Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
“My what?”
He does it again, and it’s so weird. The way he’s holding my tummy reminds me of how I hold Harriet’s when I cradle her on my forearm.
“Your squishiness,” he says, the faintest hint of playfulness in his voice.
Alec isn’t playful.
“Well, leave my squishiness alone,” I say, but I stop squirming. He doesn’t back off and moving only makes me jiggle.
“I like it.” He gives it one last squeeze before he wraps both arms around me again to hold me to his chest, smooshing my cheek against the place where his heart thumps and the bond flows.
“No you don’t,” I mumble into his sticky, cooling skin.
“I like your body. You know that,” he says, his voice gritty with exhaustion.
“How would I know that?” No one likes my body. It’s an embarrassment. I’m never allowed to forget it.
“Flora.” He sighs. “What do you think we were doing all those times we messed around?”
He was taking what he could get. What came easy.
“Flora.” He jostles his knee, jiggling me.
“You tell me what we were doing,” I say, sour.
He kisses my temple, not at all tender and sweet. He pecks it like his face accidentally bumped my forehead. It’s the first time he’s kissed me.
“I don’t know about you,” he says. “But I was trying not to fuck the shit out of you.”
My heart bottoms out. “Because you didn’t want to dishonor your future mate, messing around with someone like me.”
“Because I knew if I let myself, I wouldn’t stop.”
He’s lying, right? This is him trying to smooth things over since I’m his mate now. He’s marked me. The bond is strong and solid. He’s trapped, so he wants to rewrite the past.
But it’s just—Alec doesn’t bother to lie.
“I want my shirt.” I don’t want to be naked anymore, and besides, now that the sun’s going down, the parts not in direct contact with Alec’s skin are getting chilly.
He groans and leans forward, folding me in half, squashing my squish and not loosening his grip for a second as he snags a T-shirt from one of my sad little piles.
“You can let me go now.” I struggle to get the shirt over my shoulders. His arms are in the way.
“You’ll bail.”
Not now, at this very minute. My legs are jelly, the mark in my neck throbs, and I want to be still. Everything’s upside down. I’m mated. I got knotted.
Shit.
Did we make a baby?
My brain shorts.
“I have to pee.” I excuse myself, stumbling to my feet and hustling across the meadow to the tree line. I find a big oak, squat behind it, and while I wait for my shy bladder, I poke the squish Alec had just been manhandling and force myself to think.
A baby.
How did I not plan for this? Consider it, at least?
It’s like ever since my heat hit, life’s been unfolding at triple speed, and I’m racing to keep a step ahead so I don’t get dragged behind. In all the bustle and angst, I conveniently didn’t spare a thought to how all of this has nothing to do with feelings and plans and personal epiphanies.
It’s about biology. Making shifter babies.
I’ve got a half-sleeve of gingersnaps, some canned soups, and no pack. How am I going to keep a pup alive?
I waggle my butt to drip dry as best I can and stand. I’m numb and suddenly, unequivocally, overwhelmingly terrified.
I take a single step back toward camp, and Alec’s wolf snarls, close, a few feet away, hidden by another thick-trunked tree. He prowls into view in his human form, but his fangs have descended, and there are patches of fur on his shoulders and chest.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, striding for me as he shoots murderous glares at the wood. He herds me back against the tree, placing himself between me and the empty woods.
I try to push him aside. He’s unmovable.
“Can’t I have a moment of peace?” I shove him harder. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“Then why do you smell like fear?”
“This is ridiculous.” He was right about the feral clearing the area. I can’t hear or scent another animal bigger than a squirrel, and he’s got me crushed against a tree, trying to protect me from my own freak out, and my little puddle of wee is literally six inches away from his foot.
I snort. Just a tiny one. His wolf growls, rousing my wolf from her post-heat nap. She grumbles back, none too happy to be disturbed, and I remember how tired I am, too.
“I was just panicking about all of this. There’s no threat or anything.”
He cranes his neck to peer down and check my face, and I guess he believes me because he steps aside.
“You don’t have to panic. Everything is fine.” He gestures for me to walk ahead of him back to the meadow. “We’ll sleep here tonight, and tomorrow, we’ll go back home. We’ll run as our wolves. It’ll take half the time.”
He keeps talking as we pick our way through the tall grass and come to the spot with our quilt. It smells like crushed violets and sex.
“When we get back, we’ll move you into my place. I’ve got a kitchen. Got a gas range and a fridge. A side-by-side. I can get an oven if you want one. We can move the rabbit down, too. If you want.”
He sits and guides me down beside him. “Can’t lie, my cousins might try to go after it, but I’ve got an idea about some measures I can take.”
He lays on his side, spooning me to his chest, tucking one of his hard biceps under my head as a cushion.
“I was thinking traps might do it, but I’ve got to give credit where it’s due, and I think most of ’em could outsmart a trap, given enough time. Better to secure the rabbit. Best offense is a good defense.”
He tries to wrap his free arm around my middle, but when I wriggle and huff, he rests it on my hip instead, which is better, I guess. My hip’s more firm, less squishy.
The ground is hard, and Alec is a furnace against my back, but the night wind is picking up, and I’ve got goosebumps all down the fronts of my thighs.
My body is more tired than it’s ever been. I’m sore between the legs, sticky and cold, and every muscle aches, especially the ones that held my core upright while Alec pistoned his cock into me, over and over, until I came in a way I didn’t know was even possible.
I’m uncomfortable, but my dumb heart doesn’t want to be anywhere else in the world. Alec’s actually talking to me, holding me like he’s armor, and I’m something precious, smelling like salt and musk and pots bubbling with sugar and fruit.
I don’t have to be mad and hurt. No one’s making me. I could let it go, snuggle deeper into his arms, and go along for as long as this impossible dream lasts. Go back to Salt Mountain and cook his dinners in his kitchen, hide in his house and raise his pup, and when people run their mouths about Alec Cameron’s disgustingly fat mate, I wouldn’t hear them, so what would it matter?
I wriggle onto my back and stare at the dark sky. I want to sleep more than anything, but my brain won’t stop. It dashes from thought to thought like when my wolf was first let loose in the woods.
A baby.
Salt Mountain.
Alec.
Maybe a baby girl.
She could take after her pa, a lot of girls do, but maybe she’d take after her dam. Maybe she’ll be born with chipmunk cheeks and chubby thighs with rolls, and everyone will love to tickle her to make those fat legs kick, but they’ll be watching with eagle eyes.
How much is she being fed? How often? What’s on her plate? Why is she like that? Shifters aren’t fat. Our kind lives in harmony with nature, and fat is unnatural, unhealthy, and wrong, and if a fat shifter exists, they shouldn’t.
They have to be fixed. Helped. Pinched when they reach for a cookie at the baked goods table. Lectured to do better, eat less, run more, no matter what they’re actually doing, it doesn’t matter, they’re probably lying.
They must be told over and over that they’re fat, because they must not know, must not truly understand, because if they did, they’d fix themselves.