Page 20 of Bred Mate (Stalked Mates #2)

“Yes. It does, but it’s not her job. I’m supposed to be looking after her. I’m supposed to be getting the fucking forest back for her. I’ve taken care of her brothers, but I don’t feel like I’ve helped her at all. My job is to protect my mate. Right now she’s protecting herself.”

“As someone with a strong mate,” Gray says, “let me tell you, the job of protecting them isn’t always what you think.

Sometimes it’s more about protecting them from themselves rather than from the world.

They can fight. They can be in control. But when she’s with you, that’s when she gets a different kind of safety. Make sense?”

Gray is my little brother. I’ve tortured him most of our lives, on and off, since he came over from England and was in my orbit.

It’s strange that he’s giving me mature advice when I’ve always been the one in charge.

Nothing is going the way I thought it would, and I’m more than a little tired of it.

I want to get back to myself. I want to be in charge again. I want to have my mate wrapped around my cock. I want to pin her down and look her in the eye and teach her that I’m her alpha and her mate. I’m her world, and she’s mine.

“I had to hunt my girl down,” he reminds me. “It happens sometimes.”

“I got the meta data from the email and the video. There’s some background that we can digitally match.”

“You do the tech stuff,” I say. “I’ve got my own methods.”

Gray’s a stalker. I’m a hunter. Hunters hunt by knowing how their prey thinks. I suspect Ellie would have her captive somewhere forested. Probably not all that far from…

No. I smile to myself at the idea, though.

If she was really audacious, she’d have him back at the original house site somehow.

If not there, somewhere similar. She’s most comfortable where she can blend into nature, and avoid people.

Also, there’s the fact that an unwilling man can only be taken so far.

It probably isn’t that far from a road. She might have dragged him there, but she didn’t get too deep into the wilds.

Gray puts all the data into some kind of computer program, including where his car was found and a few other bits of information he managed to glean while Rainer was trying his best to give us as little as possible.

“Here,” he says, pointing to a map. “I think she’s here.”

As we suspected, Ellie is holed up in a swamp with her captive. The place is well guarded by hostile wildlife. Venomous snakes, vicious alligators, and more slither through the murky waters.

“Getting in and out of here alive is going to be the hardest thing,” Gray says, as I wade straight into the waters. “Careful! An alligator can take down a wolf.”

“That’s what the gun is for,” I remind him.

“We don’t want to have to shoot.”

We don’t have to shoot. The wildlife leaves us alone, and as it turns out there’s no need to be concerned about making too much noise.

Though she could probably hear an irregular ripple of the river if she was concentrating on it.

Ellie isn’t paying attention to what is going on outside the cabin. She is entirely focused on her captive.

“Sorry, Patrick,” she’s saying. “You’re the one who thought he could hit me in the face multiple times.

You’re the one who thought he had the right to take me like I was some kind of living doll, just an inanimate thing that happened to have lungs.

This is what happens to horrible men who treat women badly.

They die in the swamp, Patrick. They die in the fucking swamp. ”

“Jesus,” Gray breathes.

I grin. Never been so proud of her.

“Are we rescuing her? Or saving him?” Gray mutters.

“He’s not being saved,” I tell him. “He’s not leaving this place alive.”

“It’s going to be straight up murder if he dies,” Gray says. “He’s pathetic.”

“Oh, no. Murder. Anyway…” I reply.

Inside the cabin, the argument continues.

“Please let me go. I’ll get my father to give you what you want. I’ll get him to give you a whole fucking state!”

“See, I don’t think he will. I think if he was going to give into my demands, I’d already have it. I think your daddy has abandoned you. I think you’re going to die here.”

“Then why don’t you just kill me?”

“Because I don’t feel like it right now. You don’t get to decide when you die, just like I wasn’t going to get a choice in when I got married.”

She’s making his life miserable, and I can’t blame her for it.

“Please. I wasn’t going to hurt you… ow!”

I hear him grunt. She just hit him pretty damn hard.

“You almost knocked me out,” she says. “You forgot that?”

I’ve heard enough.

I come through the window in a shower of glass, grab Rainer’s son’s skull, and snap his useless fucking neck.

The sound of his spine giving way is muted, just like the rest of him.

He dies like the pointless creature he always was.

Gray was wrong. Killing Patrick didn’t feel like murder. It felt like taking out the trash.

“I wasn’t done playing with him!” Ellie complains, her tone whiny.

She’s not exactly a damsel in distress, and hardly grateful for being saved.

I turn toward her, trying to keep my tempter in check.

I had started to think I wasn’t going to get to see my mate ever again.

I thought I might have lost my chance to have her in this lifetime.

The sheer relief I feel is eclipsed by the anger running through me.

She was here, amusing herself. She wasn’t thinking about me at all.

She didn’t seem to notice I would even have feelings about her disappearance.

Like the little predator she is, all she cared about was her prey.

Ellie

He looks mad.

Why does he look mad?

“Do you know how worried I’ve been about you?” He snarls the words. Out of anybody else’s mouth they might sound sort of whiny and maybe needy. Out of his, they sound like a condemnation that makes all the skin on the back of my neck prickle and my body flush with heat and guilt.

“You shouldn’t have worried. There was no need. I’m fine.”

“And you didn’t think I needed to hear that?”

“I was busy,” she says, lifting her chin with more attitude than I intend to accept from her. “I would have gotten around to talking to you soon.”

His jaw clenches. “You don’t seem sorry to me.”

“That’s because I’m not?” I answer before I think too much about it. I’ve been fucking with my captive for days, getting my revenge for the awful things he did and intended to do to me. I’m not exactly in a submissive headspace.

“Oh. Well. Let me help you then,” he growls, snatching me up.

“What are you going to do? Thrash me? Fuck me?”

“Yes. That sounds like a damn good idea,” he agrees.

“There’s a dead man in the room.”

“I don’t care. You should have thought of that before you took that tone with me.”

He turns me around, throws the dress I’m still wearing up over my hips, unzips his pants, and pulls me onto his cock faster than I thought that could happen.

I let out a shriek of surprise as he bends me forward with one hand on the back of my neck and fucks me roughly and possessively, like my body is his to use.

There’s a dead man in the room who wanted to treat me like I was his to use, but that man did not have any of the animal charisma or connection that Karl has.

Feeling his cock deep inside me is a physical reminder that even though I’ve lost the forest I tried so hard to keep, I do still have one home—him.

“Asshole!” I curse at him.

“Say that again, and that’s where you’ll be taking this cock,” he promises me. His mood has improved, but he’s still deep inside me and using one hand on my hip, the other on the back of my neck to pull me all the way down on his dick.

I don’t say it again, mostly because I don’t have the ability to form words.

I had forgotten how intoxicating sex with him is.

He’s my mate, and when he’s inside me, I know it.

My pussy responds to him with rushes of excitement and lubrication, and easy submission that allows me to take every rough, dominating thrust he has for me.

“I’m going to breed you,” he growls. “I’m going to give you another dose of cum to teach you who you belong to. You forgot. I won’t let you forget again.”

He is already knotting inside me. I can feel him getting thicker and thicker, stretching my pussy wider than any man ever could. I am going to be trapped on his cock once he breeds me, and the idea of being full of his seed again is making my clit throb.

I didn’t realize how much I missed him until this moment, with my entire body being rag-dolled around his cock. My pussy is aching, and I am about to…

“Fuck” he grunts. “Fuck, yes. Fuck.”

He pulls me deep and starts coming inside me, the hand that was on my waist now finding my clit, his fingers strumming until I start to contort and writhe, now completely trapped on his cock. This is devious and unfair and it feels so good I can’t do anything besides what he wants me to do—come.

With me trapped on his knot, he wraps his arm underneath my thighs and holds me up. When he speaks, he is growling in my ear.

“What do you have to say to me?”

“Sorry?”

“That’s part of it,” he says. “It’s a start. I want to hear more from you, my mate.”

My head feels like it is full of warm liquid, like my brain melted down in the midst of orgasm and I am just sort of floating. I don’t exactly know what he wants from me.

“You want me to tell you I missed you?”

“You better, you fucking little… animal,” he says. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” I say. “But I was busy.”

I feel him take a deep breath. My entire body moves with the motion of his.