The Hellhound's Un-Christmas Miracle - Zoe Chant Page 0,18

around her like she belonged in them. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and pressed her lips against his and, God, he tasted like running wild felt, like tall grass brushing her sides and the sky wide and open above. He kissed her back, tentative until her tongue brushed against his and then he was all hunger.

Sheena’s heart felt like it was going to break out of her chest. The shadowy mental paddock where her sheep spent most of its time filled with light and that light spilled out to fill every part of her. It sang through her veins from her heart to the very tips of her fingers, flaring like the sun.

Magic. Of course, just being a shifter was magic, but it was normal magic. She’d been a shifter all her life. She’d never known anything like this. It felt like she had swallowed the sun and the only thing holding it in was the mental fence she had built in her mind.

Her skin sang where her mate touched it. Her lips tingled with excitement. She felt more alive than she ever had done. For the first time, she wasn’t too small or too weak or too adorable to be taken seriously—she was just herself and herself was enough. If she’d had any doubts about that then the possessive way her mate was crushing her against his chest would have banished them instantly.

So, what the hell did she need those walls inside her mind for? The ones she used to keep everyone out. Right now, they were keeping all that light in, and…

This man was everything she wanted, and she wanted all of him.

She let down her defenses and the light filling her veins poured into him.

3

Fleance

He should have said something.

And then he couldn’t say anything, because her lips were pressed against his with a wild intensity that drove all the words from his mind. There was only her, this woman he knew nothing about but knew in his soul he was meant to be with.

His mate.

Her fingers tangled in his hair, pulling him down to her height. He wrapped himself around her, her shudder of breath as their bodies pressed close echoing in his own chest. Her scent overwhelmed him, clover honey and spring blossoms, the promise of long afternoons and longer evenings. Was she a shifter? The moment the question appeared in his mind he knew the answer. Of course she was. He could sense it, a hint of her inner animal twined around everything else he could feel about her. Just as his hellhound was a part of everything that made him who he was, even if it had taken him this long to realize it. He wasn’t a man with a hellhound tacked on, he was a hellhound shifter, whole, and thank God he was because that wholeness made him hers.

He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her with all his heart. Something unspooled deep in his chest in the shadows where his hellhound lurked, but it wasn’t a shadow; it was light, gleaming so brightly gold it put the sun to shame. It unfurled like a shoot pushing through the snow, one leaf then two then enough to spread through his veins until it found the same golden light in her lips, in her fingertips pressed against his skin, in the softness of her cheek and the determined line of her jaw beneath his palms. Her heart and his, bound together.

He gasped. Their lips parted, but the spell didn’t break. The shining light from the deepest part of his soul was still alight, a golden rope that connected him to the woman in his arms.

“Oh, wow,” she breathed, her eyelids fluttering. Her breath hitched, and emotions shimmered down the golden rope: wonder, confusion, a shiver of embarrassment. “I, uh. I didn’t expect that to happen so fast.”

That? Fleance was confused. He’d known he was her mate the moment he saw her; wasn’t that the way it was meant to work?

The golden light connecting them thrummed like a plucked guitar string. “Oh,” Fleance said out loud. That.

The golden rope. A bond. The mate bond.

“Also, have to admit I thought it would be more, uh, metaphorical?” The mate bond twanged again. She laughed, delight burbling out of her like water from a fountain. “Holy… wow.”

Her eyes focused on his. They were as bright as her voice, her laughter, the light that connected them. Flecks of gold sparkled in warm brown, like slices