Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
A dozen things jump immediately to mind—how do you feel, are you good, I want to see you again, you’re amazing, I don’t want you doing this with anyone else.
I love you.
I shake my head. I’m not handing him that kind of ammunition. “Oh, no. I’m not telling you how to be a decent, functioning person. If you don’t know, I can’t help you.”
“I’m no different than you, Flora. Don’t rewrite history. You were right there with me. Every damn time.”
My hands curl into fists, and my eyes burn. I wish I’d left earlier this morning. I wish I’d run.
“Shit.” He squeezes his eyes shut, tilts his head back, and then, exhaling, looks at me again. “We can work this out. We’ll go back, get showers, eat something, and figure it out.”
“No.”
“Damn it, Flora,” he starts shouting again, dropping the attempt at being calm and reasonable like a hot potato. “We can’t just waltz into another pack’s territory. That’s not how it works. We’re gonna have no rank. No shelter. Our scrip’s worthless. I can fight, Flora, you know I can, but not a whole pack, not every day. You don’t know what we’re walking into.”
He doesn’t get it. The burn in my eyes turns hot and wet. “B-but I know what it’s like back there.” I point up the mountain. “And I will never, not in a million years, make a pup live like that. I can fight, too. I can take whatever the whole pack dishes out, every fucking day, but I’ll die before I let them do that to my pup.” I drop my arm to curve around my belly, smashing my lips together to stop my chin from wobbling.
I can read what he’s thinking like his face is close captioned.
You’re taking it too personally. It’s not that bad. Packmates are hard on each other. Rank is a bitch. If it weren’t your size, it’d be something else. Shake it off. Toughen up. Show them it doesn’t bother you.
If it bothers you so much, lose the weight.
My dam loved me more than life, and she thought that way, too.
Until very recently, so did I.
I wait for Alec to say it out loud, and he clenches his jaw, like for once, he’s thinking through the words before he says them. Finally, he grits out, “If anyone says or does shit that you don’t like, I’ll kill them.”
“Now you will.” My voice is tired.
There’s nothing he can say to that.
I don’t expect him to hang his head, and he doesn’t. He draws himself up, hardens his face, and lets the alpha come through when he says, “Yes. Now I will. We need to go back, Flora. You know we don’t have a choice.”
He turns as if to head back uphill, so sure on the outside, so grimly determined, but I can feel his insides through the bond. He’s knocked for a loop, and he’s furious. But not at me.
“Come on now, Flora,” he says gently over his shoulder, holding out his hand.
I take a half step back. “You’d leave me to go the rest of the way with nothing?”
He drops his arm. His muscles tense, his neck striating, his collarbone cast in sharp relief. His face is a thundercloud. I brace myself.
His chest rises, then falls, up and down, and like I tore it from him, he finally says, “No.”
He stares at me, waiting. I stare back. Around us, the woods are quiet, but not in an ominous way. In a peaceful mid-morning way. His dark eyes blaze, his jaw juts, and I can feel how much he wants to fight something, and whatever it is—Salt Mountain, himself—I know with perfect clarity that it’s not me.
I turn, holding myself like a glass of water filled to the brim, and begin to walk downhill. Step by step. Five feet. Ten feet. Twenty. I keep to the right side of the rainwater gully I’ve been following. When I’m almost to a bend in the trail, my wolf yips back at his.
After a few more seconds that feel like hours, Alec falls into step beside me.
We’ve been walking for a while when he grumbles, apropos of nothing. “Our pup.” He glares at me expectantly.
“Our pup,” I say.
He passes me the jug of water. “Drink.”
I do, and then he drinks, a small fraction of the gulp I took, and he carries the jug as the incline grows less and less steep, the gully disappears, and our path begins to meander as we pick our way around thickets and ditches. The mountain becomes the foothills, and as we hike in silence together, for the first time in maybe my entire life, I feel what it must be like to have someone by your side.
Chapter 10
10
Chapter 10
ALEC
I
‘m walking into what is most likely to be an epic ass beating, and I’ve lost all control over my mate—if I ever had any—but I can’t bring myself to be mad. She’s walking beside me, and she’s wearing my bite.
Every so often, she touches it as if checking to make sure it’s still there. It is. My wolf rumbles with satisfaction. It’s a good mark. It’s not going anywhere.
It’s the only thing going right.
Well, and the heat. The stories didn’t even scratch the surface. She was totally uninhibited, crouched on all fours, hiking her hips and spreading her knees so I could see every inch of her pretty pink pussy.
It wasn’t anything like being together before, both of us looking over our shoulders, keeping the noise down. Holding back. White knuckling the trunk of a pine tree so I didn’t throw her onto her back and do what I really wanted to do. Bailing as soon as I came so I didn’t say something stupid.
I want to do what we did in the meadow again. Me on top, face to face. Her on top. Her on top and backwards. Shit.
I reach down and adjust my dick for the hundredth time. Flora’s gaze doesn’t even flick down this time. She must be getting used to me rearranging my perpetual hard-on.
She was so damn soft. Not just her skin, which has got to be softer than that rabbit of hers, but her body. It’s got give. I was pumping into her, sinking into her tight pussy, and there was so much to take in—her ass cheeks rippling, her thighs quivering, her tits bouncing, her moans and whimpers, her hair flying into my mouth.
I don’t want to say it was like fucking a cloud, that’s not it, she’s way too solid, but I’ve never touched anything as sweet and soft.
I’ve imagined fucking her thousands of times. Hell, back when I was younger, I used to come in a wad of tissues at night just thinking about her touching my dick with her hand. Reality is better.
The further we get from the mountain, the louder my instincts scream at me to throw her over my shoulder and haul her back home. Toss her onto my bed. Flip her onto her back and fuck her until she makes those desperate little mewling sounds again.
Her wolf would be down for it, if only to get the hell out of here. As we hike toward the worst idea ever, she gives my wolf a nervous whine every now and then. At least her wolf has the sense to be anxious about trespassing on another pack’s territory.
My wolf rumbles back a reassurance, but he’s on alert, ears straight up and nose twitching. Flora’s the only one marching into trouble with the confidence of the drunk or the stupid.
Of course, she’s neither. I’ve never seen her drink liquor, and despite this particular wild hair, she’s got good sense. She doesn’t stir the pot or do shit for attention. The opposite, really.
So she means it when she says she’d rather die than go back to Salt Mountain, than to let our pup be raised there.
I flash a glance at her round belly. She catches me doing it and sucks it in. Why does she do that? Last night, she was naked, mindless and bouncing on my cock. I’ve seen every inch of her.
Blood rushes south at the same time as a spark flares to life in my brain. Bad timing. I focus on the head attached to my neck and follow the thought. It feels important.
She’s always sucking in her gut. I try to remember when, in particular, and a picture flashes into my mind of her doing it when she walked down the aisle of the bus to Moon Lake, long after I’d gotten the females to stop messing with her. Her hips would bump the seats sometimes ’cause of that delicious sway, but it’s not like she didn’t fit, or that sucking in her belly would help if she didn’t.
But every time she walked down that aisle, she’d keep her eyes lowered, and she’d suck it in. Most times, you couldn’t even see her do it, it’s just that her shirt would hang different off her boobs. Probably no one but me noticed.
So why’d she do it?
It seems like some kind of instinct. Like how your arms go up in a fight.
Because her body’s bracing for a hit. Making itself a smaller target.
So she thinks I’d hurt her? Here? Now?
Heat burns the back of my neck, and my stomach knots. Of course, she does. I’ve done nothing but fuck up with her.
But that doesn’t explain the bus and all the other times back home.
She obviously does it because people mess with her about her belly. I know they do. That’s pack life. People run their mouths until you shut it for them, and if you’re not strong enough to do it, you’ve got no choice but to deal with the bullshit. That’s rank. Rank’s a bitch.
Nobody’s gonna say shit about our pup. Nobody would even think about it.
Because they’ll know what I’d do.