Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
I whine, impatient, rocking back and forth. My wolf and I are past ready, the want becoming almost a burn. An agony.
“I won’t hurt you,” he tells me again, so low that I don’t think I’m meant to hear. He notches himself at my entrance and takes a deep breath. “Say stop if you need me to stop,” he says in a stronger voice.
I need him to start. I push back, but nothing happens. The pressure against my opening feels good, so good, but I want him inside. I growl and wriggle my knees wider, reaching behind to grip him by the base and urge him to do it. He hisses.
“Be patient,” he says and slaps my ass, not hard enough to even sting, but it sends a wave of sparkling, rolling wonderfulness crashing through me.
I mewl and mash my chest into the mattress to hike up my hips, to show him what I want him to take. A drop of my wetness tickles a path down my inner thigh. He rumbles and finally—finally—flexes his hips, pushing harder, forcing me to open for him, and I do, stretching to accommodate him, and with a jagged groan, he slides inside me, filling me near to bursting.
I squeak and tense. He freezes mid-thrust, and after a moment, he strokes my flank, shushing me even though I’m not making any noise. I’m adjusting. It’s a lot. I’m stuck. Pinned. Surrounded.
Does it hurt?
I can’t tell. It pinches where he’s entering me, but further in, it feels amazing, like he’s pushing something that wants to be pushed so bad, and I had no idea my insides could feel as much as my outsides, but in a different way. Blunter, but better. A delicious taking. No, a belonging.
“Could you, uh, move?” I ask him, realizing as I speak that I’m panting.
He growls low, and his hands stop soothing me and grasp my hips, hard, holding me in place while he carefully pulls out and plunges into me, over and over, in a steady, controlled rhythm, and even though it feels strange, somehow too careful and too controlled, the strokes inexorably ratchet up a tension inside me, twisting me tighter and tighter like a wrung washcloth, and I begin to chase the feeling with my rocking hips.
He slips a hand between my legs and touches my clit, exactly the way I like, in firm circles. I yip and bury my head in my arms. I feel so good, surrounded by softness, my mate at my back, his fingers playing me perfectly, tingles skating up and down my limbs like a hundred burning wicks, sizzling brighter and faster until the sensation explodes in waves and waves, obliterating my mind and shattering my heart into glittering shards like diamonds.
It’s magic.
I melt into the mattress, grinning like an idiot at a fluffy pillow in a moose-and-pine-tree pillowcase. Darragh snaps his hips against my ass again, once, twice, a third time, and then he snarls and abruptly pulls out. There’s a sharp pinch as his swelling cock tears through my tender entrance. My muscles immediately seize up. My wolf alerts. Something isn’t right.
I struggle to raise my head, twisting to face him, blinking to clear the fuzziness from my brain.
He’s upright on his knees, his face contorted in pain, his hand clamped around the knot engorging the base of his red dick, shiny with my juices.
He didn’t knot me?
He has to. Males can’t stop themselves. It’s shifter biology.
His face is drawn in harsh lines. He’s clearly in pain, but he tightens his punishing grip, squeezing until his knuckles blanch white. Despite his stranglehold, milky stuff spurts from its bulging mushroom head, splattering warm and sticky on my butt cheek and pooling in the small of my back.
His seed is hot, and there’s so much of it. It feels wrong on my cooling skin. My wolf doesn’t like it either. She whines. I’ve been oblivious to her, but as my heartbeat and breathing slows, pieces of reality filter back, and she’s there, on her feet, frozen in shock, horrified.
The last drop of cum splats on my back. For a moment, there is a crushing silence.
Darragh’s right hand drops from his still swollen, half-erect cock, and for a second, his dull brown eyes look—tired. Lost. He frowns, and as if he can’t help himself, he reaches out with a trembling hand and smooths my hair. With exquisite care, he winds one of my curls around his finger. His touch tugs ever so slightly at my scalp, so I turn my head to ease the pressure, and the move bares my neck.
Instantly, his face shutters. He snatches his hand away, and his gaze darts around the room, anywhere but in my direction. Without looking at me, he grabs a sheet, messing up my nest, and wipes my back, but he picks a polyester blend, and the fabric kind of smears the cum around instead of absorbing any.
As soon as he makes two hasty passes with the sheet, he drops it on me, hops out of the nest, and grabs his pants. Quick as a wink, he’s buttoning his jeans, thrusting his arms into his flannel. He still won’t look at me.
Cold air hits my flushed pink body, and I shiver. It’s as if he stole all the heat in the room. I force my drained limbs to move, to maneuver myself upright, to haul blankets over my shaking body to hide my nakedness. A minute ago, it had felt so natural and perfect, and now it feels like I’ve done something bad.
Have I?
Did I not do it right?
“Did I screw it up?” I ask because I don’t have pride right now. I’m small and left behind and scared.
He doesn’t answer right away. He’s tying his boots.
When he finally stands, he says, “Of course not.”
His voice is distant and gruff, and he addresses the floor, not me. He backs up to the door, to the exact spot where he was standing while I built my nest, and for a second, I think he’s just going to leave, but he doesn’t. He looks at me, arms rigid at his side, jaw clenched so tight that the cords in his neck pop.
Maybe he’s worried that he screwed it up. He seemed really concerned about hurting me.
“It was, um, good,” I say.
I’m too embarrassed to meet his eye, but there’s a faint warmth in the bond. Maybe he needs reassurance like I do. Maybe this is all as strange to him as it is to me. A gush of compassion floods my tender heart.
“It’s all really nice. The nest. The cabin. I’m so excited about the washer and dryer.” I blink up at him and offer him a tremulous smile.
His brow knits. “What do you mean?”
“I never dreamed that I’d live in a cabin with my own laundry room. Well, laundry cubby, but still. It’s awesome.”
Something happens to his face. He seems to register something, and his cheeks darken under his bristly beard. His eyes harden. His spine goes ramrod straight. “You’ve misunderstood,” he says. “This is a guest cabin.”
My stomach sinks. “We’re going to live at your place?”
It doesn’t seem physically possible, but he stiffens even more and backs up another step until he’s almost out of the bedroom and into the hall. A heavy blanket of dread descends over me.
My shoulders slump and curl forward, as if I can protect myself from what’s to come, but I’ve never been able to keep myself safe. I’ve never been strong enough to stop awful things from happening, to make anyone stay.
This isn’t going to be okay. It isn’t going to work itself out.
“No. This—” He gestures between himself, with one foot out the door, and me, huddled in a ball on the bed. “This isn’t happening. It can’t— It isn’t—” He hacks a cough, shaking his head back and forth like he’s denying some terrible accusation. A life sentence. “I’m not doing this.” He blows out a heavy breath. “We’re not doing this.”
But we just did, didn’t we?
What makes you mates? Penetration? The knot? The claiming bite? They don’t tell us anything.
He didn’t knot me. He pulled out. I honestly didn’t know males could do that with a female in heat, but what do I know? Everything I know about sex I learned from eavesdropping.
He sure didn’t bite me. He didn’t even kiss me. Is that what Haisley meant when she said he fucks like an animal? Like how an animal mounts a female and then kind of wanders off when he’s done to get something to eat?
This was supposed to be the beginning. How did it go wrong? What did I do?
My eyes burn. I’m going to cry. No, correction, I already am crying. A hot tear dribbles down my cheek. Darragh bares his teeth at me, and I’m not sure if it’s disgust or contempt or impatience, but it’s bad, and it hurts.
“You’re fine,” he tells me. “Cheryl says you can stay here tonight.”
I scrub the tears away, and now they’re hot and wet on my wrist. “Cheryl?”
“She got the place ready. Bought the sheets and stuff. She said she’ll clean up, so uh—just—” He stares over my head, I guess to avoid the secondhand embarrassment of watching me try to dash away the tears rolling down my face and dripping off my chin. “Just when you go into heat next time—tell Killian. He’ll come find me. Okay?” He waits, teeth clenched, expectant, like I’m supposed to say something.
Am I supposed to say okay
?
It’s not okay. This isn’t right. You don’t just reject a mate for no reason. You don’t just nail and bail your fated fucking mate.
“Why?” The word is torn from my throat, jagged and raw, and I sound so damn young. So stupid.
He stares harder at the wall. “It’s not you. It’s just— You’re so— It won’t—” He kind of waves at me like that’s an explanation. What am I? What’s wrong with me?
He sighs and screws his eyes shut like I’m giving him a headache.
“It won’t work,” he says, opening his eyes to meet my gaze head on, so he can be sure that I see the cold determination in them, so I have no doubt that he means what he says. “We’re not going to be mates. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. The key is on the kitchen table. Cheryl said for you to drop it off to her when you’re done.”
And then, like it’s the easiest thing in the world, as if he’s put in his time and he’s finally able to escape, he turns on his heel and walks out. Just like that. Just like I’m nothing at all.
Chapter 4
4
MARI
I shiver in my nest, clutching a navy comforter with white anchors to my chest, my back itching as his cum dries.