Page 16 of Savagely Mated (Shared Mates #1)

“There’s another one of those Delivery 2 Go bikes,” Rafe says, pointing it out as a hazard.

We’ve seen maybe three or four of them crash and destruct in the last half-hour.

That seems like a lot, but I reckon we’ve seen at least a hundred go by.

So that’s a three or four percent failure rate.

Not bad, really. Less than I would have guessed.

Those couriers ride like they don’t want to get where they’re going, like there’s some delivery-themed Valhalla awaiting them.

Einar is still trying to find Darcy by approaching contacts, but it’s not sounding good. Nobody knows where she’s gone. The academy doesn’t seem to give a shit. They’re too used to her disappearing, is my guess.

I think we’ve lost her.

That pisses me off, because she belongs to us. Shouldn’t be able to lose what you own—but I guess nobody told her that. Even if they had, she’d probably tell them to fuck off. She’s hard to handle, uncouth, rough around every single one of her edges, and absolutely gorgeous.

Another one of those D2G bikes comes swinging around the corner.

There’s a pack of them buzzing like flies around the intersection.

I’ve started to ignore them. They’re like the visual equivalent of background noise.

At least, until one of them slows down right next to us and the rider reaches out, grabs my sausage burrito that I just got from a vendor, and guns the bike.

Fucking riders. Nobody who likes riding motorcycles is entirely sane, that’s just a fact. And that means stupid shit like this is rife.

“Hell, no,” I curse.

I gun my engine and head off after the courier.

Einar and Rafe don’t pay any kind of attention.

They’re too worried about the girl. Our mate.

God, I hate even mentally putting the word ‘our’ in front of mate.

I always knew that one day I’d meet a woman who would become everything to me.

She’d be my one and only. Instead, what I’ve ended up with is a delinquent with enough sexual charge to mate bond to a whole goddamn pack.

Maybe we should be grateful we didn’t bring more men with us.

She might have mate bonded with a dozen guys.

With those thoughts racing through my mind, I chase the delivery rider down.

This guy clearly has a very loose attachment to life, judging not only by the shit he pulls on strangers, but the way he rides.

That bike is flung around corners, narrowly misses a slew of oncoming traffic and pedestrians, nearly gets horizontal in the effort to avoid a truck.

I know I should give up the chase in order to preserve my own life, but this fucker has my burrito, and I have lost enough for one day.

I might have to share my mate, but I will not share my goddamn burrito.

Horns blare as I follow this psychopath into an alley where the chase ends abruptly as he pulls up with screaming tires, his bike horizontal to mine.

It occurs to me that this is probably a trap.

There are a lot of hijackings in Eclipse.

Crime is rampant here. But this guy is going to regret fucking with me today.

I am sure of that. Nobody is going to notice a Delivery 2 Go driver’s death.

They truly are the house flies of the city, often swatted to the approval of all concerned.

The driver looks at me, still holding my foil-wrapped lunch like a trophy. I wonder if a bunch of people are about to come pouring out of these side doors, or if a shot is about to come from an upper window, but neither of those things happen.

The rider just looks at me. I look back. And finally, idiot that I am, I realize what I am looking at.

Not a man. A woman.

She’s too small to be male, and her jacket sits in a very feminine way on her, flaring out at the hips. Great. I’ve been chasing a random girl. Just what this day needs. More girl trouble.

I’m now even more impressed by her riding.

Like most of the yellow-suited menaces who work for that company, she was really throwing the machine around like she didn’t care if she made it to the end of the day.

The packages she has on the back swung wildly, but somehow have stayed attached.

I don’t know how they pack things there, but someone should study it.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I shout at her.

“What the fuck is wrong with you ?” she shouts back, pushing up her visor. I can see brown eyes at a distance, narrowed in annoyance at me.

“You wanna die, is that it?”

“No, idiot. I wanted breakfast.”

She pulls her helmet off her head and takes a big bite of my burrito. I stare, stunned. There is no fucking way this is happening. What are the odds? How is this even possible?

“…Darcy?”

“Fuck,” she mouths through my food, her eyes widening as she finally recognizes me.

I am wearing black leathers and a helmet, so of course she didn’t know who I was.

In the few short hours since escaping us, this little menace has somehow gotten hold of a D2G uniform and bike and packages and taken to the streets of Eclipse to steal food.

“Don’t move,” I tell her, making my voice stern. “Don’t you fucking dare even think about moving.” I swing my leg over my bike and walk over to her, half expecting her to ditch the food and drive off. She doesn’t do that.

She takes another bite and looks at me. “What are you going to do? Drag me back to the other two?”

“That was the idea, yeah.”

She gives me a keen look. “You don’t want to do that.”

“I don’t?”

“No,” she says. “You don’t like me. You don’t want me all up in your business every day.”

I lower my voice, with a different inflection this time. “What makes you think I don’t like you?”

The tone does the heavy lifting, because she blushes and instead of taking another giant bite of my burrito, she giggles instead, as if what she has to say makes her feel nervous and uncomfortable. It would be cute, if it weren’t also absolutely insane.

“I can tell,” she says. “You’re always scowling at me, and looking annoyed.”

“We haven’t known one another long enough for there to be an always ,” I point out. “First time we met, you got yourself into a duel with me. Second time, you stole my van. Third time, you’ve run away with my burrito.”

“You were giving me looks before I did any of that. You looked pissed off when the others said I was their mate.”

“Did it occur to you that the reason I looked annoyed then was because the idea of sharing my mate doesn’t sit well with me?”

She shakes her head hurriedly. She has taken another bite. She must be starving. She’s got to be absolutely exhausted, actually. We’ve run her ragged. Not a lot of sleep, and then running from us, and then whatever reason she has a delivery bike…

“I know when men like me, and you don’t like me,” she says once she swallows, speaking with the confidence of a girl who knows absolutely nothing about men whatsoever.

I want to bend her over that yellow bike of hers, pull her uniform… where the hell did she get that from? Anyway, I want to pull that down and go to town on her ass. I’ll show her what I want and what I like soon enough.

We’re still in the middle of the city in broad daylight though, and while horrific crashes and casual violence don’t draw much attention, you still can’t just fuck someone on the side of the road, even if you’re in an alley.

Yes, we could have murdered each other; that would have been unremarkable.

But sex? There are standards. Weird, backwards standards, but standards.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, wishing I could do more, but not knowing where the hell to even start.

She stuffs the rest of my burrito into her mouth as fast as she can, chewing vehemently so she can respond to me.

“Fuck you. I know exactly what I’m talking about. When a guy likes a woman, he brings her flowers and he says her dress looks nice, and he changes his whole fucking life and kicks out his friends and he…”

She’s pissed off at something that isn’t just me, I think. Some of this stuff is way too specific. Or maybe she read it in a book somewhere. Romance propaganda.

“When this guy likes a woman, he tells her to her face,” I growl. “I like you, Darcy.”

Darcy

He insists he likes me, but he’s still so grumpy.

I think it’s something about his eyes. He has these incredibly piercing blue eyes and set in that handsome face, it’s easy for him to look intimidating as hell.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so much latent fury seething in a man as what is locked away in Kirin’s long, powerful body.

I guess, to give him some credit, I do feel the attraction between us, especially as he is now wearing black motorcycle leathers, which emphasize the powerful masculine lines of his body. He’s so fucking hot.

I don’t know what to do with that feeling.

He makes me nervous. He’s actually too hot, in a way, and besides that, he seems to have an inability to just be nice.

I’m not sure I like nice, but I definitely don’t like whatever the hell this attitude is either.

All growly, dominant, stompy, demanding, rude, terse…

“I can’t talk right now,” I tell him. “I’m at work.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Darcy? You’re a cadet at the academy.”

“Not anymore, I’m not. Not after everything that has happened lately,” I tell him. “There’s no place for me there. I have to be an independent woman. I have to support myself.”

“What are you babbling about?”

He interrupts me while I’m explaining, which is really annoying, not to mention condescending.

I kick the bike back into life, and that’s when he makes his biggest mistake yet.

He tries to stop me by grabbing me and dragging me off it.

I feel his big hands wrap around my arm as he prepares to haul me into his custody.

Big mistake. Huge.

The thing with Delivery 2 Go bikes is they’re expensive.

They’re expensive because they’re custom made with all sorts of features that help deliveries go more smoothly.

I’m discovering this for myself on the job, as it were.

One of the features is an electrical field that activates when someone not wearing Delivery 2 Go livery steps into the immediate radius of the bike and tries to assault the rider.

As Kirin grabs me, I see a blue snap of electric light wrap around his arm. Kirin goes flying backwards like he’s been donkey kicked. Lucky for him, he’s wearing protective gear, because if he weren’t he’d have some nasty Eclipse special road rash.

He curses as he stands up.

This entire scene is not going unobserved. A little crowd of people has decided that they need to use the alley and is flowing past us, because that’s how things are in a city like Eclipse. Nothing happens unobserved.

A woman laughs as she catches the tail end of our conversation.

“He likes you? Girl, good for you. Nobody has time for being liked. Liking is for ice cream. A man wants you? He better crave you.”

To Kirin’s credit, he doesn’t answer back to her.

He keeps his eyes locked on me. Hell, maybe it’s not to his credit.

He looks focused and annoyed. Oh, well. He can deal with that on his own.

I gun the engine, toss the wrapper at him, and swing back into the flow of traffic. I’ve got deliveries to make.