The Mermaid's Mate Read Online Free PDF

whispered.
    His hands were on her cheeks, achingly tender. “Marian...”
    She burst. Threw her arms around his neck and drove her tongue into his mouth. He caught her, his arms around her back, his mouth opening up wide for the coming assault. They groaned in unison as Marian moved her hips against him and swept her tongue through his mouth with forceful strokes.
    He ripped his mouth from hers, leaving her swaying on shaky legs.
    “Wait,” he said. The word was spoken harshly, a whispered order.
    “But I don’t want to stop.”
    “Shh,” he said, his dark glare searching the way they came. “Someone’s coming.”
    Marian moved behind Timber, though there wasn’t much room and he couldn’t block her completely. She felt foolish, losing control the way she had.
    “Wait here,” Timber growled.
    Before he moved a single step, a rugged beast of a man with white hair and a wide, crooked nose stalked around the path. The hard glare in his hollow-gray eyes warned that he’d just witnessed everything.
    * * *
    “What the hell are you doing over here?” Slater’s gravelly voice boomed over the storm. “With a mermaid? Damn, Timber, you got a trade going on the side or something?”
    “She’s got nothing to do with Ryder or any kind of a trade.”
    “Ryder ain’t gonna like it.”
    Damn it, Timber had been caught red-handed. Messing around with a mermaid wasn’t breaking any pack rules, but Timber had been specifically assigned to keep mermaids and dragons away from the southern side of the mountain while Ryder did his blasting. Marian should’ve been dead. Instead, she’d been caught in his arms, with the pink plumpness of her lips giving away their kiss.
    “Want to tell me what the hell you’re doing here?” Timber wanted to rip his pack mate’s eyes out of his skull for looking at Marian the way he had. Instead, he squared his shoulders, blocking Slater’s view of her. “You should be back at the lair.”
    “Ryder sent me. He called a mandatory meeting at noon, and when you pulled a no-show, he wanted me to make sure you weren’t getting into any trouble. Took me all damn day to find you. Thanks to the storm, I couldn’t track you by your stench.” Slater, the best tracker in their rogue pack, craned his thick, square neck to the side until it popped. “But from the look of things, you’ve found more than trouble.”
    Timber growled from deep within his chest, and fought off the urge to shift into wolf form. If he wasn’t already indebted to Ryder for Rison’s death, he’d crack Slater’s head open and dump his body into the river. Sadly, Timber couldn’t afford to kill another one of his brothers.
    “Get your ass back to the lair,” Timber snapped, blood boiling. His muscles were taut with tension, and getting their strength back by the second. “Tell Ryder I’ll meet him at sunrise.”
    “What about the blue tail?”
    They exchanged heated glances that spoke more than words. If Marian saw or heard anything about their covert activity, she’d have to be taken out. Slater knew it. Timber knew it. And soon, when Slater reported back to Ryder, he’d know it, too.
    Timber didn’t trust Marian. But he didn’t want to see her hurt, either.
    “I didn’t see anything, I swear,” Marian said from behind Timber. “I’m on my way back to my territory now. Won’t be long until I find a place where the water’s deep enough to dive in.”
    “Yeah, that storm surge is long gone now, isn’t it? But if you’re here, that means you were in the area when Ryder was doing this excavation. The river’s too shallow for you to have come upstream after...” Cocking his head to the side, Slater peered at Marian over Timber’s shoulder. “What were you doing upriver, so far from the rest of your colony?”
    “She was exploring and got caught in the storm surge,” Timber interjected before Marian could continue.
    A bolt of lightning lit up the sky, illuminating the skepticism in Slater’s