I know, won’t matter.”
“Humanoid…there’s more like you?”
“We’ll just stick with werewolves for now, and as far as werewolves go, when we sniff out our mates, we tend to lose a little of our control.”
Chris recalled the way Eli had kissed him and the hard press of the other man’s body as he pushed Chris down onto the ground, grinding their cocks together. Eli hadn’t been the only one to lose a little control. Please, don’t let me be blushing . “Yeah, I got that.”
Eli’s Reluctant Mate 61
“Well, just so you know, I’m sure he didn’t mean to scare you. For a werewolf, the urge to complete the bonding is strong. Sometimes it can even impact the health of the wolf in question if they ignore it too long.”
“It can?” Chris shouldn’t be caring about this. He shouldn’t be allowing James to butter him up the way he was, but he couldn’t help but be worried for Eli, especially with the way the other man had hobbled off to be alone once they’d returned to clearing of houses.
“Well, nothing too severe ever happened to me aside from having the sweats at night,” James said. “But for Corey it was different. He was human when I met him, but, ah, let’s just say that he wasn’t when I brought him here. Don’t worry. No one will transform you if you don’t want them to, but Corey was a special case.”
“Okay.”
James cleared his throat. “Anyway, I wanted to give him some time to get used to me, and the fact that we were mated, because, like you, he was under the human impression that something like that just wasn’t possible. Little did I know that it was affecting his ability to learn how to shift into his wolf, and that wasn’t good for him.”
Chris looked up at James’s face, and he really looked at the scarring that was there, and he thought about the scarring on Corey’s hand. James’s scars looked like deep pockmarks, like someone had gone after his face with an ice chipper or something, while Corey’s hand looked like he’d dipped it into a deep fryer. Were those the products of not mating? Could that happen to him or Eli if he didn’t just admit that he found the other man attractive and spent the night with him?
“I can see you’re still hesitating,” James said, gripping Chris by the shoulders so that they had to look each other dead-on. “I don’t know who it was that hurt you.”
Chris stiffened.
“But I promise you, Eli isn’t like that.”
“I can’t just jump into bed with him,” Chris said.
62 Marcy Jacks
“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to just give him a chance, get to know him a little bit. Maybe because of your eyes, just being around him will be enough, and he won’t be…”
James didn’t finish. He looked like he was struggling for the right
word, and Chris didn’t want to help him find it.
Maybe if he was around Eli a little more, his lucky eyes would see to it that Eli didn’t get insane blue balls and expire from lust.
Right, Chris’s magical lucky eyes. “Are you sure my eyes are supposed to bring luck? I haven’t been feeling too lucky lately.”
James chuckled. “I doubt they bring much more luck than any lucky rabbit’s foot would. I think it’s really just part of the allure. Your eyes attract werewolves, so whoever mates with you is considered the luckiest wolf on the planet.”
And according to everyone, that was Eli.
He still wasn’t too sure about this, but Eli did save his life again,
so…
“Do you know where he is?”
James sighed. “From what I was told, he was seen stomping off to his cabin. You might want to give him the night alone, unless you want to see him in one of his less than better moments.”
Considering Chris had met Eli while he was drunk and about to get his ass kicked in a bar, he had an