Page 15 of Savage

As Clint tipped his cowboy hat at me and walked to his truck, I knew the answer would be yes. I felt the strange urge to cry at the loss of something that never really got started.

That was the hormones talking.

It wasn’t real.

Just like this thing between me and Clint could never be real.

6

CLINT

Married.

Fucking married?

I waited until I’d turned off her street before I demolished my dash with a smash of my fist. The wound at my side throbbed, as if in direct response to my agitation. Fucking hell. The burn was a reminder of exactly what I’d intended to do. Not go after Becky. But I had, and in the end, she’d given me the perfect excusenotto do so.

Then why was I fucking losing my shit? Fate wasa cunt.

I seriously wanted to kill someone right now, and I wouldn’t have minded if it was her husband.

Soon to be ex-husband, I hoped.

I never touched a married or claimed woman. Ever. She didn’t belong to me.

But Becky did, though. My wolf didn’t care about a legal piece of paper. A marriage was a human bond, not a shifter one. The fact that she’d ended it two years earlier meant she wasn’twithher ex. She was fair game.

To me, the man, it fucking blowed. I couldn’t mate a married human!

No matter how much my wolf wanted to turn around and keep on kissing her, I drove straight to the ranch and shot off an email to the council data-digger, some hacker who lived in Arizona. I might have pretended it had to do with shifter enforcement rather than my mate’s marital status, but I had to know everything about Becky Nichols, and this was the easiest way to do it.

She got back to me in thirty minutes—thank fuck.

What I read both infuriated and appeased me.

Becky's been separated for two years—just as she’d said—following an incident that resulted in a restraining order being filed and a legal status of separated.

A prickle of fear ran up my spine at that. The only kind ofincidentsthat required a restraining order were ones where someone was in danger.

I growled, stood and tossed my chair across the room. Pacing the small space, I thought about how my mate had been hurt by her husband. She’d had to file papers to keep him away. She’d said he wouldn’t sign, that he’d blocked all her petitions. Still. Two fucking years later.

God fucking dammit. I was seriously going to kill the asshole.

I froze, realizing I’d been a big fucking idiot. Standing in her driveway, it had been right in front of my face. Hell, I’d replaced the fucking thing.

The tire.

Could her ex have slashed her tire? He lived in Meade, about thirty miles away. It seemed beneath a—I skimmed the data for what type of doctor the ex was—gastroenterologist to drive to the next town over just to slash his wife’s tire, but it also seemed beneath a doctor to hit his wife.

Violence wasn’t reserved for blue-collar workers, was it?

It happened in every society and every type of household. He might have driven her to file for divorce, but since it still wasn’t final, it didn’t seem like he was inclined to let her go. He was fucking with her from afar. Or right in her driveway.

Goddammit!For the second time that day, I slammed my fist down and cracked the recipient of my force—this time my desk.

I took a deep breath and let it out. Another, but wished I could still breathe in her sweet scent, not the lemon cleaner that had been used in the room recently. Fixing the chair, I settled back at the computer and kept reading the information the data-hacker sent. Becky had filed for divorce two years ago, but Dr. Todd Nichols used various legal delay tactics to block a final divorce decree from being filed. At issue seemed to be their large debt and how it would be divided up.

I opened another email. Attachments showed a house in Meade had a sizable mortgage, and liens from several home improvement contractors were filed on it. The loan was in both spouses’ names, but I couldn’t miss a bill for kitchen renovations completed six months ago in Becky’s name.