brother.
Oh Christ, he’d just thought of him again.
Eric, I’m so sorry.
Not nearly drunk enough. Eli threw his head back and let the beer slide down his throat. He’d need another one of these quickly if he was going to get hammered.
The bartender came back and cleared away the empty bottles, shaking his head and muttering about where Eli put it all.
The man had been a loyal servant as far as getting the drinks went, because Eli had always been quick to offer up the payment for what he consumed.
Eli’s Reluctant Mate 9
Now, however, he’d long since ran out of any money he’d managed to save, and Isaac had refused to loan him anymore.
Eli was on a bar tab, and he didn’t give a shit if he ever managed to pay it back.
Something hard poked his shoulder.
Eli ignored it and opened his next bottle with his teeth, spitting out the cap.
At first he thought he’d imagined the tap on his shoulder, but then it came back, and he had to acknowledge the annoying feel of it.
He tilted his head enough to see what was up behind him.
The angry face of some guy Eli had never seen before glared down at him.
Eli went back to his beer.
“Hey! You look at me, you fucking freak.”
Nope.
The guy didn’t try to grab his shoulder or anything when Eli ignored him, but instead he went and sat down on the stool next to Eli’s.
“My kid tells me you’re the guy who was getting undressed in
front of him.”
“Your kid’s a liar,” Eli said, unfazed. It had been forever since
he’d bothered himself with taking anyone to bed, and never had he done it with someone who looked remotely underage.
“You’re gonna regret saying that, you fucking pervert,” said the angry father. “Don’t know what you drugged him with, making him see shit like that, but he tells me you were taking off your clothes right in front of him.”
Oh. That kid that Eli had accidentally transformed in front of.
Well, shit.
“The fuck is your problem?”
“To be fair, I didn’t see him there,” Eli said, still not bothering to
look at the guy.
“You piece of shit.”
10 Marcy Jacks
Something hard smashed into the side of Eli’s skull. White
exploded behind his vision and then colorful dots as he was thrown from his stool and landed on the filthy wooden floor.
Maybe he was a littler drunker than he’d originally thought.
The guy that punched him stood over him now, and Eli’s inner wolf didn’t even give a shit that he was being dominated by some
pissant human.
The bartender shouted something at them, but the aggressive human ignored him. “If I ever see your face around here, I’ll get a tire iron and some of my buddies and we’ll fuck you up.”
Eli laughed. The spots had left his vision, and even though he was still the one on the ground, he didn’t so much as have a headache from the blow to his head. “I doubt you and your buddies could do more than tickle me.”
He didn’t care that someone was trying to dominate him, but he did relish the idea of a fight. He could take this little weasel out back and tear him to pieces. He could imagine it was Deacon’s face on the guy’s head, the man responsible for killing Eric, one of the men responsible anyway, as he ripped the man’s arms from his sockets.
The guy’s fists clenched up, and Eli could hear the way his heart starting beating in that erratic way that happened when adrenaline was pumping through his veins.
He wanted a fight, too.
That’s right, idiot. Come and get it.
“Wait! Wait!”
Someone, some skinny little idiot, actually ran between them, blocking the big guy from Eli’s view, and he could have killed the little bastard for that.
The smaller man―and he barely looked like he was even that―held his hands up, trying to calm the bigger guy with his fists still clenched in front of him. “Come on, you don’t want to do this. The guy’s drunk and he’s down.”
The angry father jabbed a meaty finger in the smaller man’s face.
Eli’s Reluctant Mate 11
“Mind your own fucking business, you little weird-eyed faggot!”
What?
Eli shook his head, trying to clear it, his own adrenaline falling back to nothing now that a fight no longer looked imminent. He tried to get to his feet and failed spectacularly.
“Look at him. He can barely stand. If you kick the shit out of him, you could get in trouble for that. You can’t exactly say you were defending yourself from him.”
Eli saw red again at that comment. That little son of a bitch!
Eli blinked a couple of times, trying to scowl up at the both of them, but instead he saw the disgusted look on the father’s face as he stared down at him, right before he spat on the floor next to Eli’s hand.
“I ever see your face again, I’ll kill you,” he said, stomping off.
Whatever.
Eli turned his glare onto the young man who had come between him and a fight he really could have used, when his heart and lungs stopped cold.
He blinked a couple of times, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands just to be absolutely sure.
One eye was the darkest chocolate brown Eli had ever seen. The other was the deepest of blue.
Now he understood why that angry son of a bitch had called him weird eyed. Eli inhaled the scents of the bar. They were weak. Probably because the alcohol was fucking with his nose, but he did smell it once he started looking for it. Beneath the stale scent of tobacco, wooden booths, alcohol, and sweat, was the sweetest thing that had ever wafted up his nostrils.
The young man was beautiful, too. He looked like he was in his early twenties, with nice skin and dark-blond hair that was cut short with hints of gel-induced spikes.
Eli had just found his mate, a man―a man!―and Eli was stumbling drunk, on his ass, and bleary eyed.
12 Marcy Jacks
“You
