Then he steeled himself, leaned forward, and stretched his hand across the table.
Sammy stared at it for a long time before reaching out to take it. The reaction was instant.
The moment their skin touched, he stiffened, and his fingers tightened reflexively, his blunt nails biting into Dominic’s knuckles. His eyes rounded. His nostrils flared. His lips parted, falling open in a softO.
“You knew,” he accused once he found his voice, but he didn’t pull his hand away.
Dominic nodded.
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“Because…”
“I’ve decided to trust you,” Dominic answered bluntly. Gripping his mate’s hand, he jerked him forward across the table until he could feel the static electricity crackle between their lips. “Don’t make me regret it.”
Chapter five
Don’t make me regret it.
The words had been playing on a constant loop in Sammy’s head for the past hour.
He’d thought about them on the way to his cabin. They had distracted him while he packed his bag. So much so that he had been forced to dump the duffel and start over.
Twice.
Even when he had called Braeden to let him know he would be out of town for a few days, Dominic’s voice had been whispering in the back of his mind.
Given the circumstances, the wolf had no reason to trust him. For all Dominic knew, he had concocted the entire story to lure him into a trap. Just because Sammy had ended up being his mate didn’t negate that possibility.
Mate.
When his friends talked about meeting their mates, it had always sounded magical, like something out of a fairy tale. Even the humans he knew had felt the pull, the instinctual need to be close.
Sammy had felt the zing up his arm. The warmth that bloomed inside his chest. The immediate recognition of something achingly familiar.
Beyond that, though, it had been pretty anticlimactic.
While he’d felt a physical attraction to the male from the moment he’d appeared in the bakery, he hadn’t suddenly and inexplicably fallen in love. Nothing inside him yearned for the alpha. Discovering the connection between them didn’t make him care for Dominic any more or any less than he had before.
With that realization, he couldn’t help but wonder if maybe this time fate had made a mistake. Or worse, maybe something was wrong withhim.
Had that part of him been destroyed, burned away by the magic that bound him? Was this one more way for his mother to control him? Another piece of himself stripped away by her greed?
The possibility worried him far more than he wanted to admit.
“Are we still in Louisiana?” he asked, his voice thick like syrup as he struggled to keep down the coffee sloshing in his stomach.
He knew teleportation to be exceedingly rare magic. In fact, he had only met one other person with the capability. Erus happened to be a god, though, so he wasn’t sure if that counted.
Having just hitched a ride and experienced it firsthand, he could say with confidence that he hated it. If forced to describe it, he would liken the sensation to being turned inside out and sucked through a garden hose. His temples ached, his skin crawled, and his muscles coiled themselves into violent knots.
Dominic glanced at him from the corner of his eye. “A little outside of Shreveport. And this—” He swept his hand out in front of him. “—is La Madriguera.”
The Burrow.
Cute name. Wildly inaccurate description.