Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
“Where you going?” I keep my voice even.
“I told you. The Old Den Pack.”
“What’s wrong with your foot?”
She glowers down the deer trail she’s found that’s running more or less southward. “Blisters.”
She shakes off my hand. I let her. Then she heaves the pack up higher on her shoulders and plows ahead. I measure my steps so my pace matches hers.
“Flora, this is crazy.” I try to reason with her again. “You can’t just run away because you’re mad.” If you could, I’d have blown Salt Mountain years ago. We’re pack animals, though. We can’t survive alone.
“I’m not mad.” She scowls into the middle distance and limps onward. How bad are her feet torn up? I didn’t notice her favoring them last night, but I didn’t see her walking much either.
“You don’t have to lie to me,” I say, and before she can get madder, I add, “Give me the backpack.”
She tightens her hold on the straps. “I’m not mad. I’m determined.”
I don’t know what to do with this. I can easily take the pack from her, but I don’t need to make things worse, and she’s pissed as hell. It’s coming off her as strong as the new scent I’m catching from her pussy, beyond sweat and a skipped shower or two. It’s warm. Spicy. Delicious.
Now I’m walking at half speed with a hard-on.
She smells damn good, though, and I love the sounds she’s making. Little grunts when her foot catches on a root, and the panting. Oh, fuck, the panting. I swallow a groan and adjust my dick, tuck it into the waistband of the yellow sweatpants.
If Leith or Bram saw me now, trotting along in slow motion beside a female, I’d have to fight them for alpha heir right then and there, or I’d be scrapping for rank with every pissant in Salt Mountain for the rest of my days.
If I saw Bram now, I wouldn’t mind a fight. I’d rip his hands off. And his dick. And his head.
What the fuck was she doing with him?
She eyes me uneasily, her nose twitching. She scents my aggression in the air. I am angry, and part of me wants her to know, to be afraid, but another part wants to kill whatever’s messed up her scent with fear. And that’s me. I did it.
“Stop growling at me,” she mutters.
I’m about to deny it when I hear the rumble coming from deep in my throat. I cough and give my chest a few pounds with my fist. I could blame my wolf, but it’d be a lie. He’s relaxing, sprawled on his side, just inhaling her, waiting for me to hand our body over so he can convince her to present. He has no doubt he’d have her in her fur and on all fours in no time. He thinks I’m a joke.
Joke’s on him. He’s gonna be cooling his heels for the foreseeable future. I’m taking her first.
A rolling growl, all wolf, escapes my throat. She casts me another aggrieved look, huffs, and lengthens her stride, but she’s picking her way so gingerly, and she’s so naturally slow, it’d be nothing to keep up with her. I let her pull ahead, though.
Flora’s not built for speed. She’s got haunches like you’ve never seen, thick and round from all angles—her hips, her ass cheeks, her thighs. She tapers toward the knee, so when she walks, she’s a little knock-kneed, and those hips sway, and that ass jiggles, and it’s just a fucking invitation.
Back home, she tries to hide it with long sweatshirts or jackets tied around her waist, and that’s fine by me, but I know what’s under there. It’s burned into my brain. Has been since I first noticed her.
She’s my mate. Eventually, she’s going to get down on her elbows and stick that ass in the air and beg me to make her feel good. Like in the grainy video of Kenna Scott in heat that got airdropped back in high school. When Alpha Shaw caught wind of it, he had everyone throw their phones in the bonfire because he didn’t understand how the cloud works.
His threat to pluck out the eyes of any male who watched it put an end to it, though. We’d all watched it, at least until we realized what we were seeing. At first, we thought it was just a naked female. It wasn’t until we heard her wolf whining that we knew she was in heat. No one wanted to die, so no one spoke of it again. I felt sick to my stomach for weeks.
We didn’t see much of Kenna after that. She dropped out, and even though she eats in the hall now, she doesn’t come to cookouts or runs. She takes care of her kid and keeps her head down.
When I was a kid, I was jealous of Kenna’s mate. Everyone was, no matter what kind of trash they talked about her. It’s a male’s deepest fantasy to have a beautiful female begging for it.
What happens when I get Flora back to pack territory? She goes into heat, and I put a pup in her belly, and then what?
Does she hide in the house while I leave early for work and head to the bar afterwards to drink myself into a stupor because she doesn’t want me around, and I act like she’s a pain in the ass, and bitch about the old ball and chain, when in reality, I’m avoiding the fact that my mate wishes I was a different male or that I didn’t exist at all?
Like Aunt Shona does, and my cousin’s mate Myra, and Kenna Scott and most mated females I know. Like my mom did toward the end.
My chest hurts. I rub it. I’m not used to being empty-handed. If I don’t have a hammer or a wrench, I’ve got a ball or my hand grip. I don’t like all this fucking walking.
And it’s too quiet.
And there are too many fucking birds.
I stretch my legs a bit and catch up to Flora. She’s panting harder. Her skin’s glistening, and her pink top is damp and sticking to her skin. I let her scent fill my nose and soothe my circling thoughts.
This isn’t complicated. I get her back home safe, we do the heat thing, and we figure it out.
“I could throw you over my shoulder and carry you back,” I say and instantly regret it.
She firms her chin, tightens her grasp on the backpack straps, and limps faster. Even if I couldn’t feel the pain through the bond, I can read it on her face.
“Think, Flora. You can’t run away from heat.”
She shifts into third gear, and now there’s a whimper under the panting each time she puts a foot down. It’s like every word that comes out of my mouth is the dumbest possible thing, perfectly designed to get me the opposite of what I want.
“I’m your mate. You can’t change it. Bram Blackburn’s out. Sorry.”
She stops in her tracks. The backpack hits the ground with a thud. The pink spots on her cheeks have spread all the way from her hairline to her neck. Her brown eyes spark, and all I want to do is toss her onto her back and drive my cock between her legs, fuck her until she makes those little squeaky shrieks she does when she comes, until she forgets about everything else.
How is that wrong?
How the fuck do I get there from here?
“I don’t w-want Bram Blackburn,” she growls.
“Then why’d you let him fuck you?” I’m raising my voice, and I swear I know better. I never yell at females. “Scrip? Was that it? You could’ve come to me, Flora.
Damn it.”
Her mouth drops into a little ‘o.’ For a second, there’s nothing but a crushing silence, punctuated by the chirping of one goddamn whippoorwill.
My lungs freeze.
She explodes.
“You want to know why Ilet
Bram Blackburn fuck me? No. No. Screw you.”
Her biceps bunch, and her hands fist. She’s preparing to attack, and I want her to. God, I want her to launch herself at me, but instead, she sucks in a breath and lets me have it.
“We were at Alpha Shaw’s birthday party, and you looked at me, and I was getting ready to go meet you, but Isla Sinclair brought you a beer, and that was that. You were done with me. I toss trash into the garbage with more ceremony than you dropped me. So you don’t get to give a shit about what I did with Bram.”
I open my mouth to argue, I guess, although I’ve got nothing in my mind, but she’s not finished.
“And then I went back to you. When you got bored with Isla or whatever, and you gave me the nod, I went right back to you.” She spears her fingers into her hair, messing up her ponytail. “Why the hell would I do that? I didn’t even say anything. I was just happy you wanted me again. I’m so stupid.”
She paces, wild-eyed, and for the first time today, I have the sense to keep my trap shut.
“You want to know why I let Bram take my virginity in the supply closet at the laundry? Really?”
My chest hurts, and I want to puke. I can’t answer, but she’s not even looking at me. She’s glaring past my shoulder, up the mountain.
“Because you were sitting next to Isla at the dining hall and having your boys fetch her a plate and putting your arm on the back of her chair, and I’m such an idiot that I got my feelings hurt. And Bram came by and said I did such a nice job getting the grass stains out of his compression shorts, could I take a look at his favorite shirt, and then he said I had pretty eyes and told me to show him the back, and I was young and hurt and intimidated and flattered, and I hadn’t figured out how things work yet.”
She collapses into a squat, as if she’s suddenly been deflated, and frowns at the ground, her lip trembling. My guts are knots. The pain drills into me from all directions—the bond, the look on her face, the crushing knowledge that
I did this,
I caused this, my stupidity, my shortsightedness.
She sniffs back her tears. “I didn’t realize then that no matter how good a job I do, how hard I work, how happily I go along with whatever anyone wants, I will always be worthless to that pack.” She looks up at me. “I am not worthless.”
She says all this with a shaky confidence I’ve never heard from her, and everything she said cuts,burns, and I want to fight because that’s what you do when someone makes you feel like this, but I’ve got one brain cell, and it’s screaming at me to not fuck this up.