Free Mountain Moonlight by Jaci Burton Page A

want?”
    “Just trying to figure out what the next step  is here.”
    Was he serious? “You don’t really mean to  say that you’re planning to stay, to  honor the mate bond between us.”
    “That’s not what I said at all. Only that it bears…further investigation.”
    She wanted to know why he’d had a change  of heart. Or was it even his change of  heart? He  looked irritated, that vein  near his temple pulsing rapidly. Whatever  happened wasn’t his doing.  Yet he was still here, and for some reason she wasn’t  unhappy about that. “We’re heading back to the castle today.”
    “You’ll need escort. I have Peter locked up  in  my  room  and  I  assume  you’ll  want  to take him with you,”  Noah said. “Of course, if you’d rather leave him behind,  I’d be more than willing to …dispose of him.”
    Peter. She’d conveniently obliterated thoughts of him from her mind. But he was a  Braslieu problem, not a Devlin one. She shuddered at the thought of  exactly what Noah

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    would do to Peter. Not that  he didn’t deserve it, but some things were  best left to  Braslieu laws. “Yes, we’ll be taking him with us.”
    “Then we’re going with you,” Conner said, his tone brooking no argument.
    She started to object, then shrugged. She  and Elena couldn’t possibly escort Peter  up the mountain alone, and she didn’t trust  anyone outside the castle to come along as  security. So that left the only two people who knew what happened, who knew what  they were.
    “We leave in an hour.”
    Conner nodded and left, Noah following.
    Katya exhaled and  slipped into the chair next to the desk to  calm her  raging heartbeat.
    “You two are bonded. Destined,” Elena said. “I  can  feel  it  surrounding  both  of  you. Hell, cousin, I can smell it on both of you.  The mating frenzy is so  obvious I’m surprised  the two of you hadn’t realized it last night.”
    That was the problem. She hadn’t  realized  much of anything last night. But Conner,  her destiny? Highly unlikely.
    This was a mess.  How they were going to resolve it was an unknown, but somehow, someway they’d have to.
    She was a princess compromised.  Something would have to be done about that. What that something was, she had no idea.

    * * * * *
    They had to take two vehicles. The small  rough terrain vehicles  couldn’t carry all five of them plus luggage.
    Elena and Katya traveled in the lead vehicle with the luggage, while Conner and  Noah escorted Peter, who wasn’t very happy to have his wrists tied to the door handle.
    “I resent this treatment,” he muttered.
    Conner turned around to look at Peter, hanging onto the roll bar as they  hit a particularly large boulder in the road. “I’ll bet Katya resented your treatment of her last night, too.”
    It was all he could do not to  beat the shit out of the bastard. From the faint bruises
    on his face and the swelling that hadn’t quite gone down, Noah must have worked him  over after he’d dragged Peter from Katya’s bedroom last night.
    “Katya is   my   woman.  She understands how things are between mates. You have no  right to interfere.”
    Tension seethed, dangerous rage boiling just underneath his skin. Conner  turned  around, determined to ignore Peter until they  reached the castle. He swore that if they

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    didn’t mete out some type of adequate justice,  he’d just have to take matters into his
    own hands.  That bastard needed to pay for what he’d done to Katya.
    “She is already mated to me. I will kill you if you come anywhere near her.”
    Conner shook his head at Peter’s comment, not bothering to correct the man’s misassumption. Obviously he took  the two of them for fools.  And he  didn’t  know  that  Conner had mated with Katya.
    “She likes it rough. That’s all you saw that night. You interfered needlessly. My  Katya prefers to