Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
His lips look soft.
My fingers itch.
I have the sudden urge to touch his mouth, and that’s so freaking weird. He’s old enough to be my father even though he’s way younger than my dad was. Folks my dad’s age grew up in the dens. Darragh’s too young for that, but he’s definitely from the generations messed up in the head from coming up under Declan Kelly, our last alpha.
Older packmates don’t get human references or jokes or the concept of “chill.” The males don’t talk to females unless they want to mount them, and they’re obsessed with patrolling the pack territory, hunting, and the shifter fight circuit, exclusively and in that order.
Apparently, Darragh Ryan does talk to females. Older, powerful witchy females. God, my stomach doesn’t like that. When I think of him and Abertha even drinking tea together, the flips and tingles begin to flop and slosh. Good thing I don’t eat breakfast.
Kennedy sidles up beside me and pretends to hack at a row she’s already dug. “What’s he doing?”
“Watching the sunrise?” I hazard a guess.
“The sun’s already up, and he’s facing west.”
“I don’t know. Enjoying a cuppa?” He’s not sipping anymore. He’s just holding the cup midair in a death grip.
“It’s coffee,” Kennedy says. “Well, mostly. Coffee and hair of the dog.”
“You can smell that?”
Kennedy wrinkles her nose. “You can’t?”
I draw in a breath. My lungs fill with that earthy, horsey, straw-in-sunshine smell. It swells in my chest, and suddenly, my eyes prickle like I’m about to cry, and my breasts grow heavy. I cross my arms to cover my nipples as they bead into hard points. Kennedy’s eyes narrow.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asks.
“Can we just change the subject? He can definitely hear us, you know.”
“He’s not acting like it.”
“Maybe because he has chill.” I’m aware I’m being salty with my best friend, and I don’t want to be, but it’s like I went from zero to PMS in sixty seconds. Even my wolf is being weird. If I like to play princess, she’s a genuine, pure-bred grand duchess—snoot in the air and prancing—but right now, she’s growling in the back of her throat and baring her tiny, pointy teeth.
She doesn’t like Darragh Ryan on that porch.
I press my open hand to my breastbone. My heart drums a beat against my palm.
Oh, shit.
No fucking way.
This cannot be what I think it is.
Darragh Ryan is a grown-ass man. Aman-sized man. And he’s all mysterious with a past and issues and a possible friends-with-benefits arrangements with a witch. I cannot handle that. I’ve never even let a male kiss me.
Does he even have a cabin? I know he lives by himself somewhere up in the foothills. Does he have a den? He looks like he lives in a den.
I can’t live out in the middle of nowhere. I have shoes. And I cannot—Iwill not—live without baths. Or electricity.
Blood roars in my ears. Annie and Kennedy are whispering back and forth, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. All I can do is stare at Darragh Ryan with bugged out eyes.
Fate has to be playing a joke. My aesthetic is delicate, sweet, romantic, cottagecore. His aesthetic is—the pants I wore all last week are fine. No shirt, no shoes, no problem. Haircuts are for the weak. I kill things with my bare hands in human form. I’ve been through hell and seen the other side.
Tingles race across my skin as my stomach drops. When does it end?
Since the day I was born, Fate hasn’t once made it easy for me. I keep my head down and my mouth shut like a good unprotected female, but still, it’s like I’ve got a target on my back. When I was a baby, my father went moon mad and tried to kill me because he thought I wasn’t his.
My mom became a shell of herself after he was put down until one night, during a full moon run, she leapt off the bluff at the river’s bend when there was no way she could make the far bank, not with a wolf as wasted and weak as hers.
I was shuffled from family to family until I landed with Una in the lone female’s cabin, and I kind of curled into a ball and gave up on life for a while. Well, I wanted to hide in bed, but Una insisted on herding Annie, Kennedy, and I up to Abertha’s cottage all the time, slapping trowels in our hands and making us dig and weed and hunt mushrooms in the woods. And then she got into bees—
I’m a good wolf, and Una saved my life when my father attacked me as a baby, so of course I helped, but I’d still rather have been under the covers. Then, one day, Una bought us phones.
And phones have the internet.
And the internet has everything, and they will ship it to you, or the humans at the farmers’ market in Chapel Bell, which is close enough.
So, yeah, the world is cold and lonely and ugly, but I can buy pink dresses and fairy lights and big-ass hats like fancy ladies wear at horse races. I might be stuck in the kitchen, in the cabin as far away from the pack as possible, in a pack where I couldn’t matter less, but Killian Kelly missed the message about the internet. I can go wherever I want, talk to anyone,be anyone, anytime, day or night.
I do not care that I have to dig in the mud and mess around with bees to pay for it. I look cute in rubber boots, herbs and flowers are my jam, and I’ve got good company.
But here’s Fate, lobbing another one at me. Darragh Ryan. He was more or less my current age when I was born.
I force myself to ignore the butterflies drunk driving bumper cars in my belly, and I take him in.
My mate.
I draw in a deep breath, and his peculiar scent seeps into my veins, flows all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes, and disconnects the part of my brain that’s freaking out over how my body is going haywire.
He smells like the most picturesque barn on the most pleasant day with the bluest sky and puffiest white clouds ever. And for an older guy, he is freaking hot as shit. Ignore the hair and beard, the rough hands, and the wolfishness. His eyes are amazing, dark brown ringed with copper and gold, and they crinkle at the corners, like he’s spent a lot of time in the glaring sun.
He’s as ripped as Killian Kelly and his lieutenants, but maybe because he’s from that hardened generation—or because he lives alone in the woods—he doesn’t have that cocky swagger. He exudes pure grown man confidence as he hangs out on the crone’s front porch looking hungover, uptight as hell, and inexplicably frozen with fascination by the view to the west.
I follow his gaze just to make sure I’m not missing anything, like maybe a flying saucer, but there’s nothing but scenic wilderness. Is he ignoring me on purpose?
Does he feel it, too? The strange gathering, seeking sensation under his breastbone?
He might be pretending I’m not right here, but he’s not bailing, and he definitely has the look of an animal about to bolt, albeit a dangerous, terrifying, muscle-bound apex predator even bigger than a wolf. Like a tiger. Or a grizzled lion with a wild ol’ mane. And a little ol’ teacup.
I guess he realizes he’s been holding the cup like one of those living statues because he finally shakes himself, sets it on the railing, and shoves his hands in his pockets. His thighs are so thick that he doesn’t have a lot of room, so he kind of wedges the fingers in. I’ve never seen a man look less casual.
I rub the place in the center of my chest where the bond is sprouting like weeds through a sidewalk crack.
Maybe this could be okay. He’s not completely feral. People are wary of him, but the few times I’ve seen him around camp, no one shits themselves or runs away or anything. They just make way for him. And the males my age do go on and on about what a great hunter he is. Hunting is good. I like meat as much as the next girl.
I shoot a glance at Kennedy where she’s gone back to hacking at a stubborn clump of dirt, roots, and stones. If I’d said “I like meat” out loud, she would’ve definitely come back with “that’s what she said.”
What else do I know about Darragh? There are whispers about something that happened when he was young that made him vow to never live with the pack. Something to do with Declan Kelly. There are a lot of whispered, vague rumors about those times, but no one ever comes out and tells the whole story. Shifters are superstitious. They don’t like to talk about evil in case the words call it back.
And there are the warnings about his wolf. If you’re ever alone in the foothills and you see golden eyes glowing in the dark, run like the devil is on your heels. But who’s alone in the foothills at night? Not me, that’s for sure.
I figured it was some ghost story to scare us females into staying on pack territory. We don’t go wandering the wilderness, though. We go to Chapel Bell during broad daylight to do capitalism. We’re not about getting in touch with nature, we’re about getting paid.
I refocus. What else have I heard about Darragh Ryan?
My cheeks blaze. Haisley Byrne and her crew make jokes about getting fucked like an animal, but with them, you can never tell if they’re talking out of their asses or not. Haisley claims she and Killian bang like pots and pans, but if that’s true, she must suck at it. He doesn’t even get someone to bring her a folding chair so she can sit next to him at dinner in the lodge. She’s got to stand up there on the dais beside him like a potted plant.
What’s it like to get fucked like an animal?
My eyes fall helplessly to the crotch of his jeans. There’s a bulge. A freaking huge bulge. It’s created a gap between his waistband and his tight abs. Yeah. That’s not wolf fur. It’s happy trail.
My cheeks burst into flame.
“Mari,” Annie hisses from where she’s squatting. “You’re staring.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, my hands flying up to cover them like a little kid. Shit. Not cool. I fling my arms back to my side, summon some remnant of chill. Now he’s looking over here. Right at me.
My entire body goes nuts. I break out in sweat—big, dripping beads down my back—and start to shake. I fold my arms close to my chest, shove my hands between my biceps and boobs, and grit my teeth to stop them from clattering. With absolutely no direction from me, my hip cocks like Haisley’s does when she’s posing next to Killian at dinner, and my lips peel back in a smile that can only look like a chimpanzee’s fear grimace.
Annie gapes up at me. Kennedy visibly winces with secondhand embarrassment.
I clear my throat. Annie leans forward. Kennedy tilts her head. On the porch, Darragh’s muscles clench impossibly tighter as if he’s bracing himself. They all wait for me to say something.
I don’t know any words. They’ve all vanished from my memory, and even if I knew any, my throat is squeezing shut.