Blayne Edwards by Caine Page B

known it was him. He’d marked her tonight and although he could still very clearly smell it, she could not.
    In a sense, she’d already rejected a part of him.
    “I gather you’re Luke’s brother.”
    Caine glanced sideways at her and nodded. He caught the glimpse of a dimple in her left cheek when he did.
    “So is that what I should call you?”
    Caine took his eyes off of the road long enough to study her face in the darkness. Even with just the dashboard lights illuminating the cab of the vehicle, Caine could see those big, brown doe eyes looking back at him.
    “So I’ll just call you Luke’s brother. How’s that?”
    He hadn’t realized how silly he must have looked until she poked fun at him for his wordless stare.
    “Caine.”
    She shook her head. “I know that…”
    “That’s what I go by.”
    She didn’t nod or acknowledge that she understood. But Caine suspected she did. She just didn’t like his answer and her silence was her loudly voicing her irritation with him.
    “Do you have a first name?” she asked with just a hint of ballsy, sexy, female attitude in her tone. Caine couldn’t keep the grin from his lips at how correct he’d been in his assumptions about her temper.
    Meagan’s temper.
    Caine tried to shove that thought from his mind. This wasn’t Meagan sitting beside him. And this woman would never be his wife. He knew that. And his mind argued back and forth with what he should do when he got her back to his den. Caine knew what he really wanted to accomplish was crazy at best. There was no way Chloe was going to fall in love with him within the next month, especially when she found out what he was.
    And besides, Luke was right. The pack had to have more members. And the female on her way back to his den was merely the first of the bitches Caine and his twin would have to mount until their pack was reestablished. Luke could sire the alpha just as easily as Caine could. It made no biological difference to Caine, as genetically, he and his twin were identical. And as for the wolf in Caine, that part of him knew to act in the best interest of the pack. The beta mating with the alpha’s female was acceptable in every wolf pack that had survived and a beta wolf often sired an alpha.
    It shouldn’t have even mattered to the human in Caine. He’d known the woman for less than a day, so her feelings shouldn’t matter. They truly shouldn’t.
    They did.
    “Listen, Caine.” The way she stressed his name caused him to look in amusement at her before turning back to the road. “I just climbed into the car with you. A total stranger. Which is something I would never do in the city, but out here I like to think I can trust my neighbors. Even the ones I don’t know. And I agreed to come with you to take care of your wolf at three o’clock in the morning.” Her voice was eerily steady and smooth, but Caine could smell her fear of him growing. “I think the least you could do would be to tell me your name so that I don’t feel like…”
    “Damon.”
    She was silent.
    “Damon Alexander Caine.” He smiled at her and took a hand off the wheel and extended it across the cab. She looked down at it without reaching for it.
    “It’s a hand,” he teased.
    “I know that,” she quipped, causing Caine to chuckle at her flustered state. He was used to the reaction at the sight of his massive paws, especially from women. Any time he extended a hand to help a woman out of a car or to shake her own much smaller, dainty hand in greeting, Caine saw the same look of astonishment and fear.
    As he waited for her to find the nerve to take his hand, Caine felt an even bigger urge to tease rise up in him that could only have been coming from the human side of him that had made love to her just a couple of hours earlier.
    “Chloe?”
    She looked up suddenly from his hand and raised her eyebrows adorably at him as her silent answer.
    “Are you afraid I’ll bite?”
    The smell of her fear dissipated as