Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 72056 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 360(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72056 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 360(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
I’m sorry. The words hover on the tip of my tongue, but they do not come forth.
Hannah Bates doesn’t know those words.
“I’ll be fine for a while now,” I say. “But I took a lot. You should rest.”
“Well, then. It won’t hurt us to stay here for a little while.” He smirks at me.
“Then you can finish telling me…”
My head flops onto a pillow, and blackness descends.
PRINCESS.
Princess.
Princess!
Something jars me out of my stupor.
“Princess, wake up!”
Rogan is shaking me, jostling me.
“We have to leave.”
“What?”
“It’s your stepfather. He knows where we are.”
His words jumble in my head. I need to get a grasp. Clear the haze. “How?”
“I don’t fucking know. All I know is he’s been alerted to our whereabouts. We have to get out of here. Can you move?”
“Yes. I have my strength. You gave me a lot of blood. I fell asleep, kind of like you do after a really good meal. Are you okay? I took a lot from you.”
He touches the wound on his neck. “I’m fine. You’re my priority, princess.”
“Where do we go?”
“We’re going back to The London.”
“You said that wasn’t safe.”
“It’s not, but I have to make a choice, princess. You may be my priority, but I also have a responsibility to my pack. And right now, some of them are in danger.”
“Can you finish telling me first? Who you were defending when you offed those vamps?”
“This will be hard for you to grasp,” he says.
“This is all hard for me to grasp, Rogan.”
He nods. “I suppose I owe you the truth. I was defending…you.”
34
“Me?” I glare at him. “You said members of your pack.”
“I didn’t know who you were at the time,” he says. “I was defending my mate, and at that time I figured she was a member of my pack. I just hadn’t found her yet.”
No way. No freaking way. “So these vamps…”
“Yes. They threatened my mate. They claimed they knew who she was, and that they would get to her before I would.”
Rogan’s words make an eerie kind of sense, though I’m not sure why. Still, they ring true to me. Is my father involved in this? He seemed to know something about Rogan’s attraction toward me before we even began this investigation.
Who were these vampires? And if they were aligned with my stepfather, who has he recruited to take their place?
“Just the mere mention of my mate,” Rogan continues. “I couldn’t help myself. I killed them. But I didn’t cut out their hearts. You have to believe me.”
“I do believe you. But Rogan, they didn’t harm me. It was only a threat.”
“It doesn’t matter. We live by the laws of man, but within our own ranks, a threat against a mate isn’t tolerated.”
“You realize you can go down for this,” I say.
“I do. But I won’t. I won’t let it happen.”
“How? Your bite marks are all over those two, and now you’ve admitted to doing the killing. How will you get out of this?”
“Because this was the work of evil, princess. No one knows who a wolf’s mate is before the wolf himself. But somehow these vamps knew. I felt that they knew. And I felt their evil. There’s only one species out there that is evil for evil’s sake.”
“Demons,” I say, more to myself than to Rogan.
But that still doesn’t explain how Rogan plans to get out of this. Perhaps he knows something I don’t.
I wasn’t raised in this world. I didn’t find out my true lineage until I was into my adulthood. Sure, demons are evil. Everyone knows that much. But there’s still so much I don’t know. If no one knows a mate before the wolf himself, how did my father…
“You still killed the vampires,” I say. “I have to give this information to my father.”
“I know that.”
“But I don’t want to. I want to protect you as you’ve protected me.”
“Your father doesn’t scare me, princess. Neither does your stepfather. The only thing that scares me is losing you.”
Warmth coats my body. I almost feel as if I’m drinking from Rogan again. That amazing feeling of true completion—almost as good as an orgasm with him. Better than an orgasm with anyone else.
Just hearing him say that he was scared of losing me…
I like it. My whole body quivers.
And I really don’t like how much I like it.
I’m a loner. Have been all my life. I’m not ready to be part of someone else. Except that I am. Everything about Rogan calls to me—his blood, his body, his heart, his soul. I don’t understand, yet I do. It’s already in me. I’m already there.
Rogan grabs me and kisses me hard.
And again all that need and yearning torpedoes through my body.
Then he lets me go almost as quickly. “I can taste my blood when I kiss you, princess. And I…”
“What?”
“It tastes…so wrong and yet so right at the same time.”