Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
His wolf’s snarl crescendos and ebbs to more of a menacing rumble. My wolf sneaks a peek upward with rounded eyes.
“I-I’m sorry I just showed up.” I clear my throat as I lower my hands. “I didn’t, uh, know how to call you or anything.”
I glance around the shack. Dude definitely does not have a phone. He’s off the grid.
Darragh doesn’t answer, but he does seem to break himself free of the fight he was having with his wolf. He scrubs his face, tugs his beard, and relaxes his shoulders. Slowly, with great deliberation, he turns and looks at me. His eyes blaze gold in the dimness. I feel like he wants to eat me. My belly swirls.
“The black wolf brought you?” he asks.
“Who? What? Oh, yeah. Kennedy. He brought me. Yeah.” I wipe my sweaty palms on my skirt. Tulle is not absorbent at all. I must smell like a dripping wet mop. I twitch my nose, trying to catch a whiff.
Darragh’s wolf lets loose another round of mad snarling, and Darragh tenses again, bracing himself like he’s holding his wolf back from rushing into battle with me. I immediately break eye contact and bare my neck. Sooner than before, he masters him. I spend the time quaking in my white patent leather Docs, effectively treed against a wall made of rotten wood.
This was not my best idea.
I tried to wait patiently in camp for him to come back, but when he didn’t show up, and the heat flashes came more and more frequently, I got itchy. And then restless. Then crabby. Bitchy. Frantic. Finally, I burst out in hysterical tears when I accidentally dropped a bowl of blackberries on the floor and stepped on some by accident. That’s when Kennedy said she’d take me to Darragh’s if I pulled my damn self together.
Thank Fate that Kennedy’s wolf is off chasing rabbits now. If he heard the sound Darragh’s wolf is making right now, there would be a very short and one-sided fight. The smart move when a wolf sounds as bloodthirsty and moon mad as Darragh’s is to bare the neck, but Kennedy’s wolf is both a dumbass and a badass. He’d take his chances, and he’d get torn apart.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Darragh’s wolf could take Kennedy’s. He sounds like a mega-beast. Like an alpha. Is that why he’s so riled? Because he smells another male on me?
Shit. I didn’t think about that. Darragh seemed chill with Kennedy and me going for a run together the other night. Still, everyone knows that mates who haven’t done it yet get hella possessive, that the scent of competition can even push them into rut.
I need to clarify the situation. “Kennedy and I are just friends. Best friends. I mean, we love each other, but not in that way. Like siblings. Or like, Army buddies in the movies.” Oh, God. He’s not saying anything, just clenching that sharp jaw, so I keep rambling. “We’ve known each other for years. We’re roommates. With Annie and Una. In the lone female cabin.”
He doesn’t say anything, but at least his wolf’s snarls have subsided again into a persistent rumble. Should I try to make my escape? I inch sideways.
Instantly, his wolf’s rumble swells to a booming growl, rolling over me like a wave, triggering another jolt of adrenaline followed by a wave of neck-tickling heat. The muscles in Darragh’s neck strain ’til they look like they’re gonna burst. I ease back to the exact spot where I was, lining my feet up with the boot prints I’d made in his dirt floor.
But what if that was a “get the hell out of here, bitch,” not a “get back where you were” growl?
“Uh, should I go?” I squeak. “I could come back some other time? When it’s good for you?”
By the dark flush on his face, Darragh’s wrestling his wolf back down, and when the growls are low enough for him to speak again, he says, “You aren’t supposed to leave camp without an escort.”
I blink. “I had an escort. Kennedy.”
His strong brow furrows. “It’s not safe.”
I didn’t smell anything more dangerous than a possum the entire way here. “Kennedy’s wolf is really tough.”
Darragh’s wolf snarls. I snap my mouth shut.
God, my back itches. Sweat is still dripping down my spine, and it’s driving me nuts because I’m too scared to scratch it. My nose tingles. I’m going to cry. This is not how I saw this going. I feel like I’m being called on the carpet by the teacher, but I never got in trouble back at Moon Lake school.
I sniffle. Darragh’s brow creases more deeply. Alarm flashes across his face.
His nostrils flare as he draws in a deep, bracing breath, and he forces his muscles to slowly, deliberately unflex.
“You should sit,” he finally grinds out.
My gaze darts around the place, looking for a chair. There’s the primitive stacked stone fireplace he’s looming next to. A battered trunk. A ragged sleeping bag with a soot-stained kerosene lantern on the floor next to it. A book. It’s upside down, so I can’t tell what it is, but it’s been through the war, too.
And there’s a huge freaking sword propped against a wall. It’s rusty—God, I hope that’s rust—and dented and the blade is nicked in places, but not in a way that makes it seem old—in a way that makes it seem well-used.
What does he kill with a sword? He’s a freaking wolf. He has claws.
Oh, there’s also an almost empty bottle of whiskey lying on its side in the middle of the floor, a few inches from me. Without thinking, I reach out with my foot and toe the glass, spinning it to point in his direction. The scrape on the weathered wood is painfully loud.
Darragh’s wolf doesn’t seem to mind that move. His rumble stays at the same level, clearly a threat, but more of a “that’s right, I’m the alpha here” rather than “I am imminently going to eat you.”
My wolf’s fear eases a little more at the same time a new worry rises in my thinking, human brain.
I can’t live here. There is no chair.
And, much more importantly, there’s no bathroom. If there is, it’s an outhouse, and nope. No way. I need indoor plumbing, and you are never going to catch me sitting bare-assed over a ditch in the ground like I don’t know for a fact that spiders and snakes live in holes.
I don’t want to get knotted for the first time in here either. There’s no door.
I can’t really wrap my brain around the whole physical act of mating, let alone doing it with this male with that wolf inside him. For sure, I can’t make a nest out of an Army surplus bedroll from the ’80s and whatever is in that trunk. I’m really going to get naked in this place? With a guy I don’t know at all?
I mean, the mysteriousness is kind of hot. What does he even do with that sword and what is in that trunk? Do I want to know?
Regardless, he doesn’t seem to want me here at all.
Another wave of panic rises inside me, turning my parched mouth so dry that my throat feels like the sides are sticking together.
My hands fly to my chest, one clutching the other, pressing against the clammy skin above the neckline of the world’s worst, clingy, itchy blouse. It’s instinct, but as my heartbeat thumps against my palm, I realize that I’ve reached for the bond, just like the other mated females do when they get stressed out.
At least I think the bond is what I’m feeling—it’s not unlike indigestion. It kind of burns and kind of feels stuck in there like if I hacked hard enough, I might be able to cough it up. Despite all that, it’s not a bad feeling. Just intrusive.
Focusing on it, though, is weirdly calming. My wolf is mellowing out now. She’s scooted her butt back up to our boundary, listening to Darragh’s wolf rumble like he’s a meditation app as she idly licks her coat.
I don’t like it when we’re on different frequencies like this. It makes me feel unbalanced. I’m pretty sure she’s the one who’s reading the situation wrong, though. Neither Darragh nor his wolf has done anything the least bit reassuring. I mean, where am I even supposed to sit?
Darragh seems to realize that the second that I think it. He scrubs his neck and actually seems a bit abashed. “Uh, you can sit on the bedroll.”
I press closer against the wall.
His back stiffens. “Or, uh, on the trunk.”
He’s laser focused on my hands pressing over the bond. Or rather, the place where I’m smooshing my own boobs. I’ve got a lot up top. I can’t do one without doing the other.
I force myself to lower my arms casually to my side. The awkward tension between Darragh and me grinds on, but my fear begins to recede, too. He’s not making a move toward me, he’s dialed the snarling down, and my wolf has completely reevaluated her first impression of his wolf. She wants to see him in his fur.
I do not.
I take a few steadying breaths and the constriction in my chest eases. Contrary to what you’d expect, it smells nice in here. Well, that’s not exactly accurate. It reeks of old woodsmoke, metal, dirt, and dried blood, but there’s a good smell, too, a flipside to the bad ones—campfire, freshly-churned earth, and pennies warm from your hand.
The scent is coming from Darragh, and it’s disorienting because it’s a complete contrast to his psycho-loner-who-lives-in-the-woods vibe. It smells like what happy childhoods must.
He’s not staring at the floor anymore. He’s tracking what I’m looking at with those molten metal eyes. Because I have no game, I feel compelled to thrust my shoulders back and cock a hip like I’m just low-key hanging out against the wall of his dank wilderness shelter.
My wolf watches this unfold from her catbird seat, fascinated by it all—me posing over here, him looming over there, both of us grasping for something to say while his wolf rumbles in the background like rolling thunder.
I cough again. “Sorry if I, uh, interrupted you.”
“I wasn’t doing anything.”
“Oh. Um. Good.”
“You need food,” he says, and I’m not sure if it’s a question or not.
My stomach is a whirling, twirling dance party. Food is the last thing on my mind. Besides, he doesn’t have a fridge or pantry or stove. There’s not even a cauldron hanging in his fireplace like at Abertha’s place. Where does he cook?
“No, thank you,” I say.
“There are apples.” He bursts into movement. Inside, my wolf skitters backward with a yip. He stops and then moves with more caution to a basket I hadn’t noticed by the fireplace. He takes out a small red apple. I’m fairly sure they’re from the trees at Abertha’s.
My wolf grumbles.
He holds it up and jerks his chin. He wants me to catch it. I cup my hands and pray. I’m not coordinated, and I was always garbage at Human Sport at the Moon Lake school.
He pitches it and it lands softly in my palms.