Bump in the Night Series – Ready to Mate #2

**This 15,000 word paranormal short story features sexual encounters with a shifter, knotting and tying, and a very fertile protagonist**

The heat is nothing like what Kate expected.

Crippled by the blinding, consuming, ravenous desire, Kate teeters between control and desperation. Her new-found mate, Jase, steals her from his enemy’s territory and insists on delivering her to safety before taking her once more. But Kate’s instinct wants nothing more than to submit to the madness of lust before the fever burns her from the inside out.

Jase’s obsession with her heat might have once frustrated her, but Kate’s cannot deny her powerful lover’s need and her body’s surrender to her sudden fertility. Though she might believe she’s safe from the consequences of their mating, the wolf doesn’t care about pills and precautions.

Kate belongs to Jase, and, through her heat, he will claim her womb as his.


Excerpt:


I quieted. The innocent grip of his hand began creating very un-innocent thoughts in my jumbled mind. I pulled away and thudded my head back onto the headrest. The fever pounded harder. It didn’t feel like a regular sickness, and it wasn’t exactly a headache. It just pulsed. A rhythmic, throbbing, obtrusive pound. My heart beat in sequence to the thrumming. Within the past hour, both my head and heart beat just a little faster. It worried me.

The truck rode smooth despite Jase’s manic driving. The forests closed in around the road. He growled.

The sound rumbled low in my belly. Far lower than I would have liked and not nearly as intense as I needed. Something fierce and animalistic reverberated behind the growl. It wasn’t a human sound. Had I heard it anywhere else—under my bed in the middle of the night or echoing within an abandoned alley in the city—I would have feared it. My submission would have been something else entirely. Something taken and forced and terrible.

Instead, my instinct cradled me from fear. Jase sped through the darkness to protect me. To save me from a fate worse than losing a job and relocating to a rural nowhere. And, once I was safe, that growl would signify something far different. A sign of his dominance and adoration. A signal for me to submit properly. To offer myself, my mind, my body, my obedience.

My womb.

I rubbed my face. It didn’t help. My blood coursed through my body, searing me with heat and settling in the places I needed him to see the most. The blush on my cheeks. The flush over my chest. The swollen pinkness between my legs. I would have thought I lost my mind if it didn’t feel like I finally found it. Everything about Jase felt so right. My life had been a series of events leading to the moment when I finally found him. Now I could hold him and be held, kiss him and be kissed. Present to him and be mounted.

God, the heat. I thought I’d sweat. Instead, I trembled. The sensual, blissful dream from last night fluttered to my mind. Images of my coupling with Jase combined with the memory of the real thing. The dream hadn’t faded—and the emotions I experienced hadn’t diminished. The dream was a gift. Despite the desperation shared between the visions and my body now, the guidance seemed invaluable. The dream was an instruction of what to expect and how to act.

I wasn’t going insane. Instinct guided me. The heat prepared me. I was supposed to give myself to my mate.