I shoot up from the sofa. Launching myself at him, with desperate adrenaline racing through me, I pump my arms and reach—reach—reach—
I barely hook my hand onto the back of his shirt before he can grab our mate. Yanking hard, I pull him sideways, off balance so that he can’t get to her. My fingers claw up his torso until I can wrap an arm around his throat and use his momentum to spin him away. Breathing hard, my lungs working in short, furious puffs, I quickly move to place my body between him and our mate, and then I rush him.
My shoulder slams into his solar plexus and pain radiates down my spine as I shove him into the wall. He cracks the plaster when he hits, but I don’t feel sorry for the damage at all; it’s the least the witches deserve for pulling a stunt like this. To say I’m livid with them is a fucking understatement.
“Let go!” he growls, the pupil of his eye overtaking the color until there’s only a glowing ring of spring green left. The black veins in his neck bulge thicker with outrage.
“Calm the fuck down!” I thunder, not a damn bit calm myself. If I didn’t deal with shifters losing their shit on the daily, I might be tempted to shift and fight him right now. Or take his place and charge at Noah myself. As it is, I can feel the furor of the wolf stampeding through my veins, and I have to breathe deeply to keep myself centered. To keep myself human.
“Mine!” Ruger’s howled word echoes inside my skull, and I hear the first of his bones crack.
Shit. He’s starting to shift. “Fight it, Ruger. Fight it. She isn’t ready.”
Fuck, It’s never a good idea to get between a wolf and his mate, but I know Noah won’t understand this extreme reaction to her trying on lingerie. All his instincts are driving him to keep her from being vulnerable and exposed, and one way to fix that is to rut her and then initiate a pair bite to solidify the claim. Right now, his wolf is telling him that’s what needs to happen, and I can’t let it. I grip tighter as he pushes against me, and I switch to mindspeak.
“She won’t get that you want to protect her. You’ll scare her.”
She’s not ready for any mate claim shit yet. She’s a naif and barely coming to terms with our world. That fact forces me to get in Ruger’s face and try to talk his crazed wolf down.
Luckily, the word scare seems to slow him down a little and lets me know I’m getting through to him. If we were playing poker, his slow blink would be his tell. I exploit my advantage, talking steadily inside his head while my fingers start to ache from the death grip they’re maintaining. “We don’t want Noah scared. Then she’ll run. We want our mate happy.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Trista has the good sense to magic a pink robe over Noah. Thank fuck.
Ruger snarls threateningly in my face, but I don’t hear any more bones cracking, which means he’s winning over his wolf, for now.
I deliberately take a deep calming breath, hoping he’ll do the same.
He doesn’t.
I lean toward him, doing my best to look as unchallenging as possible and whisper in a conspiratorial tone. “She’s safe. Look, she’s covered now. She’s not exposed. The only wolves around are us…see?”
Ruger’s growl morphs into a desperate groan as he fights his instincts and tries to regain control. I fight back my own animalistic drive as I feel his pain lash out in bright, stinging gusts. Resisting is unnatural for a wolf. But so is having an adult naif running in a Hunt and getting claimed.
Noah is breathtaking and strong, and I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anything.
Fending off the need to touch her, to caress her, to rub my nose along the crook of her neck and gulp down her erotic scent…it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But it’s what she needs. We have to be what she needs.
“Need her,” Ruger mindspeaks, the tension in his mental voice vibrating with all the force he’s using to hold himself back.
“We can’t freak her out if we want to keep her,” I reply, unsure if he’s capable of rationality right now. I really, really don’t want to have to shift to block him. A violent face off will fuck up the progress we’ve made with Noah.
“Go run it off,” I order, which might be a stupid thing to do at this moment because, technically, Ruger’s wolf is a touch more dominant than mine. It’s never been an issue before, but we’ve also never had a mate before. I’ve never seen this sort of shimmering need in his eyes. He doesn’t ever lose control like this, but clearly this witch trick and the scraps of pink barely covering our girl are too much for him to handle.
Ruger’s head bombards me with a series of images of us kissing Noah, each of us on either side of her, grasping her hips, pressing her against the wall, peeling her out of the lace and straps—all the things his animal nature is calling for.
The yearning sears through his lungs, and I swear I feel it transfer into me. I have to squeeze my eyes closed against it.
Noah’s breathing picks up, and a layered scent of enticing desire rolls off her to mix with the acrid bite of her unease. Whether she knows it or not, she’s responding to Ruger and his dominant display—and it’s not all fright and alarm. I want to explore that, point it out to her, explain why we’re being driven together and why we should act on this hunger. I want to pull the smell of her need deep into my lungs, let it fuel my body to close the distance between us and rip the small bits of fabric from her lithe body, but I can’t get past the taint of her trepidation.
We’re fucking this up for her. If we’re not careful and we push too hard too soon, her panic will drown everything out and she’ll slip through our fingers just when we’ve barely caught hold of her.
“Can’t you smell it? She’s nervous. She’s scared,” I point out to Ruger, hoping the sour trace of alarm in the air will slap some sense into him.
“Fuck!” Ruger bellows in my head, and I can tell he’s picked up on the scent and hates that it’s coming off her as much as I do.
“I know it’s hard, but go run it off. I’ve got her,” I tell him aloud, suffusing all the dominance I can into the order. If Ellery were here, he’d shut Ruger down with a single order. Perks of being our den’s leader and the most alpha-dominant of the four of us.
Ruger grits his teeth, fighting the change, shaking as he tries to get the black veins to recede. His eyes are still locked on Noah, and she sucks in a breath. Her small noise of fear is what finally snaps him out of it. His green eyes flash, and then with a growl, he spins on his heel away from me and strides out of the shop. The door slams shut behind him.
Thank fuck.
That could have ended badly.
Noah watches the door, and the struggle whether to go after him or not is written all over her face. It’s what my instincts need to see, because she may not be ready to admit it to herself yet, but she’s ours.
Trista and Astrid look a bit sheepish, but I can’t tell if Karen looks repentant or pleased. Knowing her, it’s probably both.