My Fated Mate Was the One Man I Could Never Have novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: It Didn't Cut

At the creek the bond still pulls, Rhett touches her wrist, and his fiancée steps out of the trees.

I didn't go home.

Home had Mom's quiet look in it, and I couldn't stand that look tonight.

I walked the back road to the creek instead, in the green dress and the wrong shoes, and sat on the flat rock where I used to read as a kid.

The water was loud, and it was cold on my ankles when I took my shoes off.

I tried my wolf one more time.

Nothing.

"Rejection is supposed to hurt," I told the creek. "Everyone says it feels like being torn in half."

I felt tired and furious and a little sick.

I did not feel torn.

That bothered me more than anything.

Gravel crunched behind me, slow and deliberate, the walk of someone who wanted to be heard coming.

I knew who it was before I turned.

My chest knew, the same way it had known on the stairs of the estate.

"Beta told me where you'd be," Rhett said.

He had taken off the suit jacket and the tie, and his white shirt was open at the collar.

He stood at the edge of the trees with his hands loose at his sides and kept his distance.

"Go back to your party," I said.

"It ended."

"Then go back to your fiancée."

"Jessa."

"Don't say my name like that. You already said it once tonight, in front of everybody, and look how that went."

He took a breath and let it out.

"You said accepted."

"You said refuse."

"I didn't finish."

"The man in the gray coat heard plenty."

"He heard half." Rhett came a few steps closer. "A rejection needs both halves. I say I refuse the bond and sever it. You answer. It only cuts if I get to the end."

I looked at him.

"You stopped."

"I couldn't say it."

The creek went on running.

I put my shoes down very carefully on the rock, because my hands wanted to do something else.

"That's why I can still feel you," I said. "Standing in the dark, forty feet away, like you're plugged into my ribs."

"Yes."

"You let me stand there and say accepted to a bond that was still alive."

"I didn't know what you'd do. I thought you'd stay quiet." He almost smiled, and it looked painful. "I should have known better."

"Why say any of it?"

"Because the treaty requires it." He crouched at the water's edge a few feet from me, close enough that the heat of him reached my arm. "Eight years of war, Jessa. Forty of ours in the ground, and most of them were boys I trained. The ceasefire is a piece of paper, and Hiram Pierce's signature is the only thing on it that matters."

"So marry his daughter."

"That's the clause. If the wedding doesn't happen, the paper is worthless, and the border opens again by spring."

"And you couldn't have asked me to stand quietly in the back? Told me? One conversation?"

He didn't answer.

I stood up to leave, and my foot slid on the wet rock.

His hand closed around my wrist before I'd finished the stumble.

It was the first time he had touched me since Midsummer.

Heat went up my arm and straight down through my stomach, so fast it took my breath away.

He made a rough sound in his throat and did not let go.

Neither did I.

His thumb was on the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse, and my pulse was doing something ridiculous.

"Let go," I said.

"You're the one holding on."

I looked down.

I had my fingers wrapped around his forearm, hard enough to leave marks.

I let go with a jerk and stepped back.

"Careful, Alpha," I said, and my voice came out thin. "Your fiancée can smell that on you."

His jaw tightened.

"She won't be told," he said. "Nobody can know the bond is still there. If Hiram hears it didn't cut, he'll call the wedding off himself and say we broke the treaty first."

"So you want me to lie for you."

"I want you to not hand Blackwater a reason."

"Don't use your dead on me."

"I'm not."

"You are."

Neither of us spoke.

"I'm not doing this for you," I said at last. "Get that straight."

"Then do it for the forty."

That was a low thing to say, and it worked, and I hated both facts.

A twig snapped in the trees behind him.

Rhett was on his feet at once, between me and the dark.

A slim figure stepped out of the pines with a flashlight pointed at the ground.

Short blonde hair, freckles, and a hand raised in surrender.

The woman from the buffet.

"Please don't growl at me," Lorna Pierce said. "I climbed over a fence in heels."

She looked at me, not at him.

"I need to talk to you. Rhett told me everything an hour ago, in the pantry."

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