Mated To The Devil (5 page)

“Excuse me? Did you have a more pressing engagement? You will pay attention to me right fucking now,” his father roared, grabbing Remy by the arm and yanking him to stand upright. “Do you have any idea of what you did?”

“Fucked up royally.” Remy wasn’t one to hide behind his mistakes. Even astronomical ones.
Ah, shit, how could I have lost control like that?

“I’ll say you fucked up. Those two boys you beat the crap out of, they’re what you call important shits around here. And because you couldn’t handle your liquor or your wolf, you beat them to within an inch of their lives. They’re in the hospital.”

Lip curling in disgust, Remy lifted his head to face his father. “Who the hell cares about those two little bastards? They deserved it and more for trying to rape my mate.”

Remy’s ass hit the mattress hard as his father dropped him. “They did what?”

Memories, mostly blurry from alcohol, rushed to fill in the gaps of the previous evening. Some recollections, though, such as the one of him claiming his woman, stood out all too clearly. “I caught the pricks as they were about to force her. I took care of it. I know it maybe wasn’t the smartest thing, but dammit, what should I have done instead? Waited while the two little rich boys had their turn and traumatized her?”

A loud sigh was his father’s reply, and Remy looked up to see him rubbing a hand over his face. “Fuck! I should have known you’d have a reason to beat the pricks to a pulp. I guess I can’t completely blame you. But this going to cause some problems. Big problems. This girl you saved, would she be willing to give a statement? Something to at least corroborate so that we can at least show just cause?”

Remy shook his head. “I doubt it.” Few girls would. And even if she did agree, he wouldn’t subject his mate to that kind of attention, not after what he did.

“Who’s the girl?”

Who? Remy wracked his memories. Sifted through the brief conversation he recalled. Flashed through all the moments, most of them groan-worthy in the light of day. While the scent of her remained imprinted on his brain, the feel of her skin tattooed his fingers, the one thing he didn’t have was her name.
Somebody shoot me now ’cause this conversation is about to get ugly.
Squirming as the moment for his real shame approached, Remy cleared his throat. “Um, well, I never actually got her name.” Incredulous eyes met his and then narrowed. His father sniffed the air and then bent low to smell him. Red heat invaded Remy’s cheeks. Shame such as he’d not experienced since he was a pup made him want to find a hole and hide. But a real man didn’t hide from his mistakes or his punishment.

“You didn’t get your mate’s name, and yet I smell sex and blood. Virgin blood. Care to explain who it belongs to?” his father asked.

“My mate.”

“I see.” But Remy could tell his father didn’t. “Are you trying to tell me you saved the girl, skipped a courtship to fuck her, and somehow never bothered to get her name?”

Did he have to make it sound so—so tawdry? Nothing like the truth to bring a man low. Remy winced. “I . . . um . . . marked her, too.”

“What!” His father’s shout sent a stab of pain through Remy’s throbbing head.

“Actually it gets worse,” Remy mumbled, dropping his head as his shame overtook him.

“How can it be any worse than this?”

It took a deep breath before he could force the words out. “I, um, kind of didn’t give her a choice in the matter.”

“Which matter? The sex or the mark?”

“Both.”

Remy gritted his teeth as his father, alpha and biggest in the pack, hauled him up and shook him. Remy didn’t bother fighting, not when he deserved it. “You stupid little bastard. How could you do that? What the hell is wrong with you? I raised you to be better than this. Your mother is probably turning over in her grave.”

“I know,” Remy whispered, his throat tight. Nothing his father said could be worse than what Remy already thought of himself. He’d lost control. Plain and simple. He’d forced a girl to have sex with him; the fact she’d enjoyed it in the end didn’t justify his actions. Worse, he’d claimed her. Bitten her and marked her without explanation, and now she was somewhere going through the change alone.

“Fuck, do you have any idea what this could mean?”

A weary nod was all Remy could manage. By losing his mate, a woman who was becoming something
more,
he’d put all of his kind at risk of discovery.

“We have to find the girl,” his father said, pacing back and forth. “Maybe we’ll be lucky and one of your packmates will know where to find her. While they look, though, you need to get out of here.”

Leave?
“What? I can’t leave. I need to join the search,” Remy protested. He needed to find his mate so he could get on his knees and beg her forgiveness.

“Listen here, boy. I had to pull a lot of fucking strings to keep your ass out of jail. The one thing I couldn’t manage to do was keep it in college. So pack your shit, and get yourself back home. When we find the girl, we’ll bring her to you. And then you can spend the rest of your life apologizing for being an ass.”

Frustration at his inability to search for his blue-eyed mate ate at him as Remy packed. Disgust chewed at him harder when more and more of his reprehensible actions came back to haunt him.

She said no.
And he ignored her.
She tried to fight me off.
And he used his superior strength.
She was a virgin.
And he’d taken her up against the wall without a thought to anything other than his own need.
At least I made her come.
Probably a small consolation to her, given what he’d done.

Is there any way to say I’m sorry for something like this?
He didn’t know—and doubted Hallmark carried a card for something like this—but when he saw her again, he’d try his damnedest.

However, no matter how hard his father searched, no matter who his fraternity packmates asked, no matter where they turned, not a trace of his mysterious woman could be found. She’d disappeared. Vanished. All he had left were his shattered memories and her lingering scent on the scrap of material he’d salvaged before getting the bum rush from his dorm room.

It was his best friend, Dean, who thought to question Bobby, one of the would-be rapists. With his jaw wired shut, it proved an awkward conversation, but Dean found the cousins Remy’s mate had spoken about. Remy had wanted to accompany Dean when he went to question them, but his father forbade it. Dean went alone and returned with more bad news.

With a sadly shaken head, his friend said, “Your female’s cousins are on a trip overseas. I spoke to the aunt, and she wouldn’t even give me the girl’s name. She said something about the girl getting disowned because of something horrible she did.”

Something in Dean’s expression told Remy there was more. “Spill it.”

“That’s it, bro.” A single glare from Remy and, with a sigh, Dean broke. “You aren’t going to like it. The aunt’s exact words were, ‘That whore is no longer part of our family. Her parents threw her out like the trash she is. And good riddance.’”

They ended up having to plaster several walls after his freak-out, and it was then that his father told him to let it go. Told him to forget about his blue-eyed mate that he’d wronged and to get on with his life.

But Remy couldn’t forget her.

He dreamed of her nightly—the reproach in her eyes, her soft sighs of pleasure, the beating of her heart, the squeezing of her sex. He lived in torture, alone without his mate, and no clue how to find her.

Only one positive thing emerged from the ordeal. He never touched a drop of liquor again. Or another woman.

Chapter Five

Almost five years later . . .

Mina dabbed at Jacques’ scratches with a peroxide-soaked cloth, wincing on behalf of her son, who never seemed to flinch at pain.

“Why did you hit that boy?” she asked sternly. At the park, she’d only seen her son’s reaction and not the cause for his aggressive outburst.

“I had to hit him, Mama. He called me a nasty name.”

Clucking her tongue, Mina tilted his chin up and saw familiar blue eyes staring up at her, all the more striking because of the coca skin that offset them. “What could they have said that was so bad you needed to answer with your fists?”

His four-year-old brows drew together in an expression more fit on a man. “I don’t want to say. It’s not a nice word.”

It didn’t take much imagination to guess the word. She’d heard quite a few herself in the last few years, most especially since Jacques’ birth. Apparently, even in this day and age, some people still took issue with mixed-race children, and they weren’t afraid to get vocal about it.

What worried her most about this incident, though, wasn’t so much Jacques’ defense of himself—a boy had a right to stand up to bullies, especially ignorant ones. What truly frightened her was just before he’d lashed out, his eyes glowed an eerie blue. Add to that his bristling body; the growls he didn’t seem to notice emitting; his fingernails, which almost doubled when emotional; and his elongated canines . . . all those and more equaled up to one worried mother.
God help us both.
He’s just like his father.
The devil with the golden eyes—and sinful touch.

She shoved thoughts of Remy away, unwilling to remember, or dwell upon that fateful night, the night she’d discovered terror, pleasure, and shame all rolled into one. But out of that one sinful night, she’d also acquired her greatest gift and reason for living.
My baby
, who, with the resilience of youth, ran off to watch cartoons.

Watching him giggle, looking once again so normal, she could almost pretend she imagined his startling outbursts. His otherness. Then a growl shook his frame as he got excited and Mina sank onto a kitchen chair as reality sank in. She couldn’t ignore it anymore. She’d known it from the moment of his birth. Jacques was different. Heck, she was different. Everything had changed during that party years ago. She’d lost her virginity, part of her mind, her home, her family, and any chance at a normal life.
And a piece of my heart, I think, because I never did find anyone else since who makes me feel the same way.

Somehow, she highly doubted Remy woke up in the middle of the night sweating and aching for her, but when the loneliness became too much, sometimes she pretended that maybe, just maybe, he did. Destructive trains of thought, wishing for the devil. Her seducer. Her fantasy . . .

Despite her own body and heart’s longing, there were times she looked at her son and wondered if she should have tried harder to find his father. Given her boy someone masculine to look up to. Someone with whom to share the burden and joys of parenthood. Someone to hold her when it all seemed too much.

She still remembered that fateful day her world changed. The doctor perused the results of her bloodwork, her mother having dragged her in for a checkup given the extreme fatigue and general feeling of malaise dogging her every waking moment. When he announced, “Your hCG levels seem to indicate you’re pregnant, about twelve or thirteen weeks by my guess,” Mina thought she’d misheard or gone deaf so thick did the silence stretch after his momentous claim. The rest of that moment passed in a blur as her mother bundled her out of there as quickly as she could, the red spots of color in her cheeks and tight lips the only indicator of the storm brewing.

Mina opened her mouth to try to refute or explain the impossibility.
It was only one time . . . I didn’t mean to. Maybe the doctor’s wrong.
The words never left her lips. She’d known something was happening with her body, knew it when she missed her first period. Feared it when she felt the hard lump in her abdomen and the tenderness in her breasts. She’d prayed with all her might that it would go away. That somehow things would go back to the way they were, that no one would ever find out what she’d done.

But God didn’t hear her plea, and her sin came back to haunt her. And her father punished her.

He raised his hand only once, a hard slap across the cheek that left her holding it, the sting not as painful as the ache his words brought. She’d listened without speaking as her father ranted, “I can’t believe I raised a whore in my house. How could you shame me this way? Shame our family? You are not welcome here, not you or the bastard in your belly.” Despite her tender age and the fact she had nowhere else to go, he marched her out of her childhood home while her mother stood by and watched in silent condemnation.

Mina might have wandered the streets forever had some stranger not guided her to a homeless shelter. With only the clothes on her back, she spent that first lonely night hugging herself as she cried silent tears. But she didn’t lament for long.

Life grew within her. So what if the child was created out of sin? Abortion was out of the question, and not just because her religion forbade it. Mina wouldn’t do it. Besides, women bore babies every day, with some mothers younger than her even. If they could do it, so could she. And so she struggled to create a new life for herself. Using the programs and services available to the homeless and young single mothers, she started over. A social worker placed her in a women’s shelter, where she lived in a tiny cubicle of a room and shared a bathroom. She got a job that didn’t last long because no one wanted to have a young pregnant girl on staff, especially not one prone to throwing up—sometimes on customers.

Halfheartedly, fearful of his reaction, she’d tried for a while to locate Remy in the early stages of her pregnancy. She failed, but the Lord knew she tried harder when at eight months and on welfare because no one would hire her, she hit a low where she sobbed day in and day out, wondering how she’d survive, how she’d ever manage to take care of a baby alone.

Naїvely, she’d expected her search to be easy given the way the Internet played Big Brother to society’s deeds. However, the college he attended didn’t have a public listing of its student body, and phone calls to their admissions office led to dead ends as the secretaries cited privacy laws when she asked to contact him. Contacting her cousins went nowhere as her aunt slammed the phone down as soon as she knew who called. As for a phone call to the actual dorm the party was held at? The young man who answered denied knowing whom she spoke of, although he did offer to satisfy her sexually so long as she was good-looking. She hung up quickly, his crude jest a painful reminder of the rape she’d almost suffered. The memory of it was why she didn’t dare attempt to visit the college in person, too fearful she’d run into her would-be rapists. Saved once by her devil with the golden eyes, she doubted she’d have the same luck a second time.