Shifters formed two circles at rituals and ceremonies—immediate family and close friends on the inside, the rest of Shiftertown on the outside. The slow dancing, each circle moving the opposite direction, called the Goddess and the God to be present at the festivities. Or so it was said. The stately dancing usually degenerated into a raunchy party within minutes of the mating.
“Fine by me,” Cormac said. “You can all be in the inner circle. Maybe even the Fae.” Cormac’s nose wrinkled. Reid’s slightly acrid scent was stirring his killing instincts.
“Uncle Stuart is okay,” the girl said. “Even if he stinks.”
“Excuse me!” Nell lifted her hands, and everyone stared at her. “No one’s doing any mating here. Cormac barged into my house this morning declaring he wants a mate—that he wants me—and he still hasn’t told me why.”
It was time to tell her the truth. Cormac caught and held Nell’s gaze. “Magnus sent me.”
Cormac watched the shock course through Nell’s body, her pupils swiftly contracting to pinpricks. He knew he’d dealt her an unfair blow, but he didn’t have time to woo her gently. Eric had said Nell would be tough, but Cormac saw that unless he broke through, and broke through quickly, she’d shut him out forever.
He’d broken through all right. Nell came for him, claws sprouting from her hands. Her body met his with an audible slam and took him backward through the open sliding door.
The two of them tumbled off the porch to land in the dirt and dried grass below, Nell’s huge claws going for Cormac’s throat.
CHAPTER THREE
Nell pummeled him blindly, old anger and grief surging from the past, wrapped in Magnus’s name. Cormac couldn’t have known him, had no business saying he had.
She was shouting that as she bashed at his face, but Cormac blocked every blow with rapid efficiency.
Finally Cormac grabbed her wrists and rolled over with her, pinning her against the cold ground with formidable strength. His blue eyes had darkened into near-blackness; Shifter eyes, willing her to be still.
Nell scented the distress of the others on the porch, Reid’s Fae scent heightening as he debated what to do. Cormac held Nell down without quarter, but his hands on her wrists were surprisingly gentle.
“You never knew Magnus,” Nell snapped at him. Her mate had never mentioned anyone called Cormac—not that he’d mentioned many people from his past. Magnus had liked isolation.
“I didn’t say I had,” Cormac said. Damn him, he wasn’t even breathing hard. “He was of my clan, but he was gone from them by the time I found them. He’d abandoned them.”
“I know.” Nell couldn’t stop growling.
Shifters, especially bears, could live apart from their clans, and often did in the wild, but they still had deep ties, and the clan leader could call on them when he needed to. Clan leaders even had a spell that could drag clan members to him in times of desperation—useful in the days before cell phones.
A Shifter who cut all ties, including the blood bonds that made the spell work, was unusual, and the clan declared said Shifter dead to them. Magnus had cut ties, because he disagreed with his clan leader’s very old-fashioned and rather severe form of ruling.
Nell had been young and so soppily in love she’d thought it romantic that he’d decided to strike out on his own. She’d had no trouble traveling with him until they’d found a place where they could be utterly alone—herself and him—to start a new clan.
The problem was, when a Shifter severed himself from his clan, he lost part of himself. Magnus had regretted his action almost at once, but hadn’t known how to undo it. He’d certainly have been punished if he’d gone back, maybe even with death. He hadn’t been wrong that his clan leader had a cruel side.
If Magnus had lived long enough, he might have found a way to reconcile and bring Nell with him, but he’d grown more and more remote and depressed. Nell had seen the signs, but hadn’t really understood them until too late.
“They didn’t know about you,” Cormac said. His hands softened on her wrists, his eyes returning to the deep blue. “Magnus never told anyone he’d taken a mate or had cubs. No one knew until about six months ago. Then I knew I had to find you.”
“What do you mean, you knew you had to find me? If Magnus never told anyone, how did you know?”
“He wrote a letter before he died, all about you, but it was lost. Not until a Shifter I knew in Canada found it, in a museum in Winnipeg of all places, and sent it to me, did any of the clan know of your existence. Magnus confessed he’d taken you as mate, and asked one of us to look after you when he was gone. So I decided to find you and carry out his wishes. Better late than never.”
“So that bullshit about searching for a mate was just . . . bullshit?”
“No.” Cormac’s smile came back. “But it was a good excuse to get transferred out here. I didn’t tell my clan leader about you or the letter, because he’s still old-school. Now that Shifters are civilized, he might not try to kill a cast-off Shifter’s cubs and mate, but he might make life very hard for you. If I take you under my protection, that won’t happen. And I didn’t lie about wanting you as mate. After I read that letter, and Magnus’s description of the incredible woman you are, I knew you’d be the perfect one for me.”
“You are so full of . . . Get off me.”
Cormac climbed to his feet so quickly that Nell was left, stunned, in the dirt, on her back. Then he reached down with his big hand and pulled her up, strengthening the tug at the last minute so she landed against him.
He was warm, solid, comforting. Her emotions were in turmoil—Magnus, abandoning her as he’d abandoned his clan, but permanently. Magnus writing a letter, telling his clan all about her, begging someone to come and take her as mate so she’d be cared for when he was gone. The letter lost so no one had come, and Nell had been alone. Now Cormac was here, proclaiming he’d come for her. A hundred years after she’d needed him.
But it was tempting to lean against him, to let him take her weight. She’d carried so much weight on her shoulders for so long.
Nell started to pull away. Cormac tightened his arm behind the small of her back and pressed her closer, his mouth coming down on hers for a searing kiss.
Cormac knew how to kiss. Knew how to tease her lips open, how to soften on the corners of her mouth. He gently drew her lower lip between his teeth, tugging it a little, a hint that he could take her with wildness if he let himself go.
The cubs on the porch cheered. Nell jerked away. She took a step back, missed her footing, and started to fall. But Cormac’s arm was there, keeping her on her feet.
Peigi looked a little more concerned than the kids she took care of—none of them hers, because she’d never conceived with Miguel. Reid simply watched with his enigmatic expression.
“Do you and Cormac have the mate bond, Aunt Nell?” Donny asked.
Nell suppressed another growl. She didn’t want to talk about the mate bond, or mate-claims, or mating at all.
She yanked herself away from Cormac. “Don’t even try to follow me,” she said, and marched away down the green.
Behind her, she heard the cubs asking questions in concern, and Cormac’s rich voice rumbling in answer.
He didn’t try to follow her. Now why was she disappointed?
Screw this. Nell kept walking, going nowhere, her feet taking her there fast.
Joe started stalking the bear Shane by going to another bar. This one was called Coolers, popular with Shifter groupies—humans who wanted everything from the opportunity to gaze at Shifters to multiple-partner sex with them in the parking lot.