Jacks, Marcy - Eli's Reluctant Mate [DeWitt's Pack 5] (Siren Publishing Everlasting Classic ManLove) by Marcy Jacks (fiction novels to read .txt) 📕

Despite his injuries, his breathing and heartbeat were still strong.  He thought once more about calling an ambulance but again pushed  the thought away.

He owed this guy his life. Chris doubted he would want to go to a  hospital, considering what he was.

Chris tended to the wounds and stitched up his arm. For the face,  he didn’t think the slash there was deep enough to warrant stitches, so  he just cleaned it out with some alcohol. Then he applied more  bandages and creams and decided that would be that.

Chris sat back in the chair he’d pulled up, exhausted and hot

Eli’s Reluctant Mate                       23

again. He heaved a sigh at the work it took him more than an hour to

accomplish, and then he ran his hands through his hair.

God, he was tired.

The bed was out of the question, so it was better to just sleep where he was. Not that he had much of a choice in the matter of

where he slept. His eyelids were as heavy as though there were rocks

tied to them, and they just kept right on falling shut.

Before he drifted off, it occurred to him that this man was a real,

live werewolf. Or maybe he was a shapeshifter. Didn’t werewolves  only transform under a full moon? Whatever. He definitely wasn’t  normal.

Dean had said  he was going to be in this area, right before Chris lost contact with him forever. Dean always had been into dangerous things since their parents and sister had been killed by those wild animals. Maybe this man might be able to help Chris in finding out what happened to him.

* * * *

Eli had no idea how long he’d been out for, but he did know that he had a killer headache. He brought his hand up to his head, hoping to dull the pounding, and then he noticed the wrap around his arm as well as the pulling sensation on his skin beneath.

What the hell?

There was also a bandage on his face. He could feel it there and even see bits of the white stuff at the very corners of his vision if he looked down enough.

Chris, his mate, was sleeping in the most ugly-looking  brown chair Eli had ever seen. His neck looked like it was in a painful angle, but his chest was rising and falling in that hypnotic way that could only mean he was just resting.

This place he was in, Eli looked around, definitely a motel room.  And since this highway town was so small, there was only one motel

24                          Marcy Jacks

this could possibly be.

Chris had brought him here and tended to his wounds.

Still, that pulling feeling was getting on his nerves. Eli unwrapped  the bandage from around his arms and found the culprit. Stitches.

Well, fuck. The good news? He’d been passed out when they were  being administered, otherwise he would have flipped out at the sight  of the needle.

The bad news? He now had stitches he needed to try and pull out.

He got to working on them. He was naked on top of the bed.  There were no blankets, or even sheets covering him, which, considering the heat, had probably been a good thing. Had Chris been looking at him while he’d been out of it?

Eli looked over at the sleeping man, and then down at the  stitches he was doing his best to tear apart. Maybe he hadn’t been looking.  This work looked a little too well done for Chris to have been

distracted by anything else.

He picked at the thread with his fingernails and then with his  teeth. They weren’t the kind of stitches that a normal doctor or nurse  would apply. This looked like the kind of thread someone would use  if they were sewing a hole in a pair of jeans. Eli knew the difference  because the pack’s wise woman, Old Maggie, was always on hand  with some  good quality stitching. Both for the flesh and for any  ripped up clothes that inevitably occurred in a pack of werewolves.

Finally he got the stitches out. His wound had already closed,  leaving a pink line with those tiny pinprick holes. Even that sort of  healing was a little bit too fast. Maybe he should be a little more  grateful for the stitching.

“What are you doing?”

Eli looked up. Chris’s eyes had come open, and his body was very  much alert and awake now as he looked at Eli and the handiwork he’d

just  done, strewn about the bed.

Eli looked down at the bandages and bits of thread on the mattress

then back at Chris. Eli was naked. Chris was only wearing a pair of

Eli’s Reluctant Mate                       25

jeans. Never in all his life had Eli ever felt the urge to have sex with  another man, but this was his mate, and the instinct to claim, mate,

fuck, however you wanted to call it, was there, and it was strong.

He shifted his legs, trying to will down his penis and hoping that  Chris wouldn’t notice. At least he was a human. That meant he

wouldn’t easily smell the change in Eli’s body.

“I heal quickly. The stitches helped close the wound a little faster,  but I don’t need them anymore, and it was starting to itch.” Eli held  his arm out so that Chris could see for himself.

Chris leaned forward, his eyes glued to the pink line. “That’s impossible,” he said.

He’d seen Eli transform. He’d watched as Eli fought off those other werewolves, and then he brought him here to nurse him back to health. He knew it was possible, but Eli decided not to push it.

“Does  anyone else know I’m here?”

Chris hesitated and then shook his head. “No. I tried to make sure

no one would see use when we came in,”

Eli nodded. “Thank you for that.”

“What are you?”

The inevitable question that usually came when humans discovered there were things in the world they thought had only been the product of some twisted writer’s nightmares.

This man was his mate, Eli reminded himself. If he revealed what

he really was, he would have the law