Page 27 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

“Okay, okay, I promise!”

She reads the address off a folded scrap of paper, and I tap it into the GPS. I start the engine and pull out of the lot, telling myself this is a fifteen-minute errand, nothing more.

The roads narrow as we go. Trees crowd in close on both sides, and somewhere past the second turn, I notice my hands have gone tight on the wheel because I know this stretch. It’s the same forest road I limped down the night the Ford died, the night a man with gray eyes leaned into my window and undid ten years of careful distance in thirty seconds.

We take a fork the GPS swears by right before it quits entirely, the little blue dot freezing and then spinning in a slow useless circle. Past the fork, the trees open just enough to show houses set back among them, big, handsome places spaced wide, a whole community folded into the forest where I’d assumed there was nothing but timber. The roads are smooth and well kept. Dense and dark even in the afternoon, the woods crowding up against them are anything but.

“This is kind of creepy,” Mia says happily, nose to the glass.

“It’s very creepy.” I follow a carved wooden sign, then another, since my phone’s no help out here. “Stay close to me when we get out, okay?”

The houses grow farther apart and then stop altogether. A drive opens onto an estate that has me easing off the gas just to take it in. There’s no gate and no fence, only a long, pale driveway unspooling toward a house so large it stops reading as a house at all, with a lawn rolling out around it that could swallow my whole apartment block. The Steele name is worked into the stone above the door.

“Whoa,” Mia breathes.

“Yeah.” I can’t muster anything better. “Whoa.”

I park in the shadow of the place and cut the engine. “Wait here. I mean it. I’ll find out if anyone’s home.”

For once she listens, too busy gawking up at the house to argue.

The bell echoes somewhere deep inside and brings no one. I wait, count to twenty, and press it again. Nothing stirs behind the tall windows. I step back, weighing whether to call the whole thing off and drive Mia home disappointed, when it occurs to me to try the back.

A flagstone path leads me around the side, past clipped hedges and a low stone wall, and the lawn opens again toward the tree line at the rear. Movement there catches my eye. A man steps clear of the trees, shirtless, working the button of his jeans closed as he walks.

I stop where I stand.

It’s Marcus. Bare to the waist and damp with sweat, hair loose and dark against his neck, he’s all hard lines moving easily across the grass. Ten years have made him broader through the chest, heavier in the arms, more than the man I remember from a hotel room a decade ago. Then his head comes up, he sees me, and his eyes go wide.

“Jessa?” He pulls up short. “What are you doing here?”

I open my mouth. Not one word comes out.

He crosses the lawn toward me, and the closer he gets, the drier my mouth goes. A damp T-shirt was almost too much the first night. There’s no T-shirt now, and I can’t find a single word.

A few feet away, he slows, and his nostrils flare. I watch him drag in a breath like he’s tasting the air, his eyes narrowing, then warming, a slow smile curving his mouth that I do not like one bit.

He keeps coming. I keep backing up, one step for each of his, until the cool stone meets my spine and there’s nowhere left to retreat. He plants a forearm above my head and leans in, close enough that the heat rolls off his bare skin.

“Cat got your tongue?” he murmurs.

The smug curl of his lips does it. I bite down hard on the side of my own tongue, and the small bright sting snaps my wits back into place.

I shove him, both palms pressed against the broad slope of his chest, which is a tactical error of the highest order because the second I touch him, his eyes go dark and heated. He doesn’t budge an inch.

“Careful, Mrs. Vasquez.” His voice drops low and rough, and the sound of it tugs at something low in my belly. “I don’t have a lot of self-control where you’re concerned.”

My eyes fly wide. He tips his head, and his lips come a breath from mine.

“Don’t even think about it,” I whisper.

Then I drive my knee up toward his groin.

He’s already gone, sidestepping with a bark of laughter, so I stumble into the space he abandoned.

“You absolute jerk,” I snap.

“How’d you even find the place?” he asks, still grinning, far too pleased with himself.