“I am f**king breathing! And why does this gas and air make me sound like Darth Vader?”

“Here, how about I move it out the way for—”

“Don’t you touch it,” she growled at him. “It’s mine. Understand? Mine.”

“Okay, okay, you keep it, it’s yours.”

“Wanna try it?”

“No thanks, baby.” His smile could be heard in his voice. The only time his tone ever softened that way was when he was talking about, or talking to, his mate. It was a tone totally reserved for her.

A loud groan. “God, here comes another one.”

“You’re doing so well, Taryn,” praised Shaya. “I think you’ve only broken one of my fingers.”

“I think I’ve had a shit, Shaya.” The poor woman sounded distressed and mortified. “Have I, Grace? Don’t lie to me.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“I have, you’re lying. Is she lying, Lydia?”

“No,” Lydia quickly said, “you haven’t, I promise.”

“Shaya, why does it feel like the bed’s floating?” Taryn asked in a very loud whisper, though Jaime was sure that Taryn thought she was being quiet.

“Maybe we should take the gas and air from her,” suggested Trey.

“Fucking try it.”

“Stop growling at me,” he whined.

“I’m not f**king growling! You need a f**king hearing aid!” More cries of pain as another contraction hit. “Grace…I think I can feel the head.”

“It is the head, Taryn,” confirmed Grace. “On the next contraction, I need you to push for me, okay.” A long pause. “Ready? Go.”

“Push,” encouraged Trey.

“ I am pushing, doofus.” A few moments later, there was a sob. “Why isn’t anything happening?”

“I know you’re tired, baby, but—”

“Don’t you touch me, Flintstone, this is your fault! Don’t think we’re playing Hiding Pedro ever again!”

Shaya sounded stern yet amused. “Now, Taryn, that wasn’t nice.”

“Cut it out of me!” Presumably Taryn was totally ignored, because she growled, “Fine. Give me a knife, I’ll do it!”

“One more, Taryn, and it’ll all be over, I promise. I need you to push really, really hard this time.”

“What do you think I’ve been doing all along? ”

It was doubtless that Grace paid no heed to the string of insults that Taryn called her. Not long later, Grace said, “Here we go again. Ready? One, two, three.” Jaime was pretty sure the entire pack flinched at the sound of Taryn’s high-pitched scream. As it faded, the sound of a baby crying filled everyone’s ears. Outside the room, everybody’s face instantly lit up, but no one made a sound, eager to hear what Grace would announce to Taryn and Trey. Ten seconds later…

“Congratulations, you have a baby boy!”

“I always said it was a boy. Didn’t I say it was a boy, Trey?”

“Yes, baby, you did,” he said with a choked cry.

At that point, everyone outside the room started jumping up and down and making loud celebratory noises. Jaime just knew that this kid was going to get spoiled rotten by the entire pack.

Her old pack hadn’t been like this one. Although everybody had looked out for each other, they hadn’t been so close and tight-knit. Baby Coleman would want for absolutely nothing.

It wasn’t until twenty minutes later that the door opened and Trey stepped out holding a tiny little bundle wrapped in a blue blanket, pride and awe written all over his face. “Everyone, this is Kye River Coleman.” Tao immediately tried to take him, but Trey shook his head. “Later. I only brought him out so you could all see him for a second.”

Jaime leaned over and lightly ran her fingers over his head of soft blond streaks. “Aw, he is too cute.”

“Trey, he looks just like you when you were a baby,” Greta told him. “Except for the blond hair. But we can cut that off, it’s fine.”

“You go near my son’s hair, you senile old witch, and I’ll finally shave that lip of yours!” called Taryn from inside the room.

Greta’s mouth twitched into a self-satisfied smile that had Trey sighing and shaking his head.

“You couldn’t wait until later before trying to irritate my mate?” Greta just shrugged unapologetically and went to take the baby. “You can all hold him later.”

“Please, just one little tiny hold!” pleaded Jaime.

He thought about it for a second and exhaled heavily. “Just a few of you. And quickly. You want his head in the crook of your elbow and then wrap your other arm around him,” he told her stiffly, as if repeating what he himself had been told.

Carefully, Jaime took the baby from Trey and smiled, marveling over just how gorgeous he was. Even all wrinkled and scrunched-up, he was too cute for words. Best of all was his smell. She had never smelled anything like it before. There was truly nothing to compare it to. It was just a sweet, earthy, divine, addictive scent that made her melt. It called to her on a primal level and made her consider things she hadn’t before, making her feel slightly off-center and exposed in a way she couldn’t explain. Instead of making her want to hand Kye over to someone else, it made her want to keep him right there where he was. Her wolf, too, had an urge to keep Kye close—an urge Jaime didn’t understand but didn’t question.

Dante watched Jaime holding Kye with a smile of pure delight on her face and felt a twinge in his chest. Suddenly and unexpectedly, he imagined her holding their baby. The picture was so clear in his mind that a lump actually appeared in his throat. Maybe it was the wonder of the moment, he wasn’t sure, but suddenly every wall he had fell away. Every fear and doubt was pushed to the back of his brain, and he felt stripped bare.

Going by the way Jaime was swallowing hard and biting on her lower lip even as she was still smiling down at Kye, Dante guessed that the same thing was happening to her. And then she looked up at him, flashing him a smile, but as their gazes met, a knowing so primitive and absolute hit him with a force that almost hurt. As her eyes widened, he knew the same knowing had hit her, and he was sure that the wonder, shock, confusion, and recognition in her eyes would be reflected in his own.

“She’s hogging him. Move out of the way so I can get to my great-grandson,” Greta complained as she tugged on the back of his T-shirt. Feeling in some kind of daze, he stepped aside.

As Jaime awkwardly handed Kye to Greta, he saw she was in that same daze. As she looked back at him, he saw another emotion on her face. Sheer panic.

No. The word continuously raced around Jaime’s brain. Her mate. He was her mate.

She didn’t need to ask herself how she hadn’t realized this before now. How would she have known? She could recall asking her mom about mating bonds when she was a little girl. Her mom had explained that a mating bond was like a frequency; if it was jammed by something—fears, mental barriers, doubts, an imprint bond, a reluctance to mate—the frequency couldn’t be picked up.

By caging her wolf and building so many walls, there was no way Jaime could have sensed it.

Dante was no more open than she was. He had walls of his own, not to mention a total aversion to finding his true mate. And what with her having that same aversion, neither of them had had a hope in hell of sensing it.

Maybe it should have occurred to her, since she’d been drawn to him even when they were kids, but plenty of people had crushes. A girl could crush on plenty of guys over the years, thinking she was totally and unquestioningly in love with each one of them at the time. Never with any of those guys had she wondered if it meant that he was her mate, so why would she have thought her crush on Dante was anything more than exactly that—a simple crush?

It wasn’t really important at this point. Now that she knew the truth, she had to figure out what she was supposed to do about it. What could she do about it? She sure couldn’t claim him for obvious reasons. But how could she be around him each day without doing so? Even now, she could feel the urge to take what was hers building in her system, taunting her, hounding her, and nagging at her.

Now she could understand exactly what Shaya and Nick were going through. No wonder the guy was finding it so difficult to stay away from Shaya. The draw was more than a simple attraction, more than just a pull. It was magnetic, enticing, a pressure on the mind that had nowhere to go. It was a crushing and overwhelming craving, as if she needed to feed an addiction. She honestly felt as though she might soon shake with the beating need to claim him.

The longer mates resisted, the worse the urge to claim became. Suddenly she felt a little sorry for Nick. Not that it excused his behavior. But she could understand it, just like she could understand Shaya’s need to be away from this person to whom she knew she would never be mated. There was no way that Jaime could be around Dante every day while this urge was gnawing at her. The only choice she had was to leave, even if the idea did send a dull pain knifing through her body and soul. It was that or go absolutely insane.

Gabe’s words suddenly came to her: his contention that if she ever left, Dante would track her down and bring her back. But Dante wasn’t stupid. He’d know that there was no way that they could claim each other as mates. It wouldn’t be simple to get any wolf—let alone a very dominant, controlling, possessive male wolf—to resist claiming his mate. But the sad reality was that they had no other choice but to part ways, and he would know that.

Jaime knew he was nearing her before she even scented him. She was now totally aware of him and of every move he made, and this awareness prickled all over her skin and tantalized her nerve endings.

“I think you and I need to have a talk,” Dante said into her ear. He could easily hear the lust and desperation in his voice. If he didn’t get inside her soon, if he didn’t claim her, he was going to lose it.

“Really? What about?” Playing dumb probably wouldn’t work, but she figured that if she just kept denying him he might get pissed and march off in a huff—inadvertently giving her time to pack and leave.

Dante wasn’t surprised by her response. He’d known that she would fight this. While he acknowledged the sense and logic in that, he also knew that nothing would prevent him from claiming her. Not her, not her anxiety, and not the chance that he would die with her if she turned rogue and was killed. “Our room. Now.”

“Why?” She kept her manner cool, knowing it would irritate both him and his wolf. His warning growl proved her to be right.

“We need to talk in private.”

Acting confused, she shrugged. “Okay. But we can do that in the office.” She knew perfectly well what would happen if they were anywhere near a bed.

“Someone might disturb us there. Let’s take a walk outside.” Reluctantly, Jaime allowed Dante to lead her outside and down to the clearing by the lake.

Only then did he release her hand before coming to stand in front of her. “No more playing games, Jaime. You know exactly what this is about.”

“I know that you’re acting weird.”

“I get that you’re scared, baby, and I get why. But if you expect me not to claim you, you don’t know me at all.”

“Claim me?” She forced a disbelieving shake of the head. “I thought you were totally against imprinting.”

His wolf bared his teeth. “Don’t, Jaime. Denying who I am to you pisses my wolf and me off more than you can ever imagine.”

Good. “On a serious note, did you bang your head or something, sweetie? Or maybe you’re talking in code. Yeah, I don’t understand code. I can speak Thundercat.”

“Jaime, this is a dangerous game you’re playing, baby. Stop. Now.”

“Okay, now you’re starting to freak me out. I think I’ll just go on back to—”

“Don’t move, Jaime.” He went nose to nose with her. “You can keep on playing games, or you can acknowledge that I’m your mate, and we’ll discuss it like adults. Choose.”

“Your mate? You’re kidding, right?” Before she could see it coming, he wrapped one arm around her, pinning her own to her sides. With his free hand, he put pressure on the baroreceptor in the carotid artery at the base of her neck where it met her shoulder. Ten seconds or so later, she passed out.

God, who the hell was moaning? Oh, it was her, Jaime realized dazedly as she opened her eyes. It took no more than five seconds to remember exactly why she was in that daze. It was never a nice feeling waking up after blacking out, but it was worse when it had been your damn mate who sent you to dreamland. She’d kill the jerk.

Quickly it registered in her brain that that might be a little difficult right now. Not only were her wrists bound together, but they were pinned above her head. Pinned to a tree. Yes, two thick ropes—the same kind that he used for his cruel assault course—were securing her body to a tree; one was looped around her waist and the other was looped around her tied wrists. She really was going to kill him.

“Dante? Dante, what the hell is this?”

He didn’t appear or respond, but she knew he was there. Knew it. Repeatedly she squirmed and struggled within her bonds, ignoring the burning sensation it left on the flesh of her wrists and stomach. But no matter what she did, neither knot loosened even slightly. Similarly, the tie binding her wrists didn’t give. Because of how her hands were joined closely, as if in prayer, the only things her claws would have sliced open if she unsheathed them were her hands. So, yeah, okay, she had to face the fact that she was stuck to a tree. “I know you’re there. Get over here and untie me.” Her wolf was ready to tear out his throat.