Captive Mate - Eliot Grayson Page 0,14

prodding me and his teeth a millimeter from ripping my throat out, manacled to keep my magic inert and locked in with no hope of escape.

And the worst part was, I wished I could let go enough to pretend it was real for myself, and not just for him. You’re safe. No one’s going to touch you. That was a fantasy I couldn’t afford. A protector like Matthew, strong and decent and devoted…no. Not happening in reality, and not in my imagination, either, if I knew what was good for me.

“Thank you,” I murmured, pressing a kiss to his shoulder. He vibrated against me, and I grimaced. No kissing, then. I needed him chilled out, not fired up and ready to fuck. “I know you won’t let anything happen to me. You’d never hurt me. You’d never let anyone else hurt me.”

Every word burned my tongue like acid. Maybe this was the real torture: being forced to voice my own deeply-hidden longings as a lie.

But it worked. Slowly, slowly, he started to relax — although his erection didn’t go anywhere. Maybe that was going to be permanent for a while. I grimaced again, this time in sympathy. Or maybe even empathy, because I’d been half-hard pretty much since I came into Matthew’s bedroom, and that hadn’t shown signs of softening, either.

Fuck this spell. If it’d been cast by someone else, he’d be so dead once I got my hands on him.

At long last, a while after the light through the windows had shifted to show it was afternoon, Matthew raised his head. He’d spent the time in between just breathing me in, his arms still locked around me and his body half-sprawled over mine. I’d been trying to zone out, to reach some kind of state of Zen, but my aching stomach was too much to ignore. So I lay there, miserable, trying both not to tense up too much and not to relax into his hold like the sweet, helpless little mate I’d been posing as.

His intense dark blue eyes fixed on mine, hard and cold as lapis lazuli. They looked a lot less insane; when he’d burst into the bathroom, he’d been like one of those cartoon characters with the swirly spirals going opposite directions in each eye.

But he looked far from happy, with a deep furrow between his thick straight brows and the corners of his lips tipped down.

“I think I’m in my right mind.” He said it like it came as a bit of a surprise to him. “I can think clearly.”

I swallowed hard. On the one hand, great — no biting. On the other hand — well, if he was thinking clearly, that meant he hated me again. That shouldn’t have bothered me.

But I needed him on my side, right? Of-fucking-course it bothered me. At least he hadn’t let go of me yet. One big hand was splayed across my lower back, and the other between my shoulder blades. Maybe that meant I still had some leverage.

“I’m afraid to move,” he said a second later, bursting my bubble. “I think you were right, much as it pains me to say it. We needed to be…closer.” The last word dripped with distaste, and his lip curled.

An unfamiliar sharp pain lanced through my chest. What the hell was that? Was the spell acting up again?

“I guess we do,” I said, my voice gone hoarse. I couldn’t even clear my throat, it was so dry. “Can we get something to eat though? Seriously. I think I might faint for real.”

His lips twisted in something smile-adjacent. “I knew you were faking.”

At least one of us did.

“Yeah, well, it worked,” I said sharply. “You didn’t want to be mated to me any more than I wanted to be mated to you, so you’re welcome.”

Matthew sighed, but he didn’t reply to that. “Hey, Luke?” he called out, only slightly louder than if he’d been talking to someone in the room. Right. The were-mountain had been listening this whole time, and that wasn’t fucking humiliating at all. “Can you get someone to bring us something to eat? Probably a lot to eat.”

A grunt from outside the door was our only acknowledgement.

Matthew rolled us both, flipping so that he was on his back and not halfway on top of me anymore. He flopped his head down on the pillow with a groan and closed his eyes. His left arm was still around me, but he threw the other over his face.

I wriggled my