Page 22 of Damien’s Mate

The bracelet! She struggled to sit up. “The bracelet. What happened to it? I have to get it back—” Pain lanced through her, and she gasped.

“Hey, calm down, it’s okay.” He reached over to the nightstand next to her and picked up the Draken artifact. “It’s right here.”

Taking her hand, he bent the bracelet around her wrist until the ends snapped together, and then closed his hand around it. Fleetingly, she felt the sense of warmth and safety she’d felt while she was unconscious.

She closed her eyes. The bracelet was here. It was safe. Her mission was complete. Tears pooled in the corners of her eyes.

“This must really mean a lot to you,” Damien said.

She didn’t have the strength to hide her feelings. “It means everything,” she said.

He didn’t say anything, but she could feel his gaze. She opened her eyes and saw he was looking down at her, an odd expression on his face. Puzzled.

She waited for him to ask why she’d thrown him the bracelet, if it was so important, and she wondered what she’d say. Because she didn’t know, really—she’d done it almost without thinking, hoping that because it was Draken-made, it could somehow protect him from fire.

But he didn’t ask. He just trailed his fingers over the engraving on the bracelet, and then gently up the back of her hand.

She shivered.

You can’t get involved with this human, she told herself. Not now. Not when you’re so close to having everything.

Forget expensive dinners and fancy hotel rooms and amazing sex. That had only ever been a fantasy.

She needed to get out of here, to get to her safe house and retrieve the other artifacts. They should be okay—they were magically protected—but now that she had the last one, the thought of them lying there, out of her reach, was almost more than she could stand.

She wondered how badly she was hurt, and how long it would take her to heal.

Damien had turned back to the nightstand and poured some water from a plastic pitcher into one of those little motel cups. “Can you sit up and drink this? The doctor said you’d need fluids.”

She’d been debating whether it was worth the pain of sitting up to get the fucking desert out of her throat, but the word ‘doctor’ startled her into a sitting position.

Bad move. She gasped, her insides feeling like an alien was tearing them apart.

“Shit, not so fast.” Damien shifted to support her, his arm warm across her back. “Let me prop up the pillows.”

“You took me to a doctor?”

Damien finished the pillows and handed her the cup of water, holding it until he was sure she had it. “Wait,” she said, frowning. “I remember EMTs. And an ambulance.”

“Yeah. Drink your water.”

She did, sipping it gratefully.

He went on, “You didn’t want them to take you to the hospital. You were pretty upset about it.”

She shrugged, then winced at the pain. Whoa, okay, no shrugging. Maybe she’d avoid movement altogether, just for a few minutes. She said, “I don’t like hospitals.”

“Makes sense,” he replied casually. “If there was the possibility I might turn into an animal when I was unconscious, I’d avoid hospitals too.”

Lila spit her mouthful of water and immediately started coughing, which sent stabbing pain through her ribs and pelvis and made her entire insides burn like acid.

Damien held her, rubbing her back gently until she got her breath, and then got a thin white towel from the bathroom and mopped up the water, grinning the whole time.

“Stop laughing at me, you fucking dick,” she said. “You did that on purpose.”

“Well, I didn’t expect you to try to breathe water. You’re a cat, not a fucking fish shifter.”

He knew about shifters? How did he know? He definitely wasn’t one—his scent was hot and wild and too damn sexy, but it was all human.