Page 16 of Stolen By Her Alien Mate

If those rock hard muscles of his chest are any indication, he could have easily kept his hold on me, but he releases me the instant I resist. So at least he isn’t a total jerk.

“I don’t know who put you up to this, but it’s not very nice.” I cross my arms over my chest and scowl at him.

“I do not understand,” he says. There’s genuine confusion in his tone as his perfect brow tensed.

Apparently, hot guy—or Kael—has never been rejected in his life—which, given how hot he is, seems plausible.

“You don’t wish to mate with me?” he asks.

Why does he have to be so hot and have such a seductive voice? I nearly whimper.

“No, I do not want to mate.” I turn around to Lorraine to find her grinning widely at me. “This isn’t funny.”

She lifts a thin shoulder and her smile deepens, making the laugh lines at the corners of her eyes stand out. “I’m enjoying it.”

“It’s cruel, Lorraine,” I say.

“I am not being cruel, Princess Joey Kincaid, I am speaking the truth. We are destined to be together.” A look of pain crosses over his eyes, as if my rejection actually hurts him. But that can’t be right. He doesn’t even know me. “Have you not been waiting for me your whole life?”

Laughter bursts from my lips. “Have I been waiting my whole life for a prince to come find me? No. Not even a little bit.”

“You act as if you have no notion of what I’m talking about,” he says. “Didn’t they tell you?”

“Didn’t who tell me?”

“Your guardians. They should have protected you, raised you until I could come and claim you. They were supposed to tell you about your destiny.”

Guardians? Destiny? This guy had flown right beyond weird and straight to crazy cakes.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “If this is a joke, you’re taking it too far. And if it’s not a joke…”

I just shake my head, unsure what else to say. What can this be, other than a joke?

Behind me Lorraine clicks her tongue. “And he’s so pretty.”

I glance at her and see my unspoken words echoed in her gaze. He is too pretty to be so weird.

“I had no guardians,” I say, doing nothing to hide the bitterness from my tone. “I was raised in the system. In foster care.”

I’d drifted from foster home to foster home for as long as I could remember. Princess fantasies were in short supply in my childhood.

I’ve always been all on my own.

I wipe my sweaty palms on my apron, hoping that I look more put together than I feel. “If you’re looking for someone named Joey Kincaid, you probably found the wrong girl. I don’t even know if that’s the name my parents—whoever they might have been—gave me at birth. It’s just the name some social worker assigned to me when I was admitted to the system.”

I smooth my hands down my skirt, this time going for dismissive finality.

But my hand brushes against syrup and comes away sticky and gross.

Because that’s how my life is. I am perpetually cleaning some substance off my hands or clothes. It’s par for the course that the only hot guy to cross my path is bat shit crazy.

He takes a step towards me, his eyebrows angry slashes over those eyes. I still can’t tell what color they are. They seemed to change depending on angle or light.

“You are Joey Kincaid,” his words come out hard, but he doesn’t seem mad at me. It’s more like he’s just frustrated that I don’t believe him. “That is the name given to me by the Historian. Even if I didn’t trust the information supplied to me by the Historian, I knew the moment I saw you that you were destined to be my mate.”

I take a step back at his words. “Right. Because love at first sight is totally a thing and guys are always meeting their destined mates in small town diners.”

He ignores my snark and continues as if I hadn’t said a word. “I do not understand why you were in this system, as you called it and not with the guardian assigned to you.”