Mated by Zoe Winters Page A

It’s this.” She pointed at the ugly scar on her throat. “How will you be able to stand being mated to me when I’ve been marked up by a vampire like this?”
    “That isn’t your fault.”
    “That’s not what I asked. The vampires are your enemies, and you’ve got a visual reminder that more than one of them got there first.”
    Cole bent his head to her neck and kissed over the mark. His tongue darted out to gently trace the scar. He murmured against her skin, “That. Isn’t. Your. Fault.”
    Jane wasn’t finished. She didn’t know where it had come from, but she couldn’t stand the thought of almost having something good, only to have it ripped from her again. She pulled out of his embrace and took her shirt off, tossing it to the floor.
    His nostrils flared and his pupils dilated, but that wasn’t the point of the exercise. She removed the bra and shivered when she saw the feral gleam that lit his eyes
    She closed the space between them, and suddenly his hands were everywhere. She whimpered softly at the contact then got control of herself, remembering her mission.
    “Stop.”
    She could tell it was a struggle, that he thought she was teasing him. But he removed his hands and fell back onto the couch, placing them on either side of his body, digging into the leather. He didn’t seem to care about the upholstery because his eyes didn’t stray from her.
    She stepped closer. “What about this one, and this one, and this one?” She pointed to the various bite marks Paul had left on her. “Can you really stand to be with me, when I look like this?”
    Before she could say anything else, before she could even think, he’d swept her up in his arms. She blinked and they were in the bedroom. He tossed her on the bed and removed his own shirt before joining her, his eyes intense and locked with hers.
    “Yes,” his voice rumbled.
    He proceeded to kiss each bite mark. “These are scars. They aren’t a vampire claim, and they aren’t a wolf’s mating mark,” he growled. “They are battle wounds. These are the marks that prove you’re strong, that you’ve been through fire and walked out safe on the other side.”
    “They’re ugly. They make me ugly.”
    “No, you can’t think that.” He flicked on the lamp. “Am I ugly?”
    Jane hadn’t stopped to notice before, but Cole had a few scars of his own.
    “We heal fast and rarely scar, but sometimes there are things that leave a permanent mark.”
    She found herself riveted to the scar slashing across his stomach, a wound that would have killed him had he not been a wolf.
    “What happened?”
    “I was eighteen, and the pack alpha was raping my mother. I killed him and in the process got this little souvenir. He was bleeding out and dying and still sneering at me because he knew it would scar. But I didn’t look at it that way. This is what I got in the process of saving my mother and becoming the leader. And those are what you got while surviving and becoming who you are.”
    “Scars make a man look distinguished, but on a woman . . . ”
    Cole quirked a brow. “Was that a joke?”
    “Yeah. Lame huh?”
    He just chuckled.
    Jane crawled to the edge of the bed, ran her finger over the puckered mark on his stomach, and kissed it as he’d done with her. All this could be yours, Jane.
    His hands had moved to unbutton his pants. She put her hand over his. “Wait. Don’t mark me, okay?”
    He looked like he was going to protest, but she interrupted him. “I want to see what this would be like with us. I can’t just hand my entire life to you yet. Please promise me you won’t mark me.”
    He sighed, but nodded, the look on his face like she’d just asked him to go vegan.
     
     
     
    Chapter Eleven
     
    They were really going to do this. Jane stood in her jeans and bare feet beside the bed watching as Cole peeled the jeans from his own body. She guessed this was the part where she was supposed to follow suit, but she was busily cataloging her