Gio's warm hand brushed her arm. "Are you all right?"
Max couldn't help herself; she swayed toward him like a tree bending in the wind, looking up into his face. He had to feel something, she thought. It couldn't be one-sided; she had never heard of such a thing. Your mate was the person meant for you. Was it even possible to be so broken that you thought someone was your mate when really they weren't?
"Gio, do you know about mates?"
The question was blurted out before she realized she was going to dare to ask it. Her heart raced. He was new to being a shifter; he might just notknow.
"Yes," Gio said. He had moved to face her, his hands resting lightly on her upper arms. It felt impossibly intimate, even with their bodies separated, and she took a moment to realize that he had just broken her heart.
"You do?"
"Yes, my friend Mace told me about it."
"Have you ever felt it?"
Her lips parted, straining up toward his.
"Not that I know of." He moved a little closer, leaning down, and murmured huskily, "But you are a very beautiful woman, Max."
Their lips met.
The contact was hot and electric. Gio's mouth opened against hers, and she lost her sense of the world around them. An entire troupe of magicians could have opened a portal right over her head and marched past with a brass band, and she wouldn't have flinched.
The kiss broke, Gio nibbling her lip softly, and Max looked up into his gorgeous eyes. He had to tilt his head a little to kiss her. It was impossibly hot.
What she wanted was to feel his animal looking back at her, the mutual recognition that should have been theirs, as she had always heard.
But she didn't. Her jaguar had gone from being ecstatic to restless and confused. The kiss was good, but something was missing, and both she and her animal knew it.
Max pulled back.
Gio kept his hands on her arms just long enough to make it clear that he would have liked to continue to hold her, then he let her go easily. "Ah, we have business, don't we."
"Business," Max said, her voice tight.
She shouldered her rifle and marched back toward the hut. She had lost her taste for sightseeing.
GIO
The kiss had been a mistake.Gio knew it as soon as she wrenched herself away from him. It was too much, too soon. And her talk of mates had reminded him of the thing he had forgotten about being a shifter. There was someone out there for her—and for him.
Supposedly.
But he was no true shifter. He had come by it accidentally, never wanting it or asking for it. Did fate understand that? Perhaps it was still possible to make his own fate.
There were some other details to the mate-bond situation that Mace had explained, but Gio could no longer remember most of it. It had been a long time ago and had seemed to matter little to his life at the time. Gio had watched Mace fall in love with his mate Thea, but those memories were dim and hazy.
What it came down to was that he wanted Max. The more time he spent around her, the more he was aware of that. Their three days apart had only served to emphasize it. Although he had spent the time moving, a different motel room every time, he had been thinking of her all the way. It was impossible to get her out of his mind.
And yet every time he spoke to her, it seemed he made mistakes. This latest was the biggest.
She did reciprocate. He had felt it in her kiss. There was no way to fake that kind of responsiveness, at least not for someone as straightforward as Max, in her eager kiss and the way she had risen receptively against him. He had even glimpsed the hard nubs of her nipples pressing against her T-shirt before she had turned away.
What had gone wrong?
Max strode toward the cabin and Gio followed her, trying not to appreciatetoomuch the sway of her rounded hips in her camo pants.
Maybe it was the mate situation. She was the one who had brought it up, after all. Did she have a mate who had died? Or perhaps she was simply reminding him that they both had yet to find their own, even if it was hard for him to imagine, at the moment, someone he could possibly want more than Max.
