and spread out in slow, teasing figure eights, I could hardly stand it.

  “F...fuck me, Erik,” I moaned. “Put it in, please, please, please put it in.”

  “Do you think you can handle that? I mean, if I put this big, hard cock...” to punctuate, he slid his tip along my sex and threatened my entrance. “What happens if you scream? You better not...”

  I swallowed hard and let my mouth fall open. “Please,” I begged again. “I need you so bad. I can’t handle this anymore. I won’t scream, I’ll be good, I promise.”

  The last thing I saw before I closed my eyes and concentrated every ounce of effort I had was Erik’s little half-grin. “We’ll see,” he said.

  The tip of his cock pushed into me, just past my folds, and I immediately felt myself quiver in his arms. I let out a tiny yelp, and an instant later, Erik closed his mouth over mine, pulling the breath out of me and tasting my tongue.

  Deeper he went, slowly, gently, until every inch of him was within. I stretched around him, as the muscles inside squeezed Erik in milking waves.

  “Nothing in the whole world feels as good as you,” he said, sliding out then back in just when I started to miss him. “If I make you mine forever, if I mark you, will that make you happy?”

  He drove hard, and clamped his hand over my mouth just in time to squelch my surprised and pleasured squeal that would surely have got us caught. He grinned. “Harder than you thought, huh?”

  Biting my lip, I gave him a guilty, satisfied smile. “Do you mean it? About marking me? You really want that?”

  I don’t know why, but even with his moving into me and out, over and over, slow and deep and hard, I was about to cry.

  “More than anything,” he said. “I want you by my side. You’re my mate, Izzy, and no one can take that from us, no matter the politics or the worries or anything else.”

  He thrust home, driving himself all the way to the deepest parts of my sex and pushed a groan out of me. Another kiss sucked the sound out of my mouth and two rough, hungry hands grabbed my hips.

  “Are you ready?” he said. “You better be, because I can’t hold off much longer.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “To be marked,” he pushed up, driving his hips and his heat against me. I was so tight, so achingly tight, that I felt every curve of him, every line, inside me. As he spoke, the tiny muscles between my legs started twitching and clenching.

  “I can’t either,” I gasped, then bit my lip between my teeth. “But... but what will be different?”

  Erik lowered his head and kissed my belly, taking a breath. When he looked back up, he was different. Very, very different.

  The most I’d seen him was half-changed, at least when we were together like this. Before my eyes, his face elongated into a lupine snout that only vaguely retained his human features. His yellow eyes grew rounder, brighter, and his muscles swelled.

  His muscles weren’t the only thing swelling, either. Somehow, he grew inside me until I felt like he was going to tear me apart.

  “Hold... on...” he said in halting, almost pained words.

  Throwing back his head, a shaggy, thick coat sprouted from Erik’s growing muscles. He hunched forward, breathing hard, and slammed his huge girth all the way in.

  I shuddered, I trembled, but I didn’t make a sound.

  “That’s it,” he growled. “That’s it... not long now, not long...”

  With his head tilted back, all the cords in Erik’s neck were hard and taut. The muscles in his chest flexed, and he gripped my hips, keeping me right against his body as he filled me with his heat.

  “I... I can’t...” I gasped, rolling my head from side to side, trying to keep from screaming.

  “Let go,” he whispered. “Just let go, Izzy.” His voice was gravelly and thick, but it was still his voice. And the more I looked at him, the more I recognized Erik’s face as Erik.

  Something swelled inside me, bigger and bigger, and then all at once, he drove as deep as he could go, and began to tremble.

  “When this happens, we’ll be joined forever,” he said.

  “Is that what you want?” I touched his face, then his chest, before letting my hands slide down his body and my fingers draped over either side of his cock. “Is this really what you want? I’ll understand if it’s too complicated or...”

  His answer was to cover my mouth again and slam in one last time. Straining, I felt him swell and tremble. All the tension inside me seemed to melt away at once. Waves of hot, cold, hot radiated out from my core. My scalp tingled, my nipples went stiff and hard, and my aching sex squeezed for all it could.

  He took a deep breath and held me fast.

  “It’s all I’ve ever wanted,” he whispered. “All I want... is you.”

  When Erik erupted, I felt him from head to toe. Every fiber of me squeezed, relaxed, breathed and drank him in. He stiffened and lowered his head just in time to muffle my pleasured cry with his mouth.

  What couldn’t have been more than a few seconds felt like an eternity of him swelling in me, pumping, and my body quivering, convulsing.

  And then, slowly, my breathing started to go back to normal.

  My pulse descended from the peak seconds before.

  But something was different. Something was... just different.

  “Feel that?” Erik said. “Feel me holding us together?”

  That was it. Inside me, we were held together physically. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s unbelievable but...”

  “What is it?” he smiled. “I didn’t know it was possible, but that’s... that’s what happens when we bind ourselves to our mates. I don’t want to lose you again, Izzy.”

  I touched his cheeks.

  The footsteps outside the door approached then continued down the hall.

  “Security guard,” Erik said. “I might’ve played it up for fun.”

  A wave of something like anger mixed with fear mixed with overwhelming happiness slammed full into my chest. “You... you’re serious? You just did what I think you did?”

  Erik shrugged. “If I thought you’d be so upset about the security guy I—”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” I said.

  The ball inside me loosened slightly. I thought maybe I could have pulled away, if I wanted.

  If I wanted. Squeezing my heels into Erik’s muscled ass, I gripped him to me.

  Looking down at me, Erik’s face shrank back to normal, and a few seconds later all the hair was gone and he was himself again. For a long moment we just stared at each other, each watching the other one breath.

  Somehow, I felt his pulse beating inside me. I felt his breath in my chest. It was like we were two bodies with one soul shared between us.

  “What am I feeling?” I asked. “It’s like... I don’t know, it’s like I have more senses than I had before. Which makes no sense. So to speak.”

  “You’re my mate,” he said. “This bulge holding us together,” he took a breath. “It’s... this is it, you’re mine and I’m yours. I did it. I really did it.”

  He looked like he was about to collapse. Suddenly, Erik’s arms went wobbly and he bent his elbows, falling heavily onto me, pinning me between his heft and the top of the desk.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  When he lifted his head, I had my answer.

  “Never been better in my life,” he said. His voice was sleepy, almost tipsy. “But I don’t think we have much time to lie around and be lovey.”

  “Huh?”

  “
Meeting,” he groaned, pushing off the desk and taking his wonderful heft away. “Only got... an hour? Hour and a half? And if I’m going to be Captain Brazen about having a pureblood human as a mate, I’m going to have to make some choices.”

  “Like what?” I asked, taking the hand Erik extended and hopping to the floor. My thighs still burned with his friction, the inside of me wanted him again already, which made me smile inwardly. “About Atlas?”

  Erik shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’ve got to resign.”

  “What?” I almost shouted. “You can’t be serious. You’re the best leader this town’s had in a hundred years and you’re just going to give up?”

  He shrugged. “What else can I do? They’ll never accept you as my mate. And before you get irritated again, it’s nothing personal, it’s—”

  “You know what you said about stealing the money? How it was Atlas’s mate who did it and ran?” I bent over, and pulled up my khakis. Kicking around a few of the scattered papers, I found the one I wanted.

  “What about it? I mean, yeah? But what’s the... oh my goodness.”

  I couldn’t help giggling. “You just said oh my goodness. What are you, my grandma?”

  Erik screwed up his lips and pinched me on the stomach. “Good one, boo-boo bear,” he said. “What is this?”

  “It’s a ledger from when Atlas was Alpha. See?” I pointed to a date on the bank statement, it was from almost exactly ten years earlier, right in the midst of the theft.

  “Okay,” he said. Erik went to button his shirt, and cursed softly when he remembered he tore all the buttons off.

  I handed him a clean one from my desk drawer. Sometimes you have to be prepared.

  “Okay, but... wait a minute. These withdrawals were made by the council. Why didn’t I know this before?”

  “Obviously because someone was trying to hide their bad behavior. But here’s the other thing. Look who was on the council back then.”

  I ran my finger under a name – Jenga Cranston.

  “You have to be kidding,” he said. “That old witchdoctor was on the town council? How did I not remember that?”

  “You don’t pay much attention to things you aren’t interested in.” My answer was accompanied by a self-satisfied grin. “Looks like it wasn’t a human after all.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Erik growled. “Call Duggan. And Jamie and the rest of them. Actually no,” he paused. “Not the rest of them. Just Duggan, Jamie and Clay. That’s enough senior members for a caucus. If any of them know this happened, I’ll kill them. Okay, I won’t actually kill them. But I’ll be really, really pissed.”

  “So I guess this means you’re not resigning?”

  Erik clenched his fists so tightly that his shoulders began to shake. “I think no, probably not. This might get rough, all right? If you’re uncomfortable with all this, you can leave town until—”

  “Are you kidding?” I asked. “And miss all the fun? Go get cleaned up. Even if everyone knows about us, lipstick all over your neck might send the wrong message about how serious this meeting is. I’ll get on the phone.”

  “Izzy?” Erik asked after he’d already turned and open the door. “One more thing.”

  “What’s up?” I had the phone in my hand, and had pushed three of Duggan’s digits, but then put it back down and waited for him to finish.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For everything. For your patience, and for doing all this investigation. You didn’t have to do this. It’s my responsibility to be the alpha, and you’re making my job too easy. I might lose my edge if you keep it up.”

  “Get outta here,” I said with a grin. “I’m sure you’ll pay me back.”

  He laughed and ran his hand through his hair. “I’ll sure try,” he said.

  “Hello? Duggan?” I said into the phone as Erik’s office door shut behind him. “Hi, it’s Isabel. I think you might need to come in a little early for that meeting. We’ve found some... interesting things.”

  -8-

  “This is just too much, Erik.” Duggan, poor Duggan, walked back and forth, rubbing at the bald crown of his head with one hand, and pulling on his chin-beard with the other. “I’m happy for you – congratulations and all that, Isabel, but this is... you’re the alpha! How could you spring this on us?”

  His fretting had a certain kind of cuteness to it, but he was right on at least one count – there was a lot just laid on the table.

  “Izzy,” Erik said, “can you help us out here? Duggan’s caught up in all the wrong things. We need to figure out a plan, not hum and haw over my mate. Not right now anyway, we can deal with the mate stuff later. Give us a dose of reason.”

  Being called on during a council meeting was something entirely different for me. My normal thing was to sit here typing away on my keyboard, but for once, there was no keyboard. This was a strictly off-the-record meeting.

  “I don’t really know, Eri... Sir,” I said. “All I can do is say what I found, and those ledger receipts are it.”

  Clay Tomkins, the hyena, perked up, his eyes darting from left to right at whoever was talking. “Ledgers are boring,” he said with a little bit of an up-turn in his voice. “I’d rather talk about mates. Didn’t someone mention mates? Is someone mating with the witchdoctor? I thought witchdoctors didn’t need mates, they just kind of made their own young from... er... parts?”

  “It’s not a junkyard, Clay,” Erik said, standing up. “We can just let him resurrect whoever he wants to try and steal another round of money from the town treasury.”

  “Th – that’s another thing,” Duggan said, adjusting his suspenders and then loosening them right back to where they were before he started fidgeting. “How do we know this is accurate? It goes against everything we knew about the case. How did this all come out right now? It just makes no sense how we could all have been fooled for so long. And anyway, what would be the benefit to the town council keeping this quiet?”

  “Unless the council was all getting a cut,” Jamie said.

  That was the first time since he showed up that Duggan got quiet and stopped pacing.

  General silence hung for a second. Clay fidgeted, Duggan tugged his beard, but nothing else broke the quiet. Erik looked at me, then at Jamie, who shrugged. “Just a thought,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “looking at these records, only a couple of people from back then are still on the council. There’s—”

  “I don’t want to be accused of anything!” Duggan had started sweating. “Just because I’ve been serving this town for thirty years doesn’t mean—”

  “Cool down, hedgehog,” Erik said. He swung his boots off the table and onto the floor. “No one’s accusing you of anything. If anyone in this town was incapable of sneakiness, I think most everyone would agree that it’d be you.”

  “Humph,” Duggan grunted. “Fine, thank you. I guess.”

  “It makes sense,” I said. “Because there’s no other answer. It was easy to convince everyone that Atlas’s mate drove him crazy and then stole a bunch of money, right?”

  “What do you mean?” Jamie said. She had a glint in her eye that told me she knew what I was about to say.

  “Well, think about it. Everyone knows that shifters can get a little... wonky, I guess, when they are with pure blood humans who then deny them, right? Well, what better excuse? Jenga was on the council then, and he’s apparently causing problems now. Doesn’t it make sense that he cooked up a plot to steal a bunch of money using his particular... talents?”

  Thinking for a second, thoughts started connecting in my head like cards on a detective’s white-board with pins holding them up and strings connecting them.

  “What is it, Izzy?” Erik leaned over, his chair squeaking.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Something just... popped into my head.”

  I fell silent for a second until Erik jabbed me in the shin with his boot. “And?”

  “Well look, it says here that a member of the council
was withdrawing money before Atlas died, which happened what day?”

  “That’s a Duggan question,” Erik said. “Wow us with your brain, historian.”

  “Er, I’ll have to think.” Duggan ran a finger down the bald side of his head. “It was a Thursday, I remember that much, when he fell. Thursday the eighth? Yes, that’s right. My grandson’s birthday.”

  “Right, so there’s a withdrawal from the town accounts for a hundred grand on the sixth, the seventh the eighth and the ninth. See?” I said, and pointed out the lines in the ledger. It helped that everyone had got up real close. “I’m thinking that there wasn’t a conspiracy at all, it was just Jenga running a perfect scheme.”

  “This is... a hell of a plot,” Erik said.

  Clay chewed on his lip, and Jamie leaned in. “I’m impressed,” she said. “With you and with Jenga. This is quite a feat even for that old witchdoctor. So, what are you saying, exactly?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I mean, nothing for sure. But the timing all lines up. Atlas’s mate left him for whatever reason – unrelated to the money – earlier in the week. He goes crazier and crazier until Jenga finally figures out he can control him with some kind of spell or tincture or whatever witchdoctors use.”

  Clay snorted a laugh. “Tincture,” he said. “She said tincture. Did you hear that?”

  Erik shot him a nasty glance.

  “She... tincture... anyway.”

  “Right, anyway,” I said, stifling a laugh, “he somehow controls Atlas while he’s still alive, and then...”

  “That son of a bitch,” Erik said. “It wasn’t the old alpha’s fault at all. It never was! That wily old jackass used him. Then when he threw himself off that building, Jenga dug him up and kept right on using him. That would also be why the last withdrawal,” he turned the page and ran his finger down the column. “Here, on the sixteenth, this was for the biggest amount – a quarter million.”

  Everyone looked up from the book, exchanging glances of utter disbelief.

  “That’s... he must’ve stopped because Atlas was getting a little, er, worse for wear,” Jamie said, speaking the things we all were thinking. “Even magicked, a zombie isn’t going to last forever. Well, not looking very fresh anyway.”