My eyes traced the lines of black ink across her chest. Another design peeked out of the wide collar of her shirt. I wanted to see every one of her tattoos. To memorize the lines of them, to lick across them and taste her skin.
The front of my jeans grew too tight, and I inhaled for calm.
Calm?
How was I supposed to stay calm when I just found my fated mate at an airport, where she was traveling to an unknown location for an unknown amount of time? She could get on another plane when we landed. She could be flying to China, and I might never see her again.
My stunned bliss was short-lived, the onset of panic making my skin feel tight. She wasn’t a shifter. I couldn’t just drag her to the nearest hotel and make things official.
I’d just spent weeks with my alpha and his upper ranks in Seattle, hunting down a sicko kidnapping shifters and helping them protect their mates. From what I’d seen, human mates were challenging—stubborn.
I had to expect the same from Angie.
What if she had a boyfriend? Fire burned in my veins for an entirely different reason, and I lifted a lock of brown hair to my nose. There was a streak of blue underneath, and I couldn’t help the twitch of a smile.
She smelled like shampoo with a caustic hint of hair dye. Her skin had a lingering scent of fragranced lotion—vanilla and something floral. Fragrance made it harder to catch scents thatmight have rubbed off duringcontactwith another person, but not impossible.
No other male scent marked her, at least not recently. Somehow, that wasn’t particularly reassuring.
Killing her boyfriend didn’t make a fantastic start to a relationship.
The flight attendant passed with the drink cart—conveniently forgetting to ask for my drink order—and I was uncomfortably aware that we were already a third of the way through our flight. I had a little over two hours to figure out how I was going to convince a complete stranger that we were fated to be together.
Angiewokeastheplane slanted sideways, slowly winding toward the Fairbanks airport. Red veins stood out around her irises, making the blue color brighter.
Blue eyes to match her blue hair.
She blinked rapidly, gaze moving between her hand and my lap, where she was all but groping me.
“The only thing that would make this worse was if I drooled on you,” she groaned.
I wanted to say something reassuring, but I was too consumed with nerves to speak.
Soon enough, we were hitting the tarmac. Angie gripped my hand the entire time. My mate wasn’t a fan of flying.
Passengers jumped to their feet the moment the plane stopped moving, unhooking seatbelts and throwing open overhead bins.
“Are you in a hurry?” I asked her.
Maybe she had a connecting flight, and I could stall her long enough that she missed it. Then again, who had a connecting flight from Fairbanks?
Angie checked the time on her phone. “No. I still don’t have a hotel reservation.”
“My wolf doesn’t like close quarters,” I explained. “I like to be the last person off the plane. It’s—well, it’s safer for everyone involved.” Especially now that I had an unmarked mate, one I couldn’t let stand between two men in the aisle of the plane without going feral.
Her eyes widened. “Sorry for crowding you the whole flight. I didn’t realize…”
“You didn’t crowd me.” I said, stopping her before she got any ideas about putting space between us. “You aren’t the problem, remember,babe?”
“Right,” she whispered, “we should probably keep up the act until we’re off the plane. I don’t have time for federal jail time.”
I nodded my agreement, staring at the seat in front of me as people shuffled out. My wolf was more on edge than he’d ever been—even more than during the high-stakes investigation I just closed back in Seattle—and I didn’t want to risk eye contact with a curious human.
Angie yawned beside me, stretching her arms into my personal space. She didn’t protest when I lifted her duffel bag from the bin and put it over my shoulder.
“Thank you.” I smiled politely at the flight attendant as we exited the plane, despite her unfriendly expression.
Angie put her hand on my arm, leaning up to whisper, “What’s with the attitude? There was the gate agent, and then the flight attendant. What did you do to offend them?”
