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“I’m sorry.” Glancing up, I saw his sympathetic look. “I don’t know what it’s like,” he added gruffly. “Do I know lust? Of course I do. When Hannah and I got together, I was consumed with wanting to spend every single moment of the day with her. It’s what attraction is…chemicals in our brain. I know it’s not the same for you, it’s more. Right?”
Licking my lips, I nodded. Checking the clearing to ensure no one was nearby, I lowered my voice to barely a whisper. “It’s like that. Lust…but multiplied. It feels like my brain is short-circuiting. Every molecule in my body wants her. I can’t think straight. I need to be inside her.”
Royce winced. “Who said romance was dead?” Royce muttered. “Look, we’re no strangers to sex. We’ve both been with females while they’re in heat and know how crazy it can be. Do you think it’s worse because she hasn’t had a full heat?”
We started walking to my house. The alpha’s house was in the center of our small town. It was big and had too many bedrooms for a single male, but the idea was for the alpha to find his partner and fill those rooms as soon as possible with their children. Pack life was about family. Bonds of a familial nature and friendship made a good pack. A tight pack. A pack that was safe to raise your kids so your kids could have kids.
She was just a kid.
And here I was, thinking back to her again. I could still taste her toothpaste, for fuck’s sake.
“I think it’s that,” Royce carried on, oblivious to the fact I was thinking about Kezia again, “she’s extra…” He paused, struggling for a suitable word. “Potent!” he blurted out. “That’s it. She’s your mate?—”
I grabbed his arm. “Do you want to tell the fucking pack?” I hissed at him.
“Sorry.” He held his hands up in apology. “She’s your, you know,” he said with a look around. “And every time you seem to be near her, her heat starts.”
“Does it?” I looked at him in surprise.
“Doc and I were talking about it earlier. It’s what I was coming to tell you when I came into the bunker.”
Royce was no saint. Before he met Hannah, he was a faithless dick who slept with anyone, so to see this blushing prude at my side earned him a hard jab to the ribs.
“What the fuck was that for?” he asked with a growl.
“You’ve seen worse, much worse. Fuck, you’ve done worse with many different women, so this holier-than-thou act is fooling no one. Least of all me.”
“I’ve never fucked a virgin,” he hissed at me. “I’ve never walked in on my best friend, my Alpha, about to fuck a girl half his age, either. She’s a fucking innocent. What the fuck are you thinking?”
We’d reached my house, and I climbed the steps to the main door, opening it and pushing it too wide with anger, the door banging off the wall as I did. Taking the stairs two at a time, I strode into my bedroom, ready to be free of these wet clothes when I heard him at my back.
“Give me five minutes,” I snarled. “I need a shower. Meet me in the study.”
He didn’t argue, and as I heard my bedroom door close, I went into the adjoining bathroom, my hands on either side of the sink as I stared at myself in the mirror.
“She’s not half my age,” I grumbled to myself. “I’m twelve, maybe thirteen years older.” I was fourteen years older. I knew it, my reflection knew it, and my beta knew it. “She’s not a child,” I counterargued. “She’s old enough, more than old enough. Age means nothing to shifters.” It was true. After a female’s first heat, no one cared what age they were in human terms. We stopped aging like humans anywhere between twenty-one and twenty-five. Age was simply a number. Pushing myself off the basin, I stood back. “This is stupid. You’re talking to your reflection.”
I could still taste her.
With mounting frustration, I grabbed my toothbrush and toothpaste and brushed my teeth, pissed off I was trying so desperately to eradicate the taste of her. But I knew, deep down, it was too late. The taste of her was imprinted on my soul. My very soul. Tossing the toothbrush aside, I started the shower.
I needed to stop this. I was an alpha. I had a rogue wolf locked in the bunker and only four of my pack and I knew, five if Royce had told Hannah. I snorted. Of course, Royce had told Hannah.
I had my mate locked in a bunker in my packlands, and my pack didn’t know. Only three people knew she was my mate.
What the fuck was I doing?
Stepping under the hot water, my mind was racing. I’d worked hard to make our pack better. My father was a chickenshit tyrant and had run roughshod over this pack for too long. On my return from overseas, I couldn’t believe the damage he had done in the few years I’d been gone. One morning, that was all it took for me to see how beaten the Blackridge Peak Pack had become.
I challenged him the same day I returned. On the dawn of the next day, I promised them I was an alpha worth following. My pack would rebuild, and we’d find our return to what we once were together. My door would always be open, and I promised them full transparency. We’d be a proud pack once more.
It only took us months, and we were back to that. My pack had pride once more. Fast forward twenty months, and I had my eighteen-year-old virgin mate locked in the bunker my father used as a jail cell.
Luna, what was I thinking? I was risking everything for her.
She was wild. She was a lone wolf. She was a killer.
She was my mate.
