Jacks, Marcy - Eli's Reluctant Mate [DeWitt's Pack 5] (Siren Publishing Everlasting Classic ManLove) by Marcy Jacks (best ereader under 100 .txt) 📗

shock. This guy didn’t politely beat around the bush. He wanted an answer, so he asked for it straight out. “That’s not your business.”

“No?” James folded his arms, but Chris got the feeling that he wasn’t being challenged. Measured up, most likely. “By your reaction, I’m going to assume that he attempted to mate with you and finish your bonding process. You got scared and ran. Am I right?”

60                          Marcy Jacks

“No!” Chris snapped. “We are not mated, and there’s no bonding  going on between us.”

James’s brows, what little of them there were, shot up. “Did no  one explain this to you?”

“Eli might’ve mentioned something about  it,” Chris muttered.  “But I’m not a werewolf. I don’t mate.”  Not with other men.

James rubbed his face with the palm of his hand. “I can see this wasn’t explained to you properly.”

“You can’t force me to marry anyone, or to stay here,” Chris said.  It wasn’t a good idea to get defensive in front of this man, and he knew it, but he just couldn’t help the way his fists clenched up.

“No one is saying that. And being mated isn’t the same thing as being married.”

“What’s the difference?” Chris asked, genuinely curious.

“When you mate with someone, there is no divorce.”

Great.

James laughed at him. “You just went pale there for a second.

Don’t worry, though, it isn’t all that bad.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look.” James approached him and put his arm around Chris’s  shoulder, all  best-buddy-like. “Corey was a human when I found him.  The species hardly matters.”

That threw Chris off. “Seriously?”

“Well, no one is ever going to mate with the elephant at the zoo,  but the humanoid species, as far as I know, won’t matter.”

“Humanoid…there’s more like you?”

“We’ll just stick with werewolves for now, and as far as  werewolves go, when we sniff out our mates, we tend to lose a little  of our control.”

Chris recalled the way Eli had kissed him and the hard press of the other man’s body as he pushed Chris down onto the ground, grinding their cocks together. Eli hadn’t been the only one to lose a little control.  Please, don’t let me be blushing. “Yeah, I got that.”

Eli’s Reluctant Mate                       61

“Well, just so you know, I’m sure he didn’t mean to scare you.  For a werewolf, the urge to complete the bonding is strong.  Sometimes it can even impact the health of the wolf in question if  they ignore it too long.”

“It can?” Chris shouldn’t be caring about this. He shouldn’t be  allowing James to butter him up the way he was, but he couldn’t help  but be worried for Eli, especially with the way the other man had  hobbled off to be alone once they’d returned to clearing of houses.

“Well, nothing too severe ever happened to me aside from having  the sweats at night,” James said. “But for Corey it was different. He  was human when I met him, but, ah, let’s just say that he wasn’t when  I brought him here. Don’t worry. No one will transform you if you  don’t want them to, but Corey was a special case.”

“Okay.”

James cleared his throat. “Anyway, I wanted to give him some  time to get used to me, and the fact that we were mated, because, like  you, he was under the human impression that something like that just  wasn’t possible. Little did I know that it was affecting his ability to  learn how to shift into his wolf, and that wasn’t good for him.”

Chris looked up at James’s face, and he really looked at the  scarring that was there, and he thought about the scarring on Corey’s  hand. James’s scars looked like deep pockmarks, like someone had  gone after his face with an ice chipper or something, while Corey’s  hand looked like he’d dipped it into a deep fryer. Were those the  products of not mating? Could that happen to him or Eli if he didn’t  just admit that he found the other man attractive and spent the night with him?

“I can see you’re still hesitating,” James said, gripping Chris by  the shoulders so that they had to look each other dead-on. “I don’t  know who it was that hurt you.”

Chris stiffened.

“But I promise you, Eli isn’t like that.”

“I can’t just jump  into bed with him,” Chris said.

62                          Marcy Jacks

“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to just give him a chance,  get to know him a little bit. Maybe because of your eyes, just being  around him will be enough, and he won’t be…”

James didn’t finish. He looked like he was struggling for the right

word, and Chris didn’t want to help him find it.

Maybe if he was around Eli a little more, his lucky eyes would see  to it that Eli didn’t get insane blue balls and expire from lust.

Right, Chris’s magical lucky eyes. “Are you sure my eyes are  supposed to bring luck? I haven’t been feeling too lucky lately.”

James chuckled. “I doubt they bring much more luck than any  lucky rabbit’s foot would. I think it’s really just part of the allure.  Your eyes attract werewolves, so whoever mates  with you is  considered the luckiest wolf on the planet.”

And according to everyone, that was Eli.

He still wasn’t too sure about this, but Eli did save his life again,

so…

“Do you know where he is?”

James sighed. “From what I was told, he was seen stomping off to  his cabin. You might want to give him the night alone, unless you  want to see him in one of his less than better moments.”

Considering Chris had met Eli while he was drunk and about to get his ass kicked in a bar, he had an idea of what James was talking about.

Poor guy had lost his brother and was mated to a chicken like  Chris. That would drive anyone to drink.

He nodded and agreed to speak with Eli the first thing in the morning. Whatever it was that was happening between them, they would need to  find some way of settling it.

“Oh, and uh, sir?” Chris said before he left. Calling James by his first name seemed