The Mate That Wasn't Mine novel Chapter 40

Chapter 40

TESSA POV

My mind sprints away with me whilst I strip down and dive under the hot water. His oak and berries scent lingers. Enough for me tô kế loamy baba unconsciously. Like his scent ever really goes away anyway.

Inhaling it while he has a luciously damp sheen and a low–slung tower is enough to tattoo the scent onto my frontal lobes forever.

Then he had to try and call me feisty.

That pet name makes me feel as special as the ruined skin on my hip. My head is spinning. About everything.

The thought of Luna Sabrina tears at me. Is she still in the past now, or does the delusion leave as fast as it lands? Her blue eyed happiness, wandering so carefree. Has she just matured after children and the pressure of being a Luna, or is her daily life another form of captivity!

Forever on Alpha Hale’s arm, what if she’s dreaming so much of escape, when the drugs hit her, that’s where her mind flings her?

Maxim might, possibly, perhaps, have a point about needing more evidence. The full picture.

Goddess what if the Luna is dosing herself? Chasing an escape from reality and landing in her youth?

Everything I found fun and charming about her this evening, the lightness she scampered across the grass with seems a cruel joke now. Especially knowing Donlon has taken cruel advantage of it at least once.

The mystery widens the more I consider the possibilities. I know on the other side of the bathroom wall Maxim will be thinking the same.

How many times has Sabrina been ‘ill‘?

Maybe Donlon has never let their romance go. Instead spent decades pretending he is happy to see her as Ravenbow’s Luna whilst secretly indulging in his own brand of deranged vengeance?

My train of thought leads me back to Luca. Not the Luca of old, the one I saw that night. The how shower water does nothing to stop my shudder. His face was so much angrier, his black eyes beyond intense. Refusing to let go, hands gripping me, insisting I was all his. “Mine, mine,” rushing out with every breath, in his deeper, manlier voice.

In vain I scrub at my hip, forever hoping that one scaling shower and a scouring scrub would be enough to remove the angry red imprint around my hip bone.

What if Luca’s new–found need to own me never dies away?

What if watching Maxim tonight in all his stunning, chiselled perfection has killed my ability to keep a distance. It’s like dosing myself with delusion, to indulge in the idea we can be anything but a pretence.

If I tried to splutter out a rejection Luca would ignore it. Or kill me. Maxim has a mate somewhere.

I press my head against the tiles and close my eyes. This isn’t about me.

Luna Sabrina is the one in trouble.

Every time Donlon drugs her, it’s beyond reckless/You can’t reason with recklessness.

It’s too bizarre. Too strange. Only after shutting off the water, I notice something wrong in the room, and groan.

My nightwear isn’t in here. Or a towel. Too quick to get away from Maxim when he started getting commanding and calling me feisty. Damn it.

“Maxim? Are you there?” No answer. Water trickles down, wet hair clinging to my shoulders. Gingerly, I step out of the tiled shower area and onto the cold, gray stone tile floor.

1/4

Chapter 40

“Maxim, throw me a towel? Please?”

The door opens by the slimmest of cracks. A handkerchief is thrown in, dramatically fluttering its way to the floor, I cover medit as much as my hands. “You’re not funny! Come on I’m going to get cold!”

“No. I’m not bending to your charms just yet. Now. Can we agree, no more silent treatment? Looking at the floor?”

“I do not have charms! I’m not promising you anything like that either,” feeling my cheeks, even my ears sting with embarrassment,

I don’t need mocking by Maxim right now.

“I assure you, you have charms, Tessa,” he growls back, in a rough tone that doesn’t sound complimentary at all. More spoken against his will and better instincts.

I bite my lip. Whatever he’s trying isn’t going to work. “This works. This distance…it’s keeping me safe.”

“Then you don’t get a towel,” the thick, fluffy corner of one of the huge beige sheets poking it’s way around the corner before vanishing again.

Fighting against the smile his stupid game bewitched me with. “Working together now?”

“True. But I need my teammate to look at me. Talk to me. So here…”

An even small piece of material flutters its way onto the damp bathroom floor. A yellowing dust cloth for cleaning down my bow and arrows. I’ve now got enough material to just about cover my breasts. How utterly unhelpful.

Checking around the steamy bathroom, there is only one answer. Rummaging through the laundry boxes, cursing my ability to get mud and blue paint onto everything I own.

Maxim talks again, unseen on the other side

The tease in his tone has vanished, making

“Since you suggested we stop blurring lines

Of the door. “So. How have you been?”

me

Pause.

5 you mean?”

Success, I grab one of Maxim’s abandoned shirts from the laundry and start drying myself. Like Pawsome, he’s far too slinking and aloof to actually get messy. Unless he’s sparring and gets dusty his belongings appear pretty pristine.

“Yes. Since then.”

“Okay…I guess.”

“Really? Because…I’ll be honest Tessa, I think it’s been pretty shit.”

Maxim’s doleful tone makes my stomach flip. This is exactly why the door is shut. “You won’t reconsider?” he tries again. I want to answer ‘yes‘ so badly that no other answer comes out and I leave him hanging in silence.

Staring into his tiger eyes will do me no good. Neither will running my hand through his damp, glossy chocolate hair again.

I’ve already seen way too much of him tonight. All of it stunning and solid. Temptation literally laid upon my bed. He’s gone and filled my head with a thousand fantasies. Remembering how greedily he stared into my face, every vein in his neck pulsing, his abs crunching up before he lost control.

But he’s bitten now, that was the task for today. I can just get back to staying out late and the routine that works for us. I can put a lid back on my racing

pulse.

Clutching one of his blue shirts, “It’s for the best. Like you said. We need to be more invisible. Stop causing drama.”

“Always so fucking sensible aren’t you,” he mutters to himself. My smile broadens into a full chuckle at his sulking voice.

Goddess I bet he is scowling so much right now. That gorgeous, strong face of his reduced to childlike petulance. I’d want to place my hands on his

2/4

Chapter 40

bearded cheeks and mush up his face. Push him until he pounced.

“By the way, I told Warden Marshall, Luca was just a bitter ex. He’s probably going to send someone to investigate your family. But they are done investigating you, aren’t they? Nobody has given you any shit?”

Grabbing another of his

that’s about it. Thanked blue shirts to roughly dry my hair, “No. Nothing else. Donlon came to check on me while I was practicing late at night bus

“I heard about that.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

Maxim goes silent now. I keep pottering aimlessly about the bathroom. If I find enough mindless tasks we can keep talking. I don’t know what to do with myself if we’re both on the same side of a door.

All I know for certain is that I’ll get hurt.

He gently knocks at the wood and I lean closer. His voice is a secretive rasp. “I bumped into him tonight actually. He was pretty flustered about it. Probably around the same time you ran into Luna Sabrina.”

My voice drops to a matching, fragile hush. “Oh…so I wasn’t meant to find her. He was?”

With his one eye, graying hair and beloved reputation, Warden Donlon is the last man in the packhouse you would imagine taking advantage of a drugged, unknowing woman. And yet the evidence…the proof is blazing brightly.

“He told me to leave you alone to practice.”

Maxim was heading to see me? I’m pretty sure my heart just fluttered up and out of my ribcage.