Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
His lips quirk. “Are you changing the subject again already, Annie?”
My heart rate kicks up another beat. He says that like he knows me. He doesn’t. But the way he says my name like he’s accustomed to it—I don’t hate it.
I hold the book a little higher.
His lips curl higher. “It’s about what packs should do instead of claiming to own land.”
“Are all the books about the same thing?”
“Pretty much.”
I return it to the stack.
“You’re not interested?” He’s still smiling. It’s not a grin or anything, more like a soft curve, but he’s clearly enjoying this—talking to me.
I shift position to rest on my other butt cheek. My fingers twitch. I wish I had my knitting.
“I like fiction,” I say.
He kind of lights up. “Oh, I’ve got something you’ll like,” he says and makes to come over. Before I can tense up, though, he catches himself. “There’s a book at the bottom I want to show you.” He glances toward the crate. “All right?”
He waits until I nod and then prowls over slowly to sit beside me. His earthy scent follows him, filling my lungs, making me feel strangely greedy.
Quarry Pack females always complain when a male’s wolf rolls in his kill and then trots into the lodge to let everyone know what he’s found. I never understood why the males insisted on doing it since they could just shift and tell people what they caught. I get it now.
I want to roll in this scent. Wear it like a coat. Snuggle deep into it. I inhale quicker so I can get more into my lungs. It’s not a particularly good smell—no one would make a cologne out of it—but it eases my chest and makes me feel languid and weightless, like I’m floating in space.
I’m hardly paying attention as Justus takes all the books out of the crate to get a hardback at the very bottom. I hadn’t noticed it earlier. It’s an old children’s book.
Thumbelina. The fabric cover is threadbare in places, and the gold embossed lettering is tarnished.
I remember the story vaguely from the early years at Moon Lake Academy. It’s a human fairy tale.
Justus resettles himself on the pallet so that his thigh is pressed to mine. Now we’re both perched on the edge, but I’ve folded myself up as tight as possible, and he’s manspreading, knees bent and wide open, totally comfortable. And why wouldn’t he be? It’s his den—despite what he says—his bed, his pack, his territory. Whatever he wants to call himself, it’s clear that he’s the strongest here, the top of this particular food chain.
The pecking voice should be rattling off these facts, but she’s grown eerily quiet.
“Look at this,” he says, flipping to a full-page illustration.
A tiny woman, Thumbelina, is kneeling on an enormous lily pad. In the murky water underneath, huge wide-mouthed fish with bulging eyes swim among the reeds. She covers her face with her hands in despair. A monarch hovers in mid-air, gawking at her while she cries.
The colors are lovely in the lamplight—butter yellow, crimson, olive green—but I don’t like the picture. Thumbelina is scared and alone, and the butterfly just gapes at her while the fish swarm underneath, horrified surprise on their fishy faces. Something terrible is coming, and she can’t see it.
Justus smooths the page with a calloused thumb. “It reminds me of you. That’s why I traded for it.”
I feel like I’ve been socked in the stomach. “I have brown hair,” I argue. The woman in the picture is a blonde, but I know why the sad, weeping lady stranded on a lily pad reminded him of me.
What was it that he said that day by the river?
“What a sad female you are. You stink like prey. You would make weak, spindly young.” I don’t realize I’m reciting the words out loud until he sucks in a breath and tenses, the warmth of his thigh disappearing from mine.
I brace for my own fear stink, but it doesn’t come. His chest rumbles softly. I glance over. He’s still holding the book open, but he’s staring across the den, his jaw clenched.
“I was angry when I said that.” He pauses. “I’ve wished a thousand times that I could take it back.”
He means it. I can hear the regret in his voice, as well as read it clear as day on his face, but it doesn’t make me feel any better at all. It actually stokes a strange, new anger in my chest.
“You don’t have to say all that.” I don’t want a sincere apology that I have to graciously accept.
“I was young and stupid,” he says. “It’s not an excuse, but it’s true, all the same.”
I don’t want excuses. We were both so young, after all, and I didn’t react the way a female is supposed to with her mate, and he didn’t try to hurt me, not ’til the end, and that was his bruised ego. I see that now that I’ve let myself remember the day, a little, in the broadest strokes.
“I am not proud of myself,” he goes on. “You were scared, and I couldn’t see past my own hurt pride. I am sorrier than you can know.” He pins me with his soulful, earnest brown eyes. I drop mine, my fingers curling into fists.
I don’t want him to be sorry, and I don’t want to see things from his point of view. I want what I lost—a proper nest indoors with blankets and pillows and lavender sachets, excitement and anticipation and joy, a mate and a pup and a home of my own. I want what other people get, all the time, with no fuss at all.
I want a life where I haven’t been afraid every minute of every day. I want to go back in time and leave Aunt Nola’s bag on the table. I want my dam back, and Justus’s “sorry” is a poke in the eye. It fixes nothing, changes nothing, and we both know it wasn’t even his fault, not all of it, maybe not even most of it, but he can say sorry to me because he’s so strong that he can afford to take the blame.
I hate him. I hate this. I hate myself.
“Annie?”
I clench my fists and glare a hole through an invisible spot on the rug. I wish I could say sorry, too. That I wish I’d done things differently, and Ido wish that, but I also know Icouldn’t have. I’m a half-dozen coping mechanisms in a trench coat, and the only reason I function at all, day to day, is I do the same things with the same people and force everything that scares me deep under the surface like those ugly, terrified, teeming fish in the picture.
Justus exhales and flips ahead several pages. Then, slowly—so very slowly—he slides the book over so it’s propped on my knees. He’s flipped to a different picture. In this one, Thumbelina is riding a blackbird, gazing down with a serene smile at a miniature fairy prince lounging on a white morning glory throne. He’s wearing baggy green harem pants, a vest with no shirt, and a gold crown with spikes like sun rays.
Justus taps the lady. “She reminds me of you because she’s beautiful. Like you.”
Warmth spreads through my belly. She doesn’t look anything like me, but he’s clearly not lying to flirt or flatter. Ivo and Jaime and their type will say things like that to try their luck with the unmated—and unhappily mated—protected females. Justus isn’t like that. He’s not slick in any way. He’s what Old Noreen would call a ‘rough instrument.’
He thinks I’m beautiful.
I let my gaze flicker to his face. He’s watching me. My cheeks flame. He looks away for a split second, his face stern, but if I tune into the faint bond and listen closely, I can tell he’s not mad—just bashful—and his eyes come right back. Like he can’t help it, and he doesn’t want to, either.
He lets his thigh touch mine again. His upper arm, too. I curl my fingers around the top edges of the book and grip it tight.
I’m not panicking. The voice is silent. My wolf is conked out. I’m tucked away in this cozy den, alone except for a male—my mate—and despite the earlier bump in the road, I’m okay. In fact, I’m so afraid of tipping the moment over that I don’t dare move.
I watch Justus watch me.
“Our irises are the same color,” I say.
“Yours have sunbursts.”
They do. I have thin golden halos around my pupils, but no one’s ever noticed them. I widen my eyes as big as I can and bat my lashes a few times, my cheeks reheating immediately.
What am I doing? I’m being goofy. I’m an idiot. My face catches fire. My bones are going to melt. I’m going to sink off this pallet and disappear under the rug forever, and I’ll still be mortified.
Justus grins.
My gaze falls to his mouth. The bristles closest to his mouth are a slightly lighter brown than the rest of his beard. His canines dent his lower lip, but when his smile disappears, so do his fangs.
Is his beard as scratchy as it looks? Are his lips as soft?
Whistling softly, like he did when he was warning me that he was back with the stew, Justus reaches over and takes my hand, coaxing it from the book, and places it against his cheek. I let him.
The patrols at Quarry Pack whistle when they pass our cabin or Abertha’s cottage, so I’m not startled. Is it a common thing, or did he pick it up from them when his wolf was stalking me?
He nuzzles my palm. His beard is coarse. I let the pad of my thumb rest on his bottom lip. It is soft.
He nips my thumb, gently, grinning for a brief second when I squeak. I snatch my hand away. But not too far. He chases my palm with his cheek until I cradle it again. Our faces are closer now. Inches away.
How did I end up sitting so close to him? I blame his scent; it’s turned my brain muzzy.
It’s a trap.
The voice is so far away, it’s a whisper on the wind.
I raise my fingers to his long hair. It’s thick and coarse, too, but it’s not dirty and knotted like when I first saw him.
“This was all matted and tangled before,” I say.
He hums in agreement. “I mudded it up.”