“So, what brings you back here?”
“Hattie wore me down with her yammering. I’m back for the family gathering.”
Bo wasn’t bright, but like a lot of bullies, he had a low animal cunning. He narrowed his eyes, then glanced at Blake, raising one dark eyebrow in suspicion.
“Now, after all this time? You missed plenty of family gatherings before. What you really here for?” he asked, folding his arms over his chest.
Krista could still feel waves of alpha-male energy emanating from Blake, like static electricity in the air. If she’d been in vixen form, it would have made her fur crackle.
“I’m here for the family gathering,” she repeated. “Ask me a hundred times, you’ll get the same answer.”
His mean, narrow gaze slid over to Blake.“And why’shehere?”
“I just told you.” She let exasperation seep into her voice. “He’s my fated mate.”
Bo coughed, raising a fist to his mouth. He took a step back, then pointed between the two of them. “So you said.”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s not that hard to figure.”
“Is that so? Must be pretty new. You don’t smell bonded.” He flashed her a challenging look.
More dumb holler superstitions. “It is very new. Thanks for your concern.”
“Well.” He flashed a sarcastic smirk at her. “Krista Ellis finally found a man. Whoever would have thought.”
That shouldn’t have hurt, considering the source, but it did. It dragged her right back to high school. Krista Ellis, chubby nerd, daughter of the town tramp. She’d had her little circle of friends, but she’d basically been seen as a sexless bookworm; she hadn’t even gone on a date until years after she fled town.
It was almost like Blake could sense her feelings. “Say that again,” Blake said, his eyes blazing with rage. Bo’s eyes flashed with defiance—for a few moments. Then he looked Blake up and down and apparently realized that he’d crossed a line. Shifters have an instinctive sense of each other’s strength and dominance. If Bo had been drunk he might have over-ridden his own survival instincts and challenged Blake, which would have been a fatal mistake. But at the moment he was clear-headed enough to see that he was staring death in the face. He dropped his gaze to the ground in submission.
“Sorry,” he muttered to Blake.
“No, you say sorry to her.” Blake was so tense with the effort of holding himself back that he was practically vibrating.
Bo’s face twisted into an ugly knot. “Sorry, Krista,” he muttered.
“It’s nothing,” Krista said coolly.I wouldn’t have expected any better from you.She drew on all of her reserves of willpower not to say those last words out loud. She’d just gotten here; she couldn’t be starting fights left and right if she wanted to have any hope of helping to find Ethan.
Bo hurried over to his truck and scrambled in. He waited until he got the engine running before he yelled out the window, “Hope you live long enough to get that mate-bond going. Not looking good, though.” And then he peeled out of the parking lot in a cloud of dust.
She barely heard the threat over the sound of the alarm clanging inside her head. She’d told Bo that Blake was her fated mate, and he hadn’t read the lie on her face. That meant she was in big, big trouble.
