by Setta Jay
He still couldn’t believe he’d done it. When she and his brother’s mate had been taken by Cyril, his beast had nearly gone insane battering inside his body. Up until that point he’d only had the scent of her. That had already been fucking with him, but if it had just stayed away, he wouldn’t be so screwed. He closed his eyes. The moment his beast had learned she was in danger, it wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t let him stay away. Shit, it had been intense, a compulsion. He couldn’t help but go to her, touch her, hold her to his chest and feel her heartbeat. What the fuck was that? He’d never even spoken to her, but his beast didn’t seem to give a shit. It also hadn’t given a fuck that any of his brothers could have easily taken her out of there. He’d felt it snarling and itching to lash out at anyone that touched her.
After delivering her safely to Sirena, he’d barely been able to make his legs work to take him out of the healer’s office. He’d fucked up big. Touching her had made things so much worse. When all he’d had was the faint scent of her, it was bad enough. Now he knew how her skin felt. He’d felt her slight weight against him and dreamt of sinking deep inside her body. That touch had triggered a nightmare. His jaw was so tight his teeth ached from it, and he needed that bit of pain. He wasn’t keeping her. He fucking couldn’t.
His dick would soon rule him, no matter what he did. Jacking off wasn’t doing enough. He could get hard for another female, but his beast rebelled like nothing he could’ve imagined. Two nights ago he’d tried to fuck another. His brain hadn’t wanted it any more than his damned beast. It was a first for him and in no way normal for a Nereid. He’d managed to work through that bit of insanity and thought he’d finally get some relief. The human female had been on her knees ready and more than willing to suck him off, but his dick had been shot with intense pain the minute she put her hands on him. The jolt of electricity to his cock was enough to send him fleeing the place as if his dick was on fire, which was what it’d felt like.
“You need to talk to Sirena. She’s the only one that can come up with something.”
Dorian nodded, knowing Uri spoke the truth and hating it. It would be a fight with his sister. Going against a mating would be like sacrilege to her, and she was ruthless in her goal to find Immortals mates. She was going to be pissed as shit. That was why he’d been hoping Uri had the answers to his questions.
He took a deep pull from his beer and leaned back against the chair. The tension rolling off his brothers was intense. They wanted to fight him, he could tell. He was so fucking beyond hearing any of their shit. He absently banged his head against the wall a couple more times. His dick was hard and ready under his worn jeans. Ready for something that wasn’t going to happen. He’d spent hours swimming around his island and out to the furthest points in the sea. Steering clear of the humans’ shipping routes as he’d pushed his body.
Light flashed as the door to the bar opened again. He caught sight of Drake walking in, his seven-foot frame barely clearing it. They were all tall, but Drake wasn’t just tall, he was built like the dragon he was. His power fell off him in waves, and the humans instinctually cleared a path. It was time to come clean. Shit.
His brothers all got up to leave at once, each dropping down cash. They were leaving him to deal with Drake on his own. Conn shook his head and raised a pierced eyebrow. “Good call having him meet you in public. I doubt he’ll burn the place down when you tell him.”
He watched his brothers leave. Drake waved the waitress away and leaned against the wall. He wore a dark green tee stretched tightly over his muscled chest and shoulders, and worn jeans over his tree-trunk thighs. Half of his shoulder-length hair was pulled into a tail high on his head. Every female in the room stopped and stared when the seven-foot male walked in, and Dorian saw that the staring hadn’t stopped. He and his brothers drew a lot of attention, but Drake was an entirely different animal. The biggest and most powerful of the Guardians.
“Speak.”
He cringed, knowing what was coming would be fucked. “Rain is my mate.”
Drake cocked a brow and looked at him for a minute, silent. “And you’re trying to find a way out of it,” he said, watching, assessing.
“Yes.” He shouldn’t have been surprised that Drake would know what he planned. He expected Drake to do more than stare at him. He felt like a kid, wanting to squirm in his seat. He got the distinct feeling his leader was seeing into his soul. He hated that about Drake. Dorian waited for the order, his gut clenching hard, because he knew there was no way in hell he’d claim her, ordered or not. He couldn’t.
It was fucking eerie sitting there while Drake just watched him. Finally the dragon nodded once. “You’re pulled from patrol the second it’s a problem. Go.”
He felt his mouth drop open. What the fuck was that? He didn’t order him to mate the Mageia. Drake wasn’t even going to guilt him? Tell him he was letting his brothers down by not mating? All mated pairs gained power and strength. They needed the added power from another mated pair. Drake cocked a brow, and Dorian got up and left before his luck ran out. He got the distinct impression he was still screwed, he just didn’t know how much. His leader was intelligent and cunning, that thought made Dorian’s neck crawl.
Chapter 2
Guardian Manor, Tetartos Realm
Rain didn’t remember sitting, but she was glad she was. Her heart felt like it would beat out of her chest at any second.
“What?” Her mind was still reeling from what Sirena had just told her. Her head buzzed with so many emotions, ranging from shock, excitement to dread. She’d known something was wrong with her. She’d felt aroused and needy for days, even throughout everything that had happened in the last week, which had been insanity.
“Your blood shows signs that you’ve entered the mating frenzy,” the healer Guardian said. Concern scrunched her delicately stunning features.
She shook her head. She’d never imagined she was going through a mating. She assumed that arousal was the way her body dealt with the worry over everything happening to Delia, the young female that had worked in her shop before being captured and tortured by Cyril. Her concern for the Mageia hadn’t seemed to affect her body’s neediness. She’d assumed it was some weird physiological issue about life and death, her mortality and needing to feel alive; she didn’t think for a second that it was a mating. Those were so damn rare, and her best friend, Alyssa, had just found her other half in the Guardian Gregoire. So few Immortals found their mate, and only a select few of those were among Mageia like her, the odds had been miniscule.
She stared at the thick brown rug, sitting in the seating area of her room, still trying to process how she missed the clues. So much had been going on even before Delia was taken by the Realm’s biggest enemy. That had to be why she disregarded what was going on with her body. She’d been uprooted from her home and business, thrust into the Guardians’ manor, for her own protection… She and Drake, the Guardian leader, had shared words about his high-handedness, but in the end, after he’d nearly scorched her eyebrows off in his dragonish annoyance, she’d made her own decision to stay. She wasn’t stupid, and even though his behavior had set her off, she wasn’t one to make a decision out of anger.
A week or so after she was taken away from her life, she and Alyssa were abducted. It was only for a short time before they were rescued, and she’d been unconscious through almost all of it. A thought that thoroughly disgusted her. She hated feeling weak. The only thing she remembered was being grabbed and fighting whoever held her, a sharp sting on her neck, and then waking up on Alyssa and Gregoire’s couch. She still felt a little twitchy. Creators… None of that mattered… It didn’t matter why she missed the signs. Sirena was right. Her flesh felt heated, and her nipples strained against her bra as she sat there. Her body was telling her what it wanted. Those thoughts did nothing but jack up her heart rate.
Sirena’s melodic voice relaxed her some. “Take a deep breath. We’ll figure it out.”
She would have sno
rted if she had the extra breath to spare. She hadn’t been able to say more than a few words since the healer had shown up at her door and informed her she was mated.
“Can you tell me what you’re feeling?” Sirena asked.
She put a hand up. “Just give me another second.” She tried to do what Sirena instructed. Taking deep breaths was proving difficult, but she was finally getting it together. The air stuttered as if catching in her lungs.
Rain couldn’t help thinking about the events of the past weeks, everything leading up to that point. She and Alyssa had rushed to an island paradise so that her friend could reassess her life. She closed her eyes, remembering how wonderfully it’d all begun. She’d always longed for a vacation and managed to have one, for all of a day. She had a little over twenty-four hours of experiencing soft sand under her toes and being pampered before going on a huge boat with the charming owner of the island resort. Shortly after that, everything had erupted into chaos. Alyssa’s destiny had come raining down on them in the form of an attempted abduction thwarted by her friend’s possessive-as-shit Guardian mate. The one Alyssa thought had rejected her.
“Rain?” Sirena, the stunning blonde Guardian, asked her in a gentle voice while crouching in front of her in a stylish pencil skirt and heels. It felt like her new cozy home was closing in around them. The stone fireplace seemed to be moving toward her.
What if Sirena was wrong and this was all some kind of mistake? “How do you know for sure?”
“The blood tests I took a couple of days ago, when we got you and Alyssa back from the abduction, indicate you’ve come in contact with your mate.”
Wait. Contact? She furrowed her brow. Instinctually she was sure her mate could only be one male, but if what the healer said was true, that wasn’t possible. Her stomach clenched as she shook her head. She needed to shake off the dread and get some answers.
“You’re sure? Because the only one I can imagine it being has never touched me.” She couldn’t envision her mate being any other than the Nereid Guardian that had been haunting her dreams every night since she’d first seen him at Alyssa and Gregoire’s mating.
She remembered the night, less than a week ago. She had gone in with a heavy heart. Her best friend in the world had found her mate, but the minute she’d walked into the golden temple, that thought was gone. She’d been hit with the same seductive scent she’d only detected hints of while walking in the Guardians’ manor. It had been taunting her for the past couple of weeks as she’d gotten to know her new home.
Thoughts of her friend’s new life and her own fleeting mortality had fallen away, and her whole world had focused in on one male. Her heart had slammed against her chest as her skin flushed. He was the most gorgeous male she’d ever seen. She’d been struck dumb by how perfectly edible he was. His hair was sun-kissed and spiked up with blue tips. She’d fantasized about ripping the clothes from his broad chest. Tearing her eyes from the big blond Guardian to watch her friend’s mating had been nearly impossible. Her eyes tracked back to him over and over through the event, but it was his hard glare that was tough to shake. It jarred her. She had no clue what caused it, she hadn’t even met the male, and his animosity was palpable in the ten feet that had separated them.
“Rain?” Sirena was watching her carefully.
She pushed back her shoulder-length blonde hair, realizing that he had to have known. That realization churned her stomach in knots. Why reject her offhand, because she was mortal? Was it the way she’d looked? That wouldn’t account for the hostility in his eyes.
“There has to be a mistake.” She felt certain it could only be him, and he hadn’t laid a hand on her, except in her dreams. In those he’d done all matter of dirty and sexy things to her. His sexy-as-sin mouth had been all over her body as his eyes filled with lust that was only for her.
She bit off a snort. That was definitely not how he looked at her in real life. No, his eyes had glowed, but what had sparked in them should have cooled her wild attraction. Shocked animosity had shone in their depths, enough that her breath had caught in her throat. Fortunately for her, he’d left the ceremony the minute Alyssa and Gregoire started kissing. It had been the most awkward, yet, somehow, sexually charged experience of her entire twenty-five years.
“The extent of your blood work indicates touch. That’s my concern. You were unconscious with the enemy during the abduction,” Sirena said slowly, at the same time assessing Rain with her intelligent violet eyes.
Rain’s heart rate accelerated all over again at the healer’s words and their implications. She tried to shake off the anxiety. The abduction was for such a brief time, most of which she was unconscious. The experience could have been so much worse. She was safe by the time the drugs wore off. Both she and Alyssa had been taken, but Gregoire and the rest of the Guardians came for them within minutes. At least that was what she’d been told. Could she have been mated to one of the enemy? Alyssa had been awake and would have had some indication if one of Cyril’s males thought she was theirs. She took a deep breath, more sure than ever about who her mate was.
She cleared her throat. “It wasn’t the enemy. The symptoms started before I was taken.”
Sirena’s delicate brows furrowed. “Then you know who it is?”
She thought about keeping it to herself. What if she was wrong, maybe some weird part of her hoping it was him? She felt certain she wasn’t, but she had no idea where that left her. If the Nereid Guardian was her mate, then judging from his angry expression, he wanted nothing to do with her. His senses were a million times better than hers. He knew; he had to. That meant he didn’t want her for some reason. It was like a physical blow. She was generally a confident female, but she wasn’t made of steel. If she was right, Sirena, who’d become a friend in the last weeks, would know what to do.
“Dorian,” Rain said. All the inhabitants of Tetartos knew the Guardians’ names. He was the only Nereid Guardian, and she’d always found the pictures of him to be the hottest, but they didn’t even come close to the sight of him in real life.
Sirena snapped off a curse Rain didn’t quite catch. Her violet eyes flashed as she started pacing. Rain was still dealing with her own emotions and wasn’t truly processing Sirena’s reaction. Somehow saying his name out loud made it more real.
“Damn him. He should have told me. He carried you in after your abduction. He also came to me around the time you moved in, having problems with his senses around Alyssa. I took tests, but at the time nothing showed up. I told him to let me know if it happened again. No wonder he’s been avoiding me for the last few days. It started right after he brought you in.” The healer murmured some more choice words about Dorian, but Rain’s brain stuck on the part about him carrying her unconscious body from the enemy compound. Why had he touched her? He’d obviously scented her during Alyssa and Gregoire’s ceremony. If he hated the idea of mating her, then why chance touching her and pushing them into this situation?
She frowned hard, irritated that logical thinking was completely beyond her. All she could do was picture being held in his strong arms, against his chest… Her screwed-up mind loved the thought of him carrying her away like some damsel in distress. She chose to pretend that the idea of being rescued by him had no effect on her.
“I’m sorry he’s being an ass, but he has issues that have nothing to do with you. I shouldn’t apologize for him, but knowing how stubborn he is, this won’t be simple.” Sirena paced the sitting area, going essentially around and around the comfy chairs that sat in front of the fireplace. The healer looked as if she were in her own world as she moved. Rain wondered what kind of issues Sirena was talking about.
After taking a bracing breath, Rain decided to start with basic questions. She still needed more answers, because she fully intended to confront the ass with a detailed list of his crimes. “His touch set the frenzy into motion? It wouldn’t have shown up by just being in the same room with him?” She knew the answer. If he hadn’t wanted he
r, then the asshole should have kept his damn hands to himself. Anyone else could have carried her unconscious ass out of there.
“Touch. Your mortal body wouldn’t have shown anything in your blood work based on scent.”
“What can I expect now? Judging from the pissed looks he was pinning me with at Alyssa and Gregoire’s mating ceremony, he wants nothing to do with me. He sped out of there the minute it was over and has avoided me ever since, other than apparently when I was knocked out.” She hated having to admit all that, but she wasn’t naïve enough to think this would all just turn out perfect in the end. She needed to know her options, leaving her pride to take one for the team. She was fully capable of taking care of herself; she didn’t need him to get her off.
The ugly sting to her ego wasn’t making the reality any less true.
Her heart felt like it was taking a beating too. Not for him. She didn’t know the Guardian, so it wasn’t like she was in love with him. It was the loss of her childhood dreams. The fantasy of what a mating was supposed to be, of spending an eternity with a male who worshipped the ground she walked on for saving him from an eternity of loneliness. Never aging like her best friend, maybe having a bigger destiny than that of a small-shop owner with no real life or love interest. Not that she wasn’t proud of her business accomplishments. It was just that the damn fantasies were ingrained in her and Alyssa as children.
A thought hit her. “Is there a way out of mating?” Would he be looking for a way out? She got the distinct impression he would. She didn’t want a male that didn’t want her, but that would be a final ending to the possibility of having more. It was too rare, the chance would never come again, but that didn’t mean she would consider tying herself to a male that didn’t want her.
“No. There is no way out of a mating. It’s rare, sacred,” Sirena said, and she snapped the word sacred like the thought of Dorian going against it personally offended her. Mating research was Sirena’s whole life. She took it seriously and worked her ass off to get potentially compatible Mageia to relocate from Earth Realm to Tetartos. Mageia were mortal and as such could choose to stay on Earth if they wanted to. They’d discussed it a few times since Rain started living at the manor.