Page 23 of Fighting the Alpha

The question is so blunt it makes a sudden, awkward laugh bubble up out of me. “No! I—” I hesitate. “Maybe. I haven’t told him. Why, did he say something?”

“No, he just kept giving me theselooks,” Levi says, giving me a startlingly accurate impression of the exact look that Marcus has been aiming in my direction all week. “He kept saying ‘don’t fuck with Dylan’, and ‘this is not a game’. These types of things. I felt like I was getting a speech from yourpapa.”

I cringe, although I’m grateful that Marcus is looking out for me. “He can be kind of intense, I know, he just…”

“He is a good friend,” Levi says solemnly. “But…”

My stomach drops. “What?”

Levi winces, brushing a stray hair off my forehead and muttering something frustratedly in French. He sighs heavily. “I cannot sign the contract without knowing where we stand. Your intense friend is right.”

Dread creeps into the pit of my stomach. “What do you mean?”

“I mean…” he smooths the crease between his brows, placing an unusually tentative hand on my hip. “I mean that I have been a little crazy since I left your apartment.”

I chuckle weakly. “Crazy how?”

“Ah, you are not going to make this easy for me, uh?” he says. “I liked being with you, Dylan. In your apartment. Not just the fucking, but also—being in bed with you, and feeding you, and sitting on your sofa together. And before I left, when we watched that show with the strange people buying storage thingys—”

“Storage units,” I say, blood rushing in my ears. We’d watched a straight two hours of it before Levi left the morning after my rut broke, even though he couldn’t stop complaining about how terrible it was. “You mean Storage Hunters?”

“Oui.I liked that, too.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“Shut up, please, Dylan, I am trying to do something embarrassing.”

“Okay.”

He sighs. “I did not know if the things you said, about us training together here, and not wanting other alphas… I did not know if they were real. You were on your rut. Sometimes we say things we do not mean when we are in rut. But I—I wanted them to be real. This is what made me a little crazy.”

His fingers curl a little tighter around my hip, and my breath hitches. He frowns at me, and I realize I’m just staring at him with a wild smile on my face and my heart nearly beating out of my chest.

“You can stop shutting up now,” he clarifies.

“I meant it,” I say gruffly, bunching my fists in the soft material of his sweater and pulling him closer. “All of it. I want you to train here. I don’t want other alphas. I want you. In my apartment, and on my sofa, and in my bed. I haven’t figured out exactly why you make me feel the way you do yet, but I know I don’t want it to stop.”

Levi cups my jaw, his scent blooming warmly with relief and happiness. It smells so fucking good. “I also do not want it to stop.”

“Full disclosure, I went a little crazy too,” I admit. “I thought I’d said too much. I thought maybe you were put off by my—by me being so—” I frown, “—so un-alpha.”

Levi groans dramatically. “Again with theun-alpha. What made you think I was put off? Was it when I came for the 10th time in two days? Or maybe when I licked the cum off your abs and called you perfect? Was that it?”

“Jesus, Levi—” I squirm under his gaze, flushing when his grip tightens on my jaw, turning from gentle to firm in an instant and sending a wave of heat through me.

“I will keep doing these things until you understand that you are a perfect alpha, however you like to be treated in bed. Now, come here,mon loup.”

He closes the gap between us, letting out a low growl when my hands tangle in his hair as he kisses me like he hasn’t stopped thinking about it since he left my apartment three weeks ago.

“So, you’ll sign the contract?” I murmur against his lips when we pull apart, his hair ruffled and our chests heaving.

He steals another chaste kiss. “I will sign the contract.”

“The media and the other fighters in our division will probably speculate. If we start going out together in public, training at the same gym…”

Saying it out loud sets off a pang of anxiety in my stomach, but Levi is as unbothered as ever, his eyes dancing with amusement. “Let them speculate. I do not give two shits, Dylan. We do things our own way. We’ll fuck with them, it will be fun.”

“Fun,” I repeat, smoothing my hands down his torso. I meet his eyes, and he’s so handsome it almost hurts to look at him. “Do you want to come back to mine and watch more shitty television?”