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  Fated to Her Feral Mate

  The Rejected & Reborn Series

  Haley Weir

  Copyright © 2021 by Haley Weir

  All rights reserved.

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  Contents

  1. Nessa

  2. Rory

  3. Nessa

  4. Rory

  5. Nessa

  6. Rory

  7. Nessa

  8. Rory

  9. Nessa

  10. Rory

  11. Nessa

  12. Rory

  13. Nessa

  14. Rory

  15. Nessa

  16. Rory

  17. Nessa

  18. Rory

  19. Nessa

  20. Rory

  Bound to Her Royal Guard

  About the Author

  The Rejected & Reborn Series

  Complete Series by Haley Weir

  1

  Nessa

  Packing up all of your worldly possessions in order to leave everything behind and make a fresh start in life is highly overrated.

  Moving to Queens, on the other hand, is the best thing I have ever done. It was a bold decision—especially since I’m thirty-eight and definitely not a wide-eyed, young college student full of wanderlust anymore. But I was beginning to have an existential crisis and felt a restlessness creeping in that told me there was something missing in my life—I felt something calling to me, even though I don’t have the faintest idea what it is yet. I’m hoping that I find it here in New York City.

  I’ve never even set foot in Queens before. In fact, choosing to move here is the boldest decision that I’ve ever made in my life. I simply picked a place in New York City that I could afford, packed up my small pickup truck, and drove all the way from the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, to New York in one nonstop road trip fueled by roadside Starbucks and a burning determination to start over.

  It wasn’t as if anything majorly catastrophic happened to me; I just really wanted a change. I had begun to feel bored and discontent with my life and now I’m about to change all of that. There is a certain exhilaration rushing through my veins when I pull up to my new apartment in the city. I’m exhausted from the long drive but the abundance of adrenaline (and caffeine) keeps me going as I walk up to the apartment building and ring the buzzer to meet my new landlord.

  “Dalton?” I ask when a man comes to the door. He looks at me with a ruddy complexation and beady eyes as he scratches his head right at the base of the man-bun sitting at the very top of his skull.

  Interesting-looking guy.

  “Yeah,” he says as if he’s just woken up even though it’s almost five in the evening. “You must be Nessa?”

  “Yep,” I answer eagerly as I shove my hand inside the door for him to shake. “Nice to meet you.”

  He glances down at my hand and chuckles. “You aren’t from around here, are you?”

  “No, I’m from Asheville.”

  “Oh, right, you mentioned that. How was the drive?” he asks without taking my hand. Maybe city people don’t shake hands? I have no idea. All I know is that I’m tired and want the keys to my new place.

  “It was fine. I’m looking forward to laying down in a comfy bed now though.”

  Dalton looks over my shoulder at my tiny truck. “You fit a bed in that thing?”

  “What? No, you said the apartment was furnished.”

  “Did I?” he laughs. “I must have mixed your apartment up with the other one. Nope, not furnished. Sorry. You can sleep on my bed for a few days if you need to.”

  He has got to be kidding me. Already some of the sheen of this new experience is wearing off. I definitely don’t want to sleep on some strange guy’s bed—new landlord or not. And now I have to get furniture and I’ve only saved up enough money to last me a couple of months. This is starting off a bit disastrous.

  “It’s fine,” I say as I wave my hand in the air dismissively. “I’ll just take the key please.”

  “You want me to give you a tour of the place?”

  “No, just the key.”

  After standing there for ten minutes while Dalton finds the key and then returns to the doorway to drop it in my hand, I’m ready for a beer and a shower. Dalton seems nice enough, but he hovers too much for my comfort. He stands in the doorway and watches me the entire time that I make trips back and forth from my truck to the apartment on the second floor. Thankfully, I don’t have that much stuff, so it doesn’t take me long. Although that just means that my apartment looks empty, and I have nothing to sit or lay down on aside from the wood floor. No matter—at least I’m here.

  I lock the door, toss my key on the kitchen counter, and crack one of the beers that I kept in a cooler on the ride up. Then I sit down on the floor in front of the tall window and look outside at the city. At least I have this nice view outside my window. A fresh start, a new place, and a whole new me.

  Most people would probably want to take a shower and go to bed after such a long drive, even if bed was just a pile of blankets on the floor. But I just want to run.

  It’s a weird quirk of mine that I’ve had ever since I can remember—the urge to run wildly through the streets, or whatever terrain I’m on. I tried taking up jogging once, but I absolutely hated it. I think it’s because I don’t want to run for exercise, I want to run for the feeling of freedom it gives me. Right now, as I look out the window at the setting sun, I just want to run aimlessly through the streets at record speed until my lungs burn and my legs give out from under me. It’s weird, I know.

  But instead of following my nagging instinct to sprint like a stray dog through the new city, I resign to simply unpacking and getting settled. Tomorrow I will need to find a cheap bed and maybe a table and chair—definitely a lamp too so that I can actually see what I’m doing in this place. Then, I will need to figure out what I’m going to do for work now that I’m here. I truly embraced the whole “take a leap of faith” mantra and came with no job lined up and only the wad of cash in my backpack. A month or two’s worth of savings will hopefully be enough to buy me time to figure stuff out.

  This time, I want to do a job that I actually like, and not one that just pays the bills. In adherence with my boho, free-spirited personality and aesthetic, I want to check out some of the public markets here in the morning. I’ve heard that they’re super cool, and I want to see if there is any demand for a secondhand antiquities stand. I’d be great at finding interesting treasures, “arting” them up a bit, and then reselling them as unique pieces at the market. Maybe I can even meet some new and interesting people to talk to. I’ve spent the last few years living alone in the mountains and talking mostly just to myself, or the few random squirrels and rabbits that wandered by. I didn’t mind it to be honest. The woods and the mountains have always felt comfortable to me. But something called me toward the city, and I’m eager to find out what it is that brought me here.

  I arrange my blankets and pillow on the floor, and even though it’s pretty uncomfortable, I’m too tired from the drive to care. My eyes fall closed as I listen to the lull of the city sounds outside my window.

  After a good night’s sleep, I wake up ready to go, albeit a bit stiff from the night s
pent on the floor. I swing my backpack over my shoulder, grab my keys, and try to avoid Dalton as I head out toward the subway. I plan on selling my truck soon since there’s just no need for it in a city like this. That should buy me another couple of months’ rent.

  As I’m about to walk down into the subway entrance at the corner of my block, I realize that I really should have gotten some coffee in my hand before I left the apartment. Since I’m not a morning person, and not great with navigation, I’m probably setting myself up for failure and getting lost. Usually, it takes me a few minutes to come online in the morning, and here I can tell that everyone moves at a quick pace—especially when they are going through the subway, an experience that I’ve never had before.

  I stop by a local bodega advertising lattes and grab one before going down the stairs of the subway entrance. I buy a metro card at the machine and try to follow the instructions on the turnstile, swiping my metro card through, but nothing happens. The screen just gives me a “try again” message. I try to swipe it slower, then faster, but still…nada. Behind me, I can hear people getting impatient as they huff and tell me to hurry up or move out of the way.

  “Sorry,” I apologize profusely as I step out of line. I let the congested crowd go before me and then go back to try again.

  This time, I balance my latte in one hand while trying to swipe the card more forcefully into the slot, hoping that the machine will take pity on me and just work. But in my uncaffeinated morning haze, I don’t realize that my clumsy attempt at getting through the turnstile doesn’t bode well for the balancing act that I’m trying to pull off. Much to my absolute horror, I spill my hot coffee right on the back of the man in front of me.

  I let out a little shriek as I watch it happen and can’t do anything fast enough to stop it.

  Fortunately—and amazingly—the scorching hot cup of coffee doesn’t burn him, or even make him flinch. The man simply turns around and looks at me with annoyance.

  And for a minute, I’m absolutely mesmerized by the way his endlessly dark eyes stare back at me through the strands of his messy auburn hair.

  2

  Rory

  Of course, the one day that I decide to take the subway instead of walk is the day that some woman, albeit a beautiful one, spills her coffee all over me at the turnstile. But when I whip around to growl at whoever could possibly be so clumsy, I’m utterly taken aback by her pale blue eyes. They’re so ethereal that I get lost in them for a moment. So lost that I forget to act like a human and pretend that the scalding hot coffee burns.

  Shifters can still be burned, of course, but it takes a lot more heat to affect me than the temperature of boiling water. My wolf nature gives me a much higher tolerance to just about everything. Normally I’m more keenly focused on making sure that I pretend to be human, but something about this woman sends my head spinning.

  “I am so, so sorry!” she stutters as she tries to reach forward over the locked turnstile and use her tiny bodega napkin to wipe my shirt.

  Whoever she is, she is a hot mess. Her metro card is still jammed in the machine that is now beeping angrily at her on repeat, the commuters behind her have resorted to cursing at her to get her to move out of their way, and her latte is now all over both my shirt and the ground. For a grown woman, she looks like she’s due a full-on tantrum.

  While she continues to apologize profusely to me and everyone else around us, I reach around the turnstile, pull her metro card out, and place my a spare one I keep with me inside the card reader to help her finally get through. Once she has made it past the turnstile and gotten out of everyone’s way, I hand back her metro card and continue on my way. If I didn’t have someplace important to be, I might have stayed to ask what her name was, but it’s probably a good thing that I need to get going. Something about her draws me in a way I can’t place.

  My meeting with the other pack alphas is starting soon and this little incident has already made me miss the first train. Fortunately, there’s another pulling up now. I hop on, grab a handle over my head to hold inside the crowded space, and try not to think about the woman at the turnstile and her hauntingly pale eyes. But then, just as the doors are getting ready to close, guess who steps—or rather stumbles—into the exact same train?

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I mutter under my breath as I watch the woman practically fall into the train as the doors start to close and the last wave of people pack inside.

  She stands there looking like a deer in headlights, a lost lamb in a field of wolves, as I wonder how she even managed to get on this train in time. She definitely looks like she isn’t used to navigating the city. I almost feel bad for her. And I can see another mishap getting ready to happen as the trains starts to move and I notice that she isn’t holding onto anything.

  “You might want to—”

  Too late.

  I don’t get to finish my sentence before the train lurches forward and the woman nearly wipes out. Just as she gets ready to face-plant on the dirty subway floor and knock a dozen irritable commuters off their feet, I catch her.

  My hand grabs her just under her arm and holds her steady as she scrambles to get back onto steady feet. She looks at me in shock and I’m not sure if it’s because I grabbed her or because we seem to have run into each other again. I pull her closer to me and place her hand up on the overhead handle that I’m still holding onto.

  “Thank you,” she says with a nervous smile. “I’m sorry. I’m just not used to the subway, or the city, for that matter.”

  I get ready to scoff at her and scold her for being so careless, but something stops me as soon as I open my mouth—a feeling. I recognize this feeling, but I can’t believe it’s happening to me. Not now, not here on the subway, and not with this hot mess of a woman. Not after all this time.

  I stand there staring at her with my jaw hanging open. I’ve never had this happen to me, but I know about it intimately, as all wolf shifters do. Recognition isn’t something that you can just shrug off. It hits you in the gut and doesn’t let go until you give in to it. And as much as I don’t want to give in, I don’t have a choice.

  This woman is going to be my mate.

  And something already tells me that she isn’t going to be crazy about the idea. Something about her screams “wild and free” and I don’t think she’s the kind of woman who wants to be mated. There’s something else unusual about her too. Even though I can tell that she is a shifter, it almost seems as if she is acting a little bit too much like she’s a human. It’s not the kind of fake act that most of us put on so that we don’t get discovered for what we truly are. This woman’s mannerisms make it seem like she thinks she really is a human. It definitely doesn’t seem like normal shifter behavior.

  When my stop arrives, and we both get off at the same time, I try to talk to her. The crowd funnels up the subway stairs and onto the street level as I walk beside her and ask her questions. Normally, I would worry that a woman in her position would think I was stalking her, but this woman has already knocked into me twice.

  “What’s your name?” I ask as I walk alongside her.

  “Nessa,” she answers.

  “Do you live in this part of the city?”

  “No. I just moved to Queens.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Well, not that it’s any of your business,” she says cautiously, “but I want to check out some of the markets.”

  There’s an opening in the crowd and she takes off, walking a bit faster to put some space between us. For a second or two, I think about chasing after her. I have her scent in my nose now so she would be easy enough to find. But then I remember that I’m already running late for my meeting, so I don’t. I let her hurry off, leaving me distracted by thoughts of her.

  I head toward an Irish pub in Greenwich Village, where I’m meeting with three other alphas of rival wolf packs—the alphas from Soho, Chinatown, and Brooklyn. There is a tenuous peace between the packs in New
York City right now, one that has lasted for as long as I’ve been an alpha, and since I’m reaching my early forties that means it’s been a while.

  But lately there has been a disturbing rumor that has been gaining traction in all the boroughs. A rumor that, if true, could undo the peace by getting the packs to turn on each other. I wouldn’t have believed the whispers and gossip if I hadn’t seen evidence of it unfolding on my own territory: shifters are being hunted.

  3

  Nessa

  I’m still a bit flustered as I walk through the city toward the market. The interaction with that guy on the subway threw me for a bit of a loop. He was really helpful, and very handsome, but the last thing that I need right now is a distraction. I came here for a new start, a clean slate, and the chance to finally put my energy into doing something I want to do. So I need to stay focused, check out the market, and decide how I’m going to make this work. No guys. Absolutely none. Especially not invasive ones who ask me a million questions.

  What was that even about anyway? First, I bumped into him twice almost as if it was some sort of twist of fate, and then, even though he acted both times like my presence was annoying him, he ended up following me halfway down the street to interrogate me? No, thanks. That guy has trouble written all over him.

  Time for me to focus on myself and start a new career. Hopefully a profitable one, since the sale of my old truck isn’t going to cover that many months of rent. Dalton doesn’t really seem like the forgiving kind of landlord, even if he is apparently forgetful. I should ask him to credit next month’s rent since I was promised furniture, although I’m not sure how well that will go over.