Promised to the Pride: A Shifter Romance by Candace Wondrak

Author:Candace Wondrak [Wondrak, Candace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-12-01T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen – Holly

Tonight was the night. I’d steered clear of Jonas the days following the incident, and Aster and Nikolas had taken off time to be with me. I was either with one or the other, which was more than fine. It got my mind off the impending race, and what would happen after.

What really got me, though, was that no matter how much time I spent with Aster, he would not kiss me. He’d look at me, sure. Send me hard, lustful looks of wanting, but he never tried to kiss me, even though I said it was okay, even though I was sure Nikolas had told him what happened.

Aster, I guess, was trying to be a gentleman. Which was fine. Gentlemen were nice, but here it felt almost out of place, like he was trying to be something he wasn’t. Once I was shifted, once I lay before him, ready for him to claim me, surely his inner animal would come out.

It was just a few hours before nightfall, when the race would start, and I was at Nikolas and Aster’s house. They had a TV, but it didn’t have many channels. They claimed they were usually at work, so having a nice cable subscription wasn’t high on their list of priorities. I understood, but still. Something was going to have to change around here. I needed TV like I needed air. I blamed that pesky human upbringing.

Nikolas was in the shower, rinsing himself clean from the day’s work—they worked at a bar, so I could only imagine the grease and alcohol that got on them—while Aster and I sat in the living room. I liked being in their house. It was bigger, more of a house than a cabin in the wilderness. Real furnishings that didn’t look hand-carved. I did make them turn the heat up, though.

The cold. I honestly didn’t ever think I’d get used to the freezing-cold chill of this place.

A whole cushion separated Aster and me, and I kept tossing him looks. I couldn’t find anything good to watch on the TV, and my nerves were as good as shot. I couldn’t stop thinking about tonight, about what would happen.

I’d shift, be claimed, and then, after our animals got it on, taken back to whoever’s house and mated with.

Of course I was nervous. Who wouldn’t be? This was basically my whole reason for existing, why I was here, what I had to do in order to help Lumi. This was what I was bred for, in other words. Humans liked to think there were other reasons for existing, but when you got down to it, there was just one: procreation. The survival of the species. The furthering of your race. There wasn’t anything more important, more instinctual, than mating and raising children.

Even if, you know, some humans were bad at it, or if some humans didn’t want to. As a whole, it was how a species worked, even if every member of the species didn’t follow that path.

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