Boarlander Beast Boar (Boarlander Bears #4)(23)

As his door banged closed behind him, Beck released the breath she’d been holding. Up until a minute ago, Clinton had terrified her, but maybe Mason had been right when he’d said Clinton would grow on her.

Break him? She didn’t have the power to break Mason Croy. What Clinton didn’t know is that she’d marked him. She’d claimed him because her animal required scars. She was a monster. And now the only one at risk of breaking here…was her.

What the hell had she been thinking? Everything had become so clear as she’d soared high above Damon’s mountains, lost in her swirling thoughts of the man she loved. What had possessed her to fall for a huge, dangerous boar shifter? She and Mason came from completely different worlds, obviously, and her decision to claim Mason didn’t just affect her. She had Ryder to think about, and a tentative alliance with Robbie that could go up in flames at any moment. Her pairing up with a shifter wasn’t going to make co-parenting with him any easier. Robbie was anti-shifter. Always had been. Always would be.

God, she’d messed up so badly with Robbie, and now she was making the same terrible mistake. Only this time, she didn’t have the excuse of na?ve youth, inexperience with men, or a shotgun wedding for freak’s sake. She hadn’t learned anything from the first time around, but had dove in beak first once again. And Mason didn’t feel the same. He was hooked up on his ex and not ready to move on, and yet again, she was alone in this.

She had to get out of here.

Her stomach curdled and soured at the thought of leaving this place, these people, Mason. Today had felt good, freeing, and she’d owned who she was. She’d owned her inner animal right in front of Mason. But that wasn’t enough to capture a man’s heart, and she was in way over her head with this.

Affairs of the heart couldn’t be trusted with someone whose heart had been fractured like mirror glass.

Beck shoved open the door to 1010. Maybe it was this old trailer’s fault she’d fallen so unexpectedly hard. Cora had told her it was magic, and she hadn’t listened. Instead, she’d gotten drunk on feeling a part of this place and clawed up Mason! He would never forgive her for doing that without his consent. Hell, she would never forgive herself.

Stupid owl thought she knew all the answers. She thought instinct trumped logic, but she didn’t understand how the real world worked. Beck wasn’t just an animal! She was a person, too, who’d just slashed an illegal claiming mark into the shoulder of a man she barely knew.

Facing Mason again couldn’t happen. Not when she was this horrified by her reckless behavior. She would tell Cora something had come up and she needed to do her publicist duties from Saratoga, not from 1010, which was apparently akin to one of those cute little naked cupids shooting love arrows into everyone’s asses.

She yanked her suitcase from the closet and rushed to the built-in set of drawers.

“Where are you going?” Mason asked.

“Aaah!” Beck screamed, clutching her chest as she spun on him.

He stood in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest, muscles bulging, eyes blazing a brilliant blue.

“I’m leaving,” she squeaked out.

Mason blinked slow and raised his dark eyebrows. “Why?”

“Because I don’t belong here! I don’t have any control over my actions, which is insane because I’m a grown-ass woman. I’ve felt old and drained to emptiness for years, and then I come here and I’m making all these mistakes I can’t afford to make. And I’m mortified by what I did to you.”

Mason approached slowly, backing her into the corner as she countered him step for step. “What did you do to me?”

She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t draw a single full breath into her lungs, and he was too close, too dominant, too riled up. A submissive snowy owl did not belong with a beast boar! Unable to force enough air past her voice box, she circled her finger in the general direction of the bloody tears in his shirt. When he stared at her like she’d lost her mind, she rasped out, “I marked you.”

Mason shrugged flippantly and said, “Woman, it didn’t hurt for more than a couple minutes, and it’s already forming into a scar.”

“How can you be so calm about this, Mason? It’s a big deal! I never marked anyone before.”

His face went completely slack as a spark of understanding lit up his eyes. Slowly, he dragged his gaze to his shoulder and pulled the tattered material to the side, exposing four perfect, deep, half-healed wounds. “You marked me? Like…marked me?” His voice jacked up in volume. “You claimed me?”

“I tried to stop my animal, I did, but I was angry, and my owl thought I was ruining things between us, and she really wants to keep you.” Beck swallowed audibly and dropped her gaze to his scuffed work boots. Softly, she corrected herself, “I really want to keep you. I shouldn’t have done that without talking to you about—”

Mason’s lips crashed onto hers. The wind was knocked out of her, not because of his heavy dominance, but because he was squeezing her against his hard body.

Her back hit the wall hard, but she didn’t care. She didn’t feel the pain or have that trapped feeling anymore. Mason was touching her! More than touching her, he was giving into her completely!

His hands gripped her shirt roughly, and she tossed her head back and whispered his name as he ground his hard erection against her. His beard scratched at her sensitive skin as he dragged his lips down her neck and bit her hard. Not enough to draw blood, but hard enough that she felt his teeth sink into her skin by millimeters. “I didn’t know,” he rasped out as he pulled the backs of her knees up around his hips. “Boar people don’t do claiming marks like that. I didn’t even give a second thought to your talons on me, woman. Fuck, Beck, say it again. Tell me you claimed me.”