Page 5 of Never His Mate

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Again, his loyal Beta tries to intercede.

“Gem, Ryker’s right,” Shane says calmly. “This isn’t the time for this conversation.”

“I’m not going anywhere until I hear it straight from the Alpha.” They could drag me out of here, but I know they won’t. Just like I know that Shane is only trying to cover for Ryker, like usual. “Well.” I tap my flat against the floor. “I’m waiting.”

Ryker pushes his chair away from his desk, but he doesn’t stand. He just lounges almost cockily in the leather seat. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Any other packmate would back down when they heard the pure alpha dominance in his voice.

Not me.

“I can take it.”

The way he looks me up and down tells me that he’s not so sure about that. But he answers me anyway. “Then, no. I have no intention of mating you this moon or the next.”

Or at all, I bet.

Trying to hide how his answer affects me, I straighten my shoulders as the absolute rejection slithers down the echoes of a bond that began to build when I was still a kid.

I’ve spent the last ten years working toward the moment when Ryker would take over his father’s pack and accept a mate, knowing that it had to be me. Even if some part of me didn’t already sense it, during his Alpha Ceremony at the beginning of the year, it was formally declared that I was to leave the Lakeview Pack, joining with Ryker as fully bonded mates.

But then my arrival kept getting delayed, and Ryker barely spoke to me after I came to Accalia, and I put up with all of it because that’s what good girl Gemma was supposed to do. And because I’ve spent ten years wondering what it would be like to be with the infamous Ryker Wolfson, I figured I could wait a little longer.

It feels like I’ve already been waiting a lifetime.

I met Ryker, the son of the former Mountainside Pack’s Alpha, at one of the grand meets where every pack leader in the country travels for an annual get-together. And I knew from that very first meeting that he was meant to be mine.

At fifteen, it was little more than a schoolgirl crush.

By seventeen, I was smitten with the older shifter.

When I was twenty, after a night spent talking together while we sat behind the Alpha cabin where the pack leaders were assembled, I was enchanted.

Two years later, when a bunch of us younger wolves went for a run together in our fur, I had to admit that I would follow him anywhere.

I hadn’t seen him again after that—not until the moment I arrived at Accalia with all my earthly possessions and the new Alpha couldn’t even look me in the eye.

Damn it, he’s doing it again. Gaze sliding away, fixed on a point just over my shoulder as if giving the illusion that he’s paying attention while, truthfully, he’s utterly bored.

I’ve finally hit my breaking point.

I’ve been riding an unstable cocktail of adrenaline and heartbreak ever since Trish crowed that she was his chosen. Fate might say one thing, the moon might say the same, but none of that matters. A chosen mate always wins—which means that I’ve already lost everything.

And since there’s nothing left to lose...

Before anyone can guess what I’m about to do, before any of the other dominant shifters in the room can react, I leap onto his desk, then pounce. I land on his lap, stretching the skirt of my dress as I straddle him.

His head snaps forward.

Oh, yeah. He’s totally looking at me now.

I’m not a moron—but I am a bit of a hothead. And sometimes I know better than to act so impulsively, but that doesn’t stop me.

When Ryker became Alpha, everyone knew that he would take a mate. He had to. It’s how it’s done. How it’s always been done. But I had thought, when he arranged with my home pack for me to come to him, that he’d at least felt a little something for me.

Obviously, I was wrong.

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