Taurus

Chapter 17.2

A/N: The next update. Sorry for the late update, my internet was not working yesterday:(

For the characters, I have updated West Coven in the character review. You can see it there.

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After meeting her mate, she had taken him to her home and locked the door. Only after ensuring that it was locked was she able to breathe.

"Leigh?" he called again, with amusement in his voice. "What are you doing?"

"I..." she began. "I can't let Dave see you."

He frowned. "Is... is he that fearsome?"

She nodded her head fervently. "Very much, Justin. Very much."

He then leant forward, pinning her between him and the locked door and took a deep breath. "Then why do you stink like him?"

She tried to push him, but he refused to budge. He was not in his right mind. He was growling lowly and his eyes were shifting colours. He was getting possessive. The grip he had on her waist spoke volumes. The way his fangs were elongating, she knew he would end up marking her right there. But if Justin marked her here and Dave got a whiff of it, he would kill them both.

"Justin," she called his name, but it ended as a moan when he began to kiss her neck. "Justin... please. Listen."

"No!" he snarled. "Why should I, mate?"

"Cause I want us both to live!" she said, pulling her strength to push him off. "I want both of us to live."

He seemed to snap out of it. "What do you mean?"

She pulled him towards the dining table and pulled a seat for him.

After he took a seat, she bit her lips and told him everything. What she was doing to survive. Why she had his stink on her.

She knew she had not been faithful to him and it had been her fault for dating Dave when she was in university. But what she was doing now was to survive. It was the only way Dave would not make her drink that tonic and make her do what she wanted to do.

"I made a mistake, Justin," she sobbed by the time she was finished. "A huge one. I should have waited for my mate. Why I dated him, I would never know. Why I even agreed to be his mate, I would never know. I thought I was in love with him. But after seeing him with the two female, I began to lose my feelings for him. I hate myself wasting my emotions and time over him."

Her soft sobs resonated in the otherwise empty room. The clock ticked away and the winds knocked on the closed windows. Apart from that, two sets of heart, though one was beating out of duty, other beating out of shock, fluttered together in a rhythm that had her stunned.

Seconds melted to minutes when she found herself in a warm embrace.

"I... I honestly can't judge you for what you did when you had not met me," he finally said. "I had been away and you could not have... no one could have known that we were mates. As you said, you were in love. Or you were in the illusion of being in love. You were young, Leigh. People make mistakes when they are young. They grow from it. You grew from it. I can tell myself only that."

At that, she sobbed even harder.

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He kissed her lightly on her lips as they opened the door. After hours of conversation, they agreed to flee. Flee Laukris and run to some other continent. Somewhere Dave would not find them.

But the second she opened the door, a male with a sinister smile greeted her. "Fleeing, Leigh? Dave will not like it."

Her face paled and her legs began to shake. Had it been her alone, she would have fought and died, but with Justin next to her, she was not sure. She would have to think of a way to let him escape.