Page 12 of Rejecting his Mate (The Wolves of Black Mountain #2)

Chapter 12

Halle

M y body feels alive in a way it never has. Cade’s mouth is fire as he slants his head to deepen the kiss. My skin prickles and feels heated from head to toe while my pulse flutters wildly in my throat.

The taste of him coats my tongue, an explosion that makes my body tingle. His breath is hot, mine too, as we fuse together. There is no hesitation in his movements, just a desperate need as his fingers tangle in the hair at my nape. I’m consumed by his possessive need to have me.

Melting into his arms, I slide my tongue against his, tasting and owning him back. He tugs my head further back, kissing me with a desperation I didn’t know existed.

Then, without warning, he tears our fused mouths apart and stumbles back. Cade’s hand goes to his lips, trailing over them as he averts his gaze.

I’m not sure what to do, so I remain still, just watching to see what he’s going to do.

“We have to go,” he mutters.

“Cade—”

“Jackson’s in trouble.”

The pack bond flares to life inside my mind, as Cade speaks.

Wyatt, we gotta go now.

Wyatt responds with a clipped message that I don’t hear because I’m focused on Cade, who isn’t meeting my gaze.

“Are we going to ignore the fact we just kissed?” I demand.

“We need to go.” He jogs down the porch steps, making his way over to the truck.

Clearly, we’re ignoring this.

Confusion burns through me nearly as hot as the sting of his dismissal. Even Dalton rejecting me publicly didn’t hurt this much. Mostly because I had no interest in Dalton, but Cade… I feel things for him that I shouldn’t.

I rush after him, not allowing him to walk away, and brush what just happened aside.

“Stop,” I order. He doesn’t. He opens the driver’s door. I rush to him before he can climb in, grabbing his bicep. My lips are still tingling from his touch and feel hot. He jolts as I touch him, and I understand it because I feel the same way.

“Are we just going to pretend that never happened?” I repeat.

He doesn’t remove my hand from his arm as he meets my gaze. Then his eyes drop to my neck, to my claiming mark. “Get in the car.”

He climbs in himself, leaving me standing there as Wyatt and Sawyer rush out of the house with two big holdall bags each. They put them into the trunk, oblivious to the turmoil between Cade and me.

I don’t move, my feet rooted to the ground, my heart cracking a little more.

“Get in the truck, Halle,” Cade snaps before closing his door.

“What did you do to piss him off?” Sawyer jokes as he heads to the opposite side of the car and gets in the back.

Numbly, I climb in and try to hold myself together. Getting rejected at my first moon ceremony didn’t hurt as much as this.

Sawyer leans over me and grabs my seat belt from over my shoulder, tugging it down. His eyes are questioning as he hands me the clip. “Buckle up,” he says in a soft voice.

I pull my seat belt on as Wyatt gets into the front passenger side, and then Cade peels the truck out of there.

Through the pack bond, I can sense a little of Cade’s annoyance, and I’m not sure if it’s aimed at me, or my old pack coming for us, but I wonder if the others sense it and are wondering why he’s feeling that way.

I keep my eyes locked on the side window, not risking meeting his gaze in the rearview mirror, and I don’t speak. I’m not sure I can, anyway. My throat is clogged tight with emotion. Is Cade angry he kissed me or pissed I kissed him back? His eyes had gone to the claiming mark, and that was when he seemed to come to his senses.

My fingers drift to it, and I scratch my fingers over the mark. I hate this thing. I despise it declares me so completely as Dalton’s. I wish I could remove all traces of him from me.

“You okay?” Sawyer dips his head a little so he can see my face.

I don’t look at him. I can’t.

“Fine,” I mutter.

“I see Cade wired you into the pack bond.”

“I think he’s probably regretting that choice now.”

Sawyer glances between us while Wyatt chooses, sensibly, to hold his tongue. “I feel like I’ve missed half the movie and walked in on the climax.”

“Don’t you think bringing her into the pack should have been a pack decision?” Wyatt says, his words so soft I barely pick them up.

Silence fills the truck, and I notice how tight Cade’s fingers get around the steering wheel. “You have a problem with it?”

Wyatt huffs out a breath. “We had a good, quiet life before. Shit was easy. We stayed out of the way of the other wolf packs in the area, and they stayed out of ours. This is starting to unravel. There’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tub once it’s on the toothbrush, Cade.”

I frown at his words, even though I know he’s right. I’ve brought a lot of problems to their otherwise peaceful existence.

“You trust me to lead you, right?”

“That’s never been in question,” Wyatt says quietly.

“He’s right,” I say before Cade can respond. “You shouldn’t involve yourself in my problems. Find Jackson and then drop me in the nearest town. I’ll find my own way.”

“No fucking way,” Cade growls. “You’re defenseless out there.”

That pisses me off. “I’m more than capable of taking care of myself,” I snap.

His fingers tighten on the steering wheel, his knuckles popping. The only sound is the hum of the engine as the car hurtles back down the mountain toward wherever Jackson will be waiting for us.

“Really? Considering you nearly died, I doubt it,” Cade’s voice is hard and cold as he says these words.

“What do you care if I live or die?” I fire back, my voice laced with as much callousness as his. I want to hurt him the way I’m hurting.

Cade doesn’t answer, and he must have silenced his end of the pack bond because I don’t feel anything from him.

No one speaks again as the truck continues down the winding road. Even Sawyer is quiet. Eventually, Cade pulls the truck into a cut in at the side of the road, and his voice slides through my mind as he reaches out to Jackson to tell him where we are.

Wyatt gets out of the truck and walks over toward the edge of the road. It dips down into a slight bank before the trees start.

Watching him for a moment, Cade huffs a breath and climbs out. I wince at how hard he shuts the door behind him. I get him being annoyed at being questioned, but Wyatt has a point.

As Cade joins Wyatt, Sawyer turns to me. “Don’t take Wyatt’s tantrum personally.”

“I don’t think he’s having a tantrum,” I say. “Cade should have talked to the rest of you before bringing me into the pack bond like that. Wyatt’s right to be pissed.”

Sawyer doesn’t agree, but he doesn’t disagree either. Instead, his attention goes to the side window, watching as Wyatt speaks to Cade. Even without the emotion coming through the pack, bond I can tell the conversation is heated.

“My brother likes you.”

“Your brother barely tolerates me, and this constant need to protect me is going to drive a wedge between him and the people who matter to him.”

“No, Halle, he likes you. I’ve never seen him like this with an outsider before. Cade is always level-headed and a bit of an asshole at times about things. He’s thrown all that to the wind since you crashed into our lives. There’s not a hint of caution to be found.” He smiles, and I can't help but do so too.

“I don’t think that’s entirely my doing. ”

“You removed the stick from his ass. You deserve a medal for that alone.”

I rush to defend Cade and then slam my teeth together as I realize what I’m about to do. I don’t have to fight in his corner. I shouldn’t, either. It implies a friendship that we don’t have.

“You guys should be pissed he did this without asking.”

Sawyer taps a knuckle gently against the window as he watches his brother and Wyatt continue to argue. “Wyatt would complain about the sun rising in the east if he was given a platform,” he says, which makes me chuckle. “Fact is, I don’t think my brother is going to let you walk away, and I can’t leave him undefended. Wyatt, for all this, won’t either. Cade’s pack and that means something to us. I get Wyatt wants us to sit in our corner and make no sound so no one hears us, but that isn’t possible. Hunters have left us alone, sure, but for how long is that going to continue? They hate anyone not pure and vargr… well, no one really knows what our blood is.”

“Were your parents vargr?”

“Yeah. They owned the house we just left.”

“What happened to them?” I wince as soon as the words leave my mouth. “Sorry, that’s rude of me.”

“It’s okay. I don’t mind talking about it. The vargr curse got them.”

“What’s that?”

“They moved to Florida to seek the sun.”

I stare at him for a beat. “I can’t tell if you’re joking. ”

“I wish. Mom wanted a house on the beach, even though wolves aren’t much for swimming. Dad would do anything for her, including leaving the mountains and having the freedom to run to drink cocktails overlooking the ocean.”

“You see them much?”

“No. Cade and I like the trees and the space to run. We’ve visited a few times, but they got on with their lives, and we got on with ours. The house was theirs, but they signed it over to us when they moved.”

“Did Wyatt and Jackson come with the house too?” I ask with a grin.

He snorts. “Wyatt is our cousin. Jackson, we kinda ran across without meaning to. He was lost, scared of his wolf, and his first shift was done alone.” I wince. Even though I never managed to shift, I’m aware of the dangers of doing so without the support of an alpha and beta. “His wolf was nearly feral when we found him. Took us a month to get him to calm down.”

“And then I crashed into your little family and turned everything upside down.”

“Yeah,” he says, his eyes bright. “I can’t say I don’t approve. Things were getting stale around here.”

He pokes me in the side, making me laugh. “You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if things were normal, right?”

“Exactly.” His attention goes back to the window. “Shit.”

He grabs the door handle and quickly opens the door. My gaze follows his line of sight, and I see a wolf limping out of the trees.

Jackson.

There’s blood on his light fur, and I reach through the pack bond to him, feeling his pain.

I get out of the truck, rushing around the back of it to follow Sawyer as Jackson collapses. Sawyer and I reach him at the same time, his shift back to his human form taking less than a second. His body is covered in cuts and bite marks. Blood smears his skin, and my pulse flutters wildly in my throat.

“They’re… not far… behind me…” he gasps out the warning.

“Fuck.” Cade turns to his brother and Wyatt. “Get him up and in the truck now.”

Wyatt steps forward and drags Jackson onto his back with no help from Sawyer. Grabbing my arm, Cade shoves me in the truck’s direction as a howl resounds through the air.

A howl I recognize. My mating bond throbs to life suddenly, and cold heat pebbles my skin.

Dalton’s close.

“Move,” Cade hisses, urging us all back toward the car.

I don’t argue. The three of us run at full speed and pile inside. It’s a squeeze in the back, with Sawyer on one side, me on the other, and Jackson between us. Sawyer reaches over the back seat into the trunk and tugs a blanket free, draping it over Jackson’s naked body as Cade starts the engine.

“Fuck!” he exclaims.

My gaze snaps up to see six wolves standing in the road in front of us. I recognize all of them, including the large gray one.

Dalton.

Klaus is there. Alaric too.

“Fuck this,” Cade mutters and slams the truck into reverse, hitting the gas. The vehicle screams as it moves backward at speed. I hold onto the window and the back of Wyatt’s seat, trying not to lose my grip.

The wolves run after us before the car spins a hundred and eighty degrees.

The motion stirs something inside me. It’s familiar like it's happened before, but I don’t remember a single incident like this one. The déjà vu is so strong I can’t ignore it.

I close my eyes as the truck spins out, my stomach rolling at the motion. Then we’re moving forward at speed. Sawyer’s hand, I realize, is pressed against my shoulder, holding me in place.

Twisting in my seat, I peer out of the rear window. Red Deer wolves are still following us, but they are falling behind as Cade speeds down the mountain pass.

Dalton’s wolf meets my gaze and I feel him pressing into my mind, calling to my wolf to go to him. I wince at the pressure and the mounting pain as he forces his way inside my thoughts.

Come to me…

Pain slices through my skull as I try to push him out. I see lights behind my eyes, and I lean forward as my stomach clenches.

“Halle?” Sawyer’s voice penetrates my awareness.

“What’s wrong with her?” Cade snaps, and I hear the fear in his words.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m… okay.” I straighten in my seat, realizing I can’t sense him in my mind any longer.

I twist, glancing behind us, and as soon as I know Dalton’s wolf is looking at me, I flip him the bird.