Mate (Bride, #2)

by Ali Hazelwood

She tore him apart and remade him. It took her less than a second.

“You’re the most beautiful woman that I’ve ever seen,” he says simply.

My sex drive’s cobwebs have grown their own cobwebs.

So I close my eyes and let the time and the road flow by. Until I remember something. “Koen?” I’m almost fully asleep, my lids too heavy to open. “Yeah?” “I think you owe me an apology.” “For what?” “The way you stared at my tits.” Silence. Then, instead of the I’m sorry or Go to fucking sleep I expect, he says, “I think you owe me an apology.” “For what?” “How spectacular your tits are.” God, he really is an epic asshole. “You might be the worst person I’ve ever met.” “Wouldn’t be surprised,” he mutters.

Sometimes, you just do what you have to.

“I’m simply going to lock you up, killer. If I have to chain you to my fucking bed to keep you alive, I will not hesitate.”

It’s okay. We tried. Didn’t work out. But that’s life: you win some, and you lose some—in which case, it becomes death.

Faced with proof of the existence of stuff like biologically mandated mates, and hybrids, and the legality of child beauty pageants, it’s hard to discount…anything.

Look at her. Just—look at her.

Her laughter adjusts the spin of his atoms.

“Just the fact that you’re keeping your cool, helps K—all of us.” “Oh, great. I just figured I’d scream my little heart out later, into my pillow.” Saul laughs. “That’s some grade A compartmentalization.” “Thanks.” I toss my hair back. “It’s the childhood trauma.”

“Everybody has cults. They’re the weeds of sentient civilization.

He easily resigned himself to a lifetime without her, but… Simply put, he is unwilling to contemplate a universe in which she no longer exists.

“How perfect you are. I spent the last twenty years hoping that if there was a mate for me out there, I’d never come across them. And then I found you, and, Serena…there isn’t one thing I would change about you. Or one single thing I regret about knowing you.”

“As in, my smell brings all the Weres to the yard?”

Can’t tell them about the sequel if you didn’t let them watch the original.

Having given birth to me doesn’t buy her my love or my gratitude or my compassion,

He is afraid—not only of what might happen to her, but also of what he might do to the world in retaliation.

She is meant for him, but they couldn’t be more impossible.

This is it, then. What he was born for.

“Take it.” He shoves deeper. “Be good and take my knot.”

He licks his lips. “If someone had given me a piece of paper and asked me to list everything I liked, everything I dreamed of, everything that I was sure would make me happy, you would have been the final product of it.”

I cognitively reframe the concept of having sex: not an act with a beginning and an end, but a continuous exchange of pleasure and hushed words.

“Unbelievable, how fucking unreal you feel, soft and wet and warm and every good thing in the world, baby.”

She would make for the perfect Alpha’s mate.

I’ve never had a family to disappoint before, and it’s a bit of a power trip. Lots of fun. I don’t understand what Misery has been going on about.

I think I’m still in college, wondering who the hell is getting kickbacks for putting a chemistry requirement in a finance degree.

“Such a fucking nuisance.” I wonder why it took me until this very moment to realize that it’s been his way of saying I love you all along.