Alien Conquest (Fated Mates of Xaensskar #2) - Jude Gray Page 0,15

had brought it on, I realized, but still, some hidden part of me had to have been feeling it all along. The jeqwa waiting in the primal part of my Craeshen brain believed that Krey was my mate.

My mate.

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry, but I understood one thing for sure. The kid—no, not kid; the young man—was out of here. I’d send him and his friend back to the city with a guard, order them set free to go on their merry thieving ways, and I’d reset myself in Corsov with hunting and fighting and fucking. Manly things.

Some part of me also realized that my screwed-up wiring wanted me to believe that not only was I attracted to a male, but to someone with fucking Drimuti blood. I wasn’t sure which was worse, though both were unacceptable.

I threw back my head and roared, enraged, and then I was sprinting reflexively toward the tree because the damn little thief lost his precarious balance and began to fall, as though my voice and rage had shaken him loose.

And I didn’t even think about it. I rushed to save him, and that instinct was as automatic as the instinct that wanted me to believe he was meant for me. He landed in my arms and stared up at me with those blue eyes, eyes that I knew would now haunt me for the rest of my damn life, and for the briefest moment imaginable, my gaze dropped to his lush, pink lips.

With a groan, I opened my arms and made no move to help him when he lurched backward, tripped, and fell to a heap on the ground.

“Fuck you,” I said, my voice filled with pain. “Fuck you.”

Those words weren’t meant for him, they were meant for me, but still, he flinched and tried to scramble away, as though he thought I was going to kick the shit out of him.

“I see you caught him,” Bo called, loping toward us.

He lost his smile when he got a look at my face.

I couldn’t meet his eyes. “Bring the asshole,” I said, remnants of the fated mate call echoing hollowly inside my mind.

Bo was Craeshen, and he understood immediately what he was seeing in my eyes. “No,” he breathed, and there wasn’t even a spark of humor in his face.

That saved him. If he’d have laughed, I would have taken my horror out on him. I couldn’t very well fight the boy.

“Get them ready to return to the city,” I said.

“Dexx, I’m…that’s fucking—”

“Don’t,” I bit out.

He clamped his mouth shut and gave a sharp nod, then leaned over to yank the mystified Krey off the ground. He was rough with him, and when Krey’s bruised and battered face tightened with pain and he clutched at Bo’s arm with small, pale fingers, my immediate instinct was to break Bo’s nose and take Krey gently away from him.

“Fuck,” I whispered. I turned on my heel and strode away, unsure where I was going or what I’d do when I got there.

Gods.

I was surely damned.

Chapter Nine

KREIA

I had no idea what happened. Something was wrong with Dexx. One minute he shook me out of the tree with his roar, a roar like none I’d ever heard, and then he shot forward to save me from breaking my bones upon a hard, cold ground.

He stared down at me with such an expression of horror on his face that I thought maybe I’d died on the way down and just didn’t realize it—but gradually I’d become sharply aware of something else in his eyes.

Desire. Lust. Need.

I was shocked, but more than that, I was disappointed. Disappointed because the damn master of Eastmeadow liked men. I’d started longing for a man who was obviously gay, and maybe he hated himself for his sexual bent or hated himself because he was interested in someone so far beneath him—and part Drimuti, at that—but either way, he was pissed.

He didn’t want to want me. Not me, really…the young man he thought I was. I had to remind myself of that. And the very second he discovered that I wasn’t who he thought I was, he’d abandon his charity quest of the day and send me to an awful women’s prison. Lankastred, maybe. Or the dreadful Femjeaster, where harried parents threatened to send misbehaving children.

He released me as I stared up into his really quite beautiful green eyes, and so suddenly that I nearly fell again. When his guard Bo strode toward us,