Page 57 of The Enforcer’s Rejected Mate (Red River Rejected Mates #1)

Chapter

Thirty-Nine

CORDELIA

I dream of my fated mate. It’s the first time since Keiran rejected me that my mate dream comes to me.

At first, I don’t know what it is. Everything feels different.

When I dreamed of my faceless mate before, things felt…

oppressive. Cold. Bleary. It scared me when I was younger and it still did when I got older, no matter how much I tried to convince myself it wasn’t an omen about my mate or what we’d be to each other.

I should have known, though. It was a perpetual winter in those dreams. Nothing grew there.

The trees felt more like bones than anything else, each one an exposed fragment of a long forgotten body.

This dream is different.

It’s warm, almost hot and the air is summer sweet.

A storm rolls in overhead, the distant sound of thunder rumbling makes me happy.

I dig my toes into the soil and stretch my hands overhead as a breeze blows by.

Everything around me is alive. Blooming and thriving like it’s the height of summer.

The bright flash of pinks and reds, yellows, all of them flowers brightens the space around me and when I step towards one of the summer blooms to inspect it I see him.

He’s big. One of the biggest shifters I’ve ever seen.

I know he’s a shifter even from this far off.

I lift my nose to scent the air for him but the wind is at my back.

I can’t catch his scent yet. I'll have to get closer. I push through the flowers and walk through the waist high grass towards him. It’s sweet grass that I’m walking on, every step I take lets its perfume loose into the air.

It rises up and weaves itself in a bubble around me, until it’s the only thing I can smell.

“Hello!” I call out to him. His back is to me, it’s broad and toned and I can see his muscles bunch and move in the summer sun. He’s bent over, working on something but what? I can’t see his face.

“Hello?” I call out again. “Can you hear me?”

He doesn’t answer me. I raise a hand to shield my eyes from the sun.

He’s standing now, black hair blowing in the wind and I can finally see what he’s working on.

He’s holding a saw. I come forward another step and see he’s felled a tree.

Nearby, there’s planks of wood, the beginnings of a house frame suddenly sprouts from the ground and I stumble back with a startled yelp.

The sound catches his attention and he turns my way but just before I can see his face I wake up.

“Thorne!” I thrash so hard in my bed that I end up rolling out of it and hitting the floor with a thump. I lay there in shock. Not because I just catapulted myself out of my bed or because I just had another freaking mate dream, but because I called out Thorne’s name.

“ What the hells ?” I whisper to the floorboards. I’m face down so I can whisper to them. They don’t answer back but I stay where I am. “Why would I-oh Luna.” I close my eyes and let my forehead hit the floor. I don’t even have the strength in me to ask myself why I called out Thorne’s name.

You want him, my wolf reminds me, because she’s not one to dance around the matter at hand.

“He’s not ours,” I remind her. “He’s just an alpha.”

An alpha that’s been nice to us and fed us, had our back and…an alpha that we climbed like a tree the second we saw them. Plus there was that time that he sort of admitted that he thought I was pretty….

“ No ,” I whisper-scream to floorboards. I leap up, a feat with how tangled I am in the bedsheets. “No, do not go there.”

Thorne is nice in his own way. He’s steady and dependable.

I like how even he is, how constant. At least, he’s feeling that way the longer that I’m with him.

He intimidated me before. Scared me even but that was before I started to see the tender side of him.

The side that smiled at the pups and took time to chat with the elderly pack members.

He was always there if they needed a hand, even when he was meant to keep an eye on me.

“That’s coming to an end.” I have to say it because it’s easy to forget that I won’t always go on like this with Thorne walking me to work and meal times.

He isn’t going to be there to serve me my plate or glower at someone that stares too long.

He’s my storm cloud, a little gloomy and scary if you don’t know how to read it but once you do then there’s… wait… no.

“My storm cloud?” I hiss and pull my hair.

“Knock that off. Now.” I shake off sleep and the bedsheets.

I need something to drink. I pad down the hall and into the kitchen.

When I was rooting around in here earlier taking stock of what was in the cabin I found a bottle of whiskey.

I’ve never needed a whiskey more than right the hells now.

I pull the bottle out and pour myself a measure in silence.

After my dream, my cabin feels cold and sparse.

I rub my arms. I can still feel the summer sun on my skin, smell the sweet grass with a hint of pine, the dream feels deafening, like the realness–the weight–of it will crush me right where I stand in the quiet of my kitchen.

I gulp down my whiskey and pour another finger of it.

“We don’t have storm clouds that are ours, or alphas that we want.

We don’t have fated mates because that’s not for us, and that’s okay,” I say into the dark kitchen.

A sliver of moonlight makes it in through the parted curtains but that’s the only light in the space.

I’d stub a toe trying to walk around in the cottage if I wasn’t a shifter.

I look around my cottage and I can see everything pretty clearly due to my heightened senses.

The longer that I look out at my space, at my things, the more my mate dream fades away and the calmer I get.

It could also be the whiskey kicking in, but who’s keeping score?

The cottage is coming along nicely even after just a couple of days.

I’ve spruced it up some with Clover’s help.

Fresh cut flowers sit in a mason jar on the counter and we used her magic cabinet to get our hands on candles, pillows, blankets, and a rug.

We even got a lamp too. Basically anything we could carry ourselves without drawing too much attention.

“They get so weird when they know I’m conjuring stuff,” Clover told me. “Best to keep it small. We save them freaking out when we magic you up a new bed.”

“Can a bed fit through the cabinet?”

“You know…I never tried it, there’s only one way to find out.”

I didn’t know if we’d get the bed through or not but I was thankful for the little touches that Clover had helped me bring to the cabin. On the counter my home design magazine sits face down, open to a page I was particularly inspired by.

Autumn Rain Chic is emblazoned across the top of the page.

Deep greens and burnt mustard yellows are the base of the color theme.

There’s a pink here and a coral there in the form of blankets and I smile because I managed to bring those exact blankets through the cabinet.

I tuck my magazine under my arm and go to sit on the couch.

I spread the blankets over my legs and flip on the lamp beside me.Then I settle in and sip my whiskey while I look over my magazine for more ideas on how to make this cottage mine.

Outside I can hear the wind blowing, the tap of limbs against the roof, the creak of the porch settling, all of it calms me.

I’m almost done with my whiskey when I hear a thump. It’s slight, just the sound of a footfall really on the porch. I get up and go to the window, whiskey in hand and that’s when I see the big wolf sitting outside.

Thorne.

He’s at the edge of my porch, snout up sniffing the wind.

Wind blows through his coat and I want to go to him.

Pull one of my new thick blankets off the couch and wrap it around him but I don’t.

He’s not mine. If he was…if he was, then I could take the blanket to him, but he’s not.

Thorne turns and looks over his shoulder right at me.

I jerk back from the window but the damage is done. He’s already seen me. Still, I let the curtain fall back into place and go back to the couch. I set my empty glass down on the floor and crawl back under the blankets there.

Thorne’s outside. Why is he outside?

Was it him that was outside of my door in the Keep?

I turn over the thoughts once, twice, but not nearly three times before sleep pulls me under.