He frowned down at the large Celtic cross with the small crescent moon. It took him a minute to realize that he was looking at the Sentinel mark, only in reverse. Each Sentinel was born with a crescent moon with a small cross marked right below their navel. This was……

“Why do you have the Sentinel mark tattooed on your arm?” he asked, wondering how to tell her that the tattoo artist had seriously f**ked up and switched the positions of the cross and moon.

“It’s not the Sentinel mark,” she mumbled against the comforter only to add after a pause, “well, not really anyway.”

“Then what is it?” he asked, tracing his fingertip over the black tattoo.

She sighed heavily as she said, “It’s something I designed when I was a kid.”

“For……?”

She grumbled something inaudible into the comforter.

“What was that?” he asked, pulling his c**k out until only his piercing touched her core, knowing that she’d get him back for this and not really caring, not when she was hiding things from him.

“I wanted my own Sentinel design,” she muttered stubbornly as she tried to push back and force his c**k back inside her.

“I see,” he said, pressing a kiss against the back of her nape, because he knew his mate well.

The Sentinels had been her life. She’d worked her ass off, training, fighting and doing whatever she could to prove her worth. While most humans born to Sentinels liked to bitch about the unfairness of their situation, Danni had accepted her fate as a mere human with grace and dignity. She’d never used the fact that she was human as an excuse, never hid behind it, because she considered herself a part of the Sentinel world.

“Why didn’t you get this sooner?” he asked, sliding back in, her wet walls making the move easy.

“You know why,” she answered with a disgruntled snort.

“Because they would have mocked you?” he asked, chuckling when she tried to throw him off.

Human children that got the Sentinel mark tattoo were usually mocked and ridiculed and for good reason. They usually believed they were just as good as or better than Sentinels and had the attitudes to match, which was mostly why they were mocked. They were cocky little bastards.

“Yes!”

“And the reason that you hid it here?” he asked, feeling like an idiot because the answer was pretty obvious.

“Chris.”

He chuckled as he pulled her hand closer so that he could press a kiss against her tattoo. “Is that why Chris and Ephraim have been wearing matching bandages?”

“They’re mocking me, because I’ve been wearing this thing for so long,” she mumbled pathetically. “Just imagine what they would do if they knew what I’ve been hiding.”

They would make fun or her day and night, because they viewed her as a little sister and saw it as their responsibility, and right, to torment her. Even he’d admit that they did a great job. They took their job seriously, very seriously.

“Do you want me to kick their asses?” he asked, linking their fingers back together as he adjusted the angle of penetration.

“No,” she muttered, sounding pathetic and making him glad that she couldn’t see him smile. “They’d just make fun of me more. I’ll deal with it, I guess,” she decided, finishing it off with another drawn out sigh that had him biting back a chuckle that would probably end with him taking a very cold shower.

“Do you want me to distract you?” he asked, punctuating each word with a slow roll of his hips.

“I suppose,” she said, sounding put out.

“I could stop,” he offered, releasing her hands so that he could slide his hands between Danni and the bed. He cupped her br**sts, making sure that her firm ni**les peeked through his fingers so that they rubbed against the comforter as he pushed back inside her.

“And I could kill you,” she reminded him, earning a chuckle, because he knew that if he stopped right now, she’d kick his ass, make him finish her off with his mouth and then leave him to either relieve himself or deal with blue balls, neither prospect sounding pleasant at the moment.

Chapter 54

“Wait. Where are you going?” she managed to ask, panting heavily as she struggled to push herself up on trembling arms.

“Shit!” Christofer said, rushing across the room towards the door, shoving his hand through his hair, his pants unbuttoned and his-

“You may want to put that thing away,” she said, trembling as she watched him, torn between amusement and frustration as he grabbed his erection, forced it back into his pants and-

“God damn it!” he shouted, stumbling into the wall, wincing as he reached down and cleared the zipper.

“Christofer?” she said, trying to get his attention as he continued towards the door.

“Be right back,” and with that, he was gone.

“Okay……….,” she said, watching as the door closed behind him, leaving her to wonder what the hell just happened.

One minute he’d been driving her out of her mind as he’d kissed his way down to where she really needed him and the next he was falling off the bed, stumbling to his feet and racing for the door. She’d still been able to scent his lust, but there had been another scent coming off him, one that she couldn’t quite figure out.

As she sat there, struggling to catch her breath, she thought over what had happened over the last few minutes, trying to figure out what she’d missed. Maybe-

“Go sniff her,” Christofer suddenly demanded just as the bedroom door flew open and Ephraim and Caine came stumbling into the room, struggling to zip up their pants.

“Ummm,” was her only response, because really, what else could she say when the man that she loved left her naked, trembling and alone in bed only to return a few minutes later, shoving two half na**d men into their room and demanding that they sniff her.

“Bossy bastard,” Ephraim muttered as he finished buttoning his pants.

“You could have at least waited until I was done!” Caine snapped.

“Sniff!” Christofer bit out, pointing at her.

It took a few seconds for what he was asking them to do to really sink in and when it did, her jaw dropped. He didn’t just seriously ask them to-

With a muttered curse, Ephraim walked over to her, leaned over and inhaled, but before she could die of mortification, Caine followed suit, swearing more vividly as he leaned over, inhaled, frowned, inhaled and muttered a whole new genre of curses.

“Is she?” Christofer demanded, staying where he was by the door.

“Yeah,” Caine said, rubbing his hands roughly down his face.

“It’s fresh. Probably by just a few hours,” Ephraim explained, doing a wonderful job of keeping her in the dark.

“It shouldn’t be possible,” Caine said, dropping his hands by his sides as he shared a look with Ephraim.

“She was fully marked.”

“It must have grown back during the change,” Caine said, shooting her a curious look that had her pulling her sheet up higher as she tried to make sense of their words.

“We overfed her,” Ephraim explained. “It was probably enough blood to fix everything and restore her body.”

“What grew back?” Christofer asked, and at that moment she could have kissed him, because she was wondering the same damn thing.