Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” I say against his worn jeans. “We’re in the same pack, and we’re technically mates, but we don’t know each other at all.”
He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and then he says, low and gruff and careful, “I want to know you, Mari.”
“Yeah?” It makes me want to smile—it seems so silly. We’re probably going to die tomorrow, disappear like all those folks in Moon Lake who “went for a walk” and didn’t come back. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.” He says it so seriously. A warmth—not the prickly urgency of heat, but something airier, softer—unfurls in my stomach.
“There’s not much to know about me.”
“Me neither,” he says, both wry and sincere, and strokes my hip and massages my neck with exquisite tenderness, as if he’s scared that he’ll spook me, and I’ll pull myself away and stop him.
“You like books,” I say.
“You do, too.”
I hum a yes.
“What do you like?”
“Anything that has a happy ending.”
“Me, too,” he says, so quietly that if there was anyone else in this box, they wouldn’t be able to hear him.
“Those men got out of the center of the earth, right?” I peek up at him.
His lips curve. “They did.”
“And the story with knights? The good guy wins and marries the lady, right?”
His brown eyes grow somehow browner, and the creases in the corner of his eyes deepen. “Ivanhoe wins,” he says, and oddly, I feel like he’s not quite telling me the truth, like he’s telling me what I want to hear.
It makes the warmth in my chest glow.
I haven’t lived a life where anyone’s tried very hard to protect me from hard truths. I know “it’s going to be all right” is a fantasy—I know the danger is real and close and ugly—but for this moment, I let myself give in to it.
I’m curled close to my strong mate, and I hurt, but he’s stroking me with his careful hands, telling me everything is going to be okay, everything is going to turn out all right.
The heat washes over me, and I wriggle closer until my knees are tucked flush against his hard inner thigh. The pain in my wrist is slowly easing into a dull throb.
His steady breathing coaxes mine into the same calm rhythm. I nuzzle his jeans. The denim smells like him—fresh air, dew, home.
I don’t want this to end here.
I force my brain to focus, searching out his eyes. They’re on me. On my face. And even if I don’t quite trust it, I see it—longing. Bitter, tender, hopeless longing. It stirs me, touches my raw and bruised heart.
I swallow to clear the lump in my throat and say what needs saying. “We need to mate. Before they come back.”
His hand pauses mid-stroke. My wolf whines. He keeps going.
“We don’t have to,” he says, grim and certain.
“Yes, we do.”
“I won’t make you.” His voice drops so deep, it rumbles.
“I know you wouldn’t.”
“We can wait.” His mouth flattens.
“No, we can’t.” I didn’t do this for nothing. I turn to gaze up at him. Pain and remorse and rage are etched on his rugged, beautiful face.
“I can’t make a nest,” I say, low and broken, like a confession, like a shared grief.
“I’m sorry.” The hand on my neck wanders to my hair. I can hardly feel it, but I know what he’s doing. He’s touching my curls.
“I don’t want to do this here.” It’s another confession. “Like this.”
“We don’t have to,” he says, and I know in my bones that he means it as much as he also knows that we do.
“I want it to be my choice.”
“It is,” he says.
Everything is such a mess. I can’t ignore the bond at all anymore. Maybe we’ve been too close for too long, or I’m too tired, or it’s just gotten too strong. I can feel his fury, his shame, the conflict tearing him apart, and underneath it all, his desire.
His awe.
Of me.
I can feel it all, and it blows my mind and breaks my heart, and I feel as young as he sees me and a million years old at the same time.
“You want me,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“A lot.”
“Like air,” he says.
My lips curve, sad and rueful and bittersweet. “Nobody wants air.”
“They need it.”
“You don’t need me.” He walked away. He stayed away.
“Like air,” he says again with a note of finality.
“You don’t even know me.” I cradle my wrist closer to my bare breast. The throbbing is easing more quickly than I’d expect. Maybe my heat is accelerating the healing.
Darragh leans closer. His chains clank. I feel guarded. Protected.
“I know the important things.” His fingers stroke down my cheek, finding the divot at the corner of my mouth. He strokes lightly across my thirst-chapped lower lip. He traces my nose from the bridge to the tip like I’m exquisitely delicate. Like I’m a work of art. “You’re strong. Brave. Beautiful.”
“You’re just saying nice things because you feel bad.”
He rumbles a denial, and his touch disappears. I blink my blurred eyes, distressed by the loss, but before my wolf can growl, he scoops me up, adjusting me so I’m right side up, drawing my back to his chest, wrapping his arms around my middle. He gently rocks us side to side. I prop my hurt wrist on his forearm.
“Is this okay?” he asks.
I hum and lean back, letting him take my weight.
“If you need me to stop, just say so, okay?” he says.
I tilt my head back to rest it in the place where his neck meets his shoulder. This is another “not quite the truth.” Soon, I won’t be able to stop myself, and not too long after that, he won’t be able to stop himself, either. We’re powerless against our biology, powerless in this situation, but somehow, still, when he says he’ll stop if I ask him to, it isn’t a lie.
It’s what the truth would be if it were just us, Darragh and Mari. If there were no past and no present. If we existed in a world where Fate didn’t decide for us. In that world, Darragh would say, “If you say stop, I will.”
And I’d say, “Don’t stop.”
So I do. I say it. “Don’t stop,” I murmur.
His lungs catch. He groans and buries his face in the crook of my neck, breathing me in. He places a reverent kiss on my pulse point, so carefully, like I’m glass. Like he’s never kissed anyone anywhere before.
“Oh, Mari,” he growls. “I want to do things to you.” His breath is hot on my earlobe. A shiver judders down my spine.