“Why do you think this happened now, then?” she asked suspiciously. “You had four years to make this mating start or to even show me you wanted me. Why now? Why did it just happen now?”
He prowled farther into the room, coming nearer, not stopping until she stepped several feet in the opposite direction.
“Answer me,” she demanded, despite the lust in his eyes and her own growing heat. As though the confrontation only made the need to touch, to taste, more extreme. “Why now?”
He inhaled sharply, a grimace contorting his expression. “It actually began the morning you gave me your resignation,” he told her, his expression hardening. “The recessed Breed instincts hadn’t become active enough, though, to strengthen the mating hormone until I learned you’d been attacked.”
She knew how it worked. Graeme had explained it to her. When a Breed was faced with the woman the animal instinct recognized as its mate, then small glands beneath the Breed’s tongue filled with a liquid hormone that bound them together physically. According to Graeme, her resignation had caused the inner animal instincts to jerk in response and begin awakening. She was leaving him, and the strength of the animal’s refusal to allow that had activated his Breed instincts. Or, she wondered, had the man’s refusal to lose his only reminder of his lost wife started the mating instead?
“When I kissed you after learning of the attack, it was stronger. It’s only gotten more so since,” Cullen concluded. “This had nothing to do with Lauren, and nothing to do some fucking insane view Ranger has of how I feel. For God’s sake, she’s been dead ten years,” he snarled. “He’s the one with the problem here, Chelsea. Not me.”
“Tell me why it happened now, Cullen,” she demanded, needing to understand what was happening to them, and why it was happening now. “What made now different? I had threatened to leave dozens of times and you didn’t mate me then.”
“Because I was losing you and I knew it,” he snapped, his expression filling with frustration as he raked his fingers restlessly through his hair. “I felt it when you drew that damned piece of paper from your jacket. You were leaving me.”
And she had been. She nodded heavily, refusing to hide from it.
“I was actually getting ready to leave the Nation,” she admitted, watching his eyes flare with pending fury. “It was Ashley and Cassie who convinced me to wait to see if I could get on with the Bureau. And after what happened with Louisa . . .” She gave a heavy shrug. “I changed my mind.”
She stared around the kitchen, her body so sensitive now, her need to touch him, to be touched by him, only growing.
“You were going to completely leave me?” he bit out, moving closer again as she shifted farther around the table. “Do you really think I wouldn’t have come looking for you?”
Did she?
She shook her head slowly.
“No, I don’t think you would have,” she admitted, her voice sharper, confused as to why he’d believe she’d even give it a thought. “I think you would have let me go. If I had left as I meant to, the attack by that Coyote wouldn’t have happened and you wouldn’t have come looking for me. Then the mating wouldn’t have started, and your friend wouldn’t give a damn who you were sleeping with.”
That smile that curled at his lips wasn’t comforting and had nothing to do with amusement.
“Is that what you think?” His eyes narrowed then, tension tightening the muscles at his jaw. “I’ll deal with Ranger soon, don’t doubt it. But I cannot believe you’d even consider a reality where I wouldn’t have come for you.”
“It’s what I know,” she informed him heatedly, the knowledge of it hurting far more than she wanted to admit to herself. “You had four years to decide you wanted me,” she pointed out furiously. “We were together almost daily and you didn’t want me then. So why the hell should it matter if I left now?”
“And you really believe that? Oh baby, you are so fucking wrong.” He was on her before she could evade him, his voice part growl, part incredulous anger.
Before she could stop him, he pulled her hand to the erection beneath his jeans and held her palm in place.
“I’ve been like iron since the night you showed up at that damned Breed Underground meeting with Steven Fields when you were no more than eighteen fucking years old, and it’s only gotten worse since.”
She’d been so desperate to see him that she’d all but begged Steven to let her go with him.
“And you want me to believe you’ve waited all these years for a woman you say you’ve stayed hard for?” She jerked her hand out of his grip, but the feeling of heat remained. “Really, Cullen? Do you think I don’t know exactly who your lovers were over the years? You’re telling me you didn’t want the women you fucked?”
That memory was enough to piss her off and remind her of the jealousy that ate at her during those times.
“That actually about sums it up.” Disgust filled his voice and flashed across his expression. “But I knew myself, Chelsea. I wanted to give you time to grow up first; instead all I did was give you time to find ways to get yourself killed.”
“No, Cullen, I figured out how to protect myself and others if I have to. And I’ll be damned if I’ll feel as though that’s a weakness of some kind,” she argued fiercely. “Mating me will not change who I am, so don’t even imagine it will.”
She was not Lauren. She didn’t need him to shadow her every move. All she needed was a partner, not some damned grieving widower living in the past . . .
Before the thought could finish she was in Cullen’s arms, his lips covering hers, the heated spice in his kiss stronger, more intense than it had been at any other time, and
it hit her senses faster, deeper.
The arousal already overheating her senses flared into a conflagration and burned through thought, protest and shadows. Fear receded beneath the feelings that rose when she was in his arms. It wasn’t security she was searching for, but she found security in his arms.