His Unidentified & Untouchable Mate

In Another's Arms

Jacob POV

I was angry.

I tried to push it behind a mask, but it felt impossible to swallow – perhaps it was because the clock was growing ever closer to midnight, but having my father come between me and Zahraa just…

…and I’d left her with Rowan, who’d looked at her like I might look at a nicely cooked steak.

Something so trivial never would’ve bothered me before, but it must be my alpha blood awakening the closer we got to tomorrow. Or maybe it was that strange sense of déjà vu – like I’d seen her before in a hundred dreams – that made me feel more territorial.

I wanted more time with her, I realized, which I never could’ve said about any of my exes. But, then, none of them had intrigued me as she had – none of them enticed. They were excellent distractions, but they weren’t much more than that.

“Jacob, buddy, there you are,” Alex said, pushing a beer can into my hands. He had Kaelin in tow, who greeted me with a nod of his head.

Kaelin’s lips curled into a catlike grin. “We missed you after your big performance. You sounded like dying cattle.”

“Looked like it too,” Tatum agreed, appearing seemingly out of nowhere.

Alex pulled at the straps of his suspenders (reminder to self: mock him relentlessly for wearing suspenders) and puffed up his chest, looking altogether too proud of himself. “You’re welcome, by the way. Ingrid was ready to pounce on her when she got off stage, but Tatum held her off.”

“I did not hold her off,” Tatum replied, rolling his eyes. “I asked her to dance. She said yes. There was no holding.”

“There was a little holding,” Alex smirked, waggling his eyebrows. “In some very soft places.”

Tatum punched him full force in the shoulder, and Alex took it without a yelp, rubbing the spot after. “s**t, you hit like a train.”

“And I’ll do it again if you don’t watch your mouth,” the usually mild-mannered Tatum spat.

“You know, Ingrid’s actually known for being pretty nice. She must really hate you,” Kaelin remarked.

I groaned. “She does. With reason – I won’t say good reason, but…”

“If you want to get with that, you’re going to need to patch that up,” Kaelin advised. I barely heard the second half of his sentence – he’d indicated to Zahraa. She was there, barely visible among party goers, dancing with Rowan.

He had his hands on her hips while she writhed to the high-tempo beat, hands raised high above her head. Again, he had that predatory stare – looking at her like she was a piece of meat.

I growled, crushing the beer can with a spray of amber liquid and golden foam. The guys dodged and shouted, and the tin digging into my hand brought me back to the present.

Kaelin raised his brows, “Damn bro. Find your mate already, did you?”

“What?” I snapped my attention to him, but for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to dispute it. Instead, my eyes turned to Zahraa, looking at her as though I was seeing her for the first time.

She was surely beautiful. But she knew nothing about herself, touching her bore consequences (what kind, I still didn’t know) and she had powers the depth of which I’d never know.

My mouth opened, then shut. I was acutely aware of the guys exchanging glances, but I couldn’t pull my eyes off of her. That word…

Mate.

My Mate.

Zahraa… is my mate.

It felt right, but… it wasn’t time yet. And wasn’t it supposed to be a pull? I didn’t feel pulled.

A light punch on my arm drew my attention back to Kaelin, who looked at me with a blend of disbelief and amusement. “Relax, Jacob, I was only kidding. You still have another…” he looked down at his watch and winced. “Twenty minutes.”

“Oh s**t!” Alex proclaimed, “I’m supposed to be near the stage to go over my speech again. Jacob, you should get over there too. They have a whole countdown to do.”

I let him pull me, but my eyes lingered on Zahraa, something deep and primal in me already accepting what I couldn’t fathom.

Zahraa was my mate.

Mine.

Zahraa POV

Rowan’s hands were large and warm on my hips. I’d had another drink, which relaxed all the tension in my shoulders, and felt perfectly fine shaking my ass and waving my hands in the air like the other females around me.

Well, not quite like them. I kept a healthy distance – if my skirt rode up, or there was a break in the lace, and Rowan touched me, it could be incredibly problematic. So I kept an arm’s length from my alpha, hoping he didn’t smell the way his touch was kind of turning me on.

“So, Zahraa,” he drawled, pulling me in closer. “You’ve been with us for eleven years now, and you were accepted into USC… what’s your next plan?”

“Graduate,” I replied without hesitation. He laughed, and I laughed along with him. “After that… I think I might travel. I’m worried… I’m worried that I’ve been locked down here for too long. Maybe my family is long gone by now. Or maybe they’re-”

As if he could sense what I was about to say, he shook his head. “I don’t know – my father sits on the Alpha Council, and since he’s in command of the largest pack in the Americas, his word has quite a bit of sway.” I could feel his breath hot on my neck as he leaned over me. “If you were to stay, he has a lot of resources at his disposal. I’m sure we could work something out…”

“I don’t know about that,” I said, turning to face him. I thought it would put more distance between us, but instead, he continued leaning over me, our faces just inches apart. I looked aside, uncomfortable being so close. “There are dozens of other wards that need attention too. I think my case has gone cold.”

“It just needs a little bit of extra attention,” Rowan’s voice was huskier than I remembered, and his grip was tightening on my hips. “I can give you-”

The speakers screeched with a terrible high-pitched noise. It offered me the chance to pull away, redirecting my focus towards the stage. I noticed Jacob holding a microphone too close to the speakers, and a few people I didn’t recognize pulling the mic from his hands and chiding him.

He grinned, his gaze sweeping the crowd until it landed on me. It faltered, then spread wider.

I filled with giddy amusement – it leaked out into a pfft, and then I was laughing, feeling lighter than I had in months.

When I looked back at Rowan, he wasn’t laughing, though. He was looking to the stage with a look of annoyance.

When I looked back to Jacob, he was returning the glare.