Page 119 of The Enforcer's Rejected Mate

The hand on my arm moves and she rubs her thumb across my bicep. “Except for you?” She sounds hopeful. Fuck, she feels hopeful. I can feel it moving through the Soul Tie. Bright and happy, like the summer sunshine from my dream.

The band starts a new song, it’s something slow and couples around us make for the dance floor. When Cordelia moves to take a step off to the side, I catch her by the waist and pull her into me.

“Yeah, that’s right. Just me,” I tell her as I start to lead her through a dance. We make it all of two steps before she steps on my foot. The next step and she does it again.

“Oh my Luna, oh no, I’m so bad at this. I don’t know how to dance. I’m sorry.”

“You never learned?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

“I’ll teach you.”

Chapter

Fifty-One

CORDELIA

Thorne is going to teach me how to dance.

Thorne is going to teach me how to dance and he just kicked an alpha out of the dance for me. I think he also took his job away from him too, which….woah.

“It’s okay, it’s easy. Just watch my feet, okay? Step forward,” I do as he says and then he nudges me to the side, “now to the side one-two. Do it again with me.” I look down at our feet so I don’t step on him and let Thorne’s hand on my waist guide me.

“One and one-two, that’s it.” I stumble over his foot and into the next round of steps. “Good job,” he praises me.

I can’t help it. I laugh when he tells me ‘good job’. “I just stepped on you again. What do you mean "good job?”

“Eh, the first time I tried to dance. I stepped on her foot so hard that she lost a toenail.”

My mouth falls open. “You did not.”

He grins at me. “Sorry. I definitely did. She was a good sport about it but that was the end of our date. Never saw her again.” I giggle. The earlier drama with the pushy alpha, my worry over not seeing him and thinking he would reject me? It’s all gone and I haven’t even been with him for five minutes. Every second feels like an eternity and everything is right in the world.

“Hey, look at that. You’re dancing,” Thorne says.

“Huh? No I’m not.”

“You haven’t stepped on me once. You just did the box step three times. You’re dancing, sweetling.”

Sweetling.

Not my name, not omega, not even Cordy but sweetling? It’s like someone turned on a light in a dark room-if my body was that dark room. I feel like I’m glowing. I have to be from the looks I get from the pack members around me.

This moment feels delicate, like the soap bubbles I used to blow when I was on dish duty. Those bubbles had been fragile, tremulous in the way they existed in the world, a mix of color and shape that made everything in me long to fly away with them. Dancing with Thorne feels like this. I can see it now, light moving around us, cocooning us away from the rest of the dance floor.

I smile up at him and miraculously don’t step on his feet while we dance. “I’m happy I’m dancing with you.” Thorne’s eyes soften and he smiles back. The light above us reflects back at me from his eyes. There’s a flash and the bubble of light and color shoots out around us until it’s all I can see.

Wait…the light around us…it’s not just in my head that I’m seeing this.It’s real.

There’s actually a bubble of light around us. Holy hells.

The light goes gold and warmth shoots through me. It feels like I’ve been shot and seeing as Ihavebeen shot, I know what it feels like. I gasp, stumble and fall into his arms. All around us I hear the rest of the pack starting to notice. There’s gasps and raised voices, I even hear some shouts. Thorne’s the only reason I don’t end up in a heap on the floor but the big alpha isn’t steady. He rocks back on his heels with a curse. I’m not the only one feeling this.

“What’s happening?” I ask him.

“I-I…” He doesn’t answer me. There’s a lost look in his eyes. He’s just as stunned as I am by what’s happening. Except, in the span of one heartbeat to the next, I know what’s happening. I’ve felt this way before. It’s just like when the moon goddess revealed Keiran as my fated mate. The threads of fate align, wrap themselves right around Thorne and I, and our future unfolds just the way it did with Keiran. At least, it does until another wave of light and heat pierces me and I realize that,no,I’ve never felt like this in my entire life. This is nothing like what it was with Keiran.