Page 26 of Hunted Mate (Stalked Mates #1)

I reluctantly let him take me to his car.

I know if he does betray me, I can do unpleasant things and get myself free again.

But I also know that he’s smarter than most, and that next time anybody comes for me, I probably won’t get the same low level of security.

In the lab, they barely locked the doors because I was a pretty little blonde heiress who couldn’t possibly be a threat. The people who made that mistake died.

They deserved to. They had done things to me, or participated in the research of the things that were done to me. They tried to change who I was, and I guess they succeeded.

“Move over,” Gray says. “You’re not driving.”

“Really?” I giggle. “But I’m so good at it.”

“Move over, or I’ll take you out of this car, spank your ass, and put you back in it,” he says sternly. “We have enough to talk about, you and I.”

“Oh, do we?” I smirk at the idea of being in trouble.

A strong hand grabs the back of my neck low down and Gray pulls me out of the car just like he threatened.

I try to hold onto the steering wheel, but that doesn’t help.

It just means I’m faced toward the vehicle when his hand comes down hard on my ass.

The burst of pain strikes me as definitely unfair, not to mention very painful.

He’s not treating me with any kind of gentle kindness.

My screech is filled with some pain and a whole lot of outrage.

I let go of the steering wheel, but he keeps me pushed in place against the side of the car.

“I don’t need your attitude,” he growls. “I am sorry, but I am not going to grovel. You’re still my mate, you little creature.”

His hand meets my ass several more times, hard and fast and brutally stinging.

My yowls turn into yelps as I realize he’s actually punishing me.

Out of the corner of my eye I can see a couple of officers watching the scene with what seems to be satisfaction.

Most of the townsfolk have scattered at this indecorous display.

It doesn’t fit their idea of what reality is.

We are already shattering expectations, and neither one of us has showed our real animal side yet.

“You’re going to have to get yourself under control,” he hisses in my ear. “There’s no excuse for what you’ve been doing. You could have gotten people killed. You could have gotten yourself killed!”

“Get off me!” I try to squirm my way out, for real this time. It doesn’t work. He snugs me back in place against the car with a hand on the back of my neck, and a grip that tightens every time I try to fight.

“I know you’re full of yourself right now,” he says. “But I’m still your mate, and I’m still bigger, stronger, and yes, meaner than you.”

“You’re not meaner than me,” I whimper, my voice muffled.

“Yes, I am,” he says, his voice taking on the tone of a promise.

“I’ve been getting vengeance,” I whisper, rubbing my ass back against him. I’m just trying to stop him from spanking me, and trying to get the sting out, but it has the benefit of distracting him from his punishment.

“I know,” he growls. “And you were entitled to it, but I’m here now. And you don’t have to protect yourself anymore.”

“You let them take me,” I remind him. I’m not trying to rub it in, but I felt really fucking abandoned.

For all I knew, he’d lured me into the lab and left me there to be experimented on.

I’ve had to consider the possibility of betrayal every minute of every hour since I woke up in that horrible white room.

“My father distracted me while you were taken. I never, ever intended for you to suffer. I certainly never meant for you to be experimented on.”

“Well, the good news is, it didn’t work,” I say. “I’m fine. Not even a little fur.”

“It’s too early to tell if it worked or not,” he says. “And in the meantime, I want you by my side. Literally not out of my sight. My father’s people and the lab scientists are all still looking for you.”

“They want to finish the experiment, huh?”

“Exactly.”

“So what now?”

“Now we run.”

“Oh.” I smile.

“What?”

“Well, I guess the hunter, you, is becoming the hunted. How are you going to handle that?”

He looks serious. I was teasing, but I guess I was also accurate.

“He will send Karl. Karl’s the most motivated to bring me down. Maybe some of the older brothers, but most of them have real jobs and families that don’t allow them to take time off to run a sibling down, even if they wanted to.”

“Where are we going to go? What are we going to do? I have money. I bet it’s practically impossible to find a billionaire who doesn’t want to be found. You stalked me, but that’s because I didn’t know about it.”

“For starters, you go and get in the passenger side of this car, and we get out of here.”

I agree to that, and he lets me go long enough for me to do that. It feels a little nice to get into the passenger seat. I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, hardly any of it good. I guess I’ve been acting a little unhinged, but it felt really good at the time, and that’s what matters most.

Gray gets in the driver’s seat and looks at me with an expression of what I can only describe as relief and satisfaction.

He starts the car and sends it out of town at a very reasonable speed.

The posted limit here is just fifteen mph.

Cars here crawl. We pass the intersection where I simply lost interest in driving and abandoned the car I stole.

The car is being hooked up to the back of a tow vehicle, by someone who looks bland and righteous at the same time.

“I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to find you before something unfixable happened,” he says as we get on the open road. “You have no idea how scared I was for you. You know you’ve been out of control, don’t you?”

“Staying in control is for when life makes sense in the usual way,” I say. “Doing whatever the hell feels best is for when I end up captive and medically experimented on. You can’t expect people to follow the rules when you get evil.”

“You’re reckless,” he says. “And you’re not thinking about the fact that there’s a very real chance that you are going to have some kind of medical reaction to the procedure they put you through.”

“And there’s an even realer chance that we can spend a lot of money doing some very cool things,” I say. “I don’t feel sick. At all. I’ve never felt so healthy, actually. I’m glowing.”

He narrows his eyes at me. “You do look good, healthy, I mean,” he says, reluctant to admit that the secret underground nonconsensual lab treatment seems to have done wonders for more than just my skin.

“Yeah. I’m doing great. And I’ve got some money being wired to me, and I’m not in any real legal trouble, because people with as much money as I have never are. So stop worrying. It’s going to be fine.”

“I know you feel bulletproof,” he says. “But you’re not. You can be harmed. You can easily be killed. You have to be careful, and you have to lay low with me. We are on the run.”

“You’re on the run,” I say, sassy. “I’m along for the ride.”

“You’ve really got to stop with the attitude,” he growls. “I feel like I need to thrash you until you settle down and learn how to behave yourself in this new form. That medical treatment definitely did something to you.”

“Yeah. It made me fun. I’m sorry you got attached to the boring bookworm who spent all her time looking up old chat logs about shifters, but I’m interesting now.”

“Interesting,” he snorts, indicating to change lanes. “You’ve always been interesting, Calista. You don’t need to act like a criminal on a binge to be interesting.”

“I’m not trying to prove a point,” I tell him. “I am just different now. Because of what your family did to me. So maybe lay off the fucking judgment.”

He gives me a brief, sharp look before his eyes return to the road, and I know I’m going to pay for that later.

I really don’t care. This isn’t about behaving properly, even though he’s going to make it all about my manners, or lack thereof.

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to be nice and good and polite the way most people are.

Half of being human is constantly policing yourself.

I wasn’t doing anything for attention. I was just doing what made sense, what my instincts told me to do.

“What if…”

“What?”

“What if we didn’t run? What if we just went back home.”

“They’d try to come for you.”

“I’m very rich, Gray. I don’t need to run. I need men with guns, and I have enough money to pay for a thousand men with guns if I want. I could have a man with a gun in every single corner of every single room in my house if I wanted.”

“That is a good point,” he agrees, reluctantly.

“And you tell your father the experiment didn’t work and if he comes anywhere near New York I will lock him up in one of my many, many warehouses and… you know what? I’ll tell him myself.”

“What?”

Gray glances over at me, and then back at the road, and then back at me again. He didn’t notice when we were wrestling around, but I stole his phone at the time. I thought it’d be funny. I didn’t realize it’d be this funny.

I hold the phone up to his face when he looks at me the second time, and it unlocks. From there, not hard to find Orion in his contacts list and make the call.

“Son?”

“Hey. It’s me,” I say. “The girl you had locked up and experimented on.”

“Calista Hart,” he says.

“Yes. Good for you for remembering.” I do not even try not to sound condescending. “Anyway, just wanted to let you know that if I ever see you again, I will kill you. Okay, sweetie?”

The last part is a little passive-aggressive, but I’m trying that on as an alternative to the more outright aggression.

He laughs.

“You couldn’t kill me if you tried.”