Page 10 of Oakheart

I had no business speculating what we might build where, or where Dad’s house might fit into the configuration so he was most comfortable, or what kind of house Aleks might like.

Definitely not, because there’d be space for him in Katya’s home, and having any curiosity about him was sure to only bring me trouble.

But I’d been lost in the clouds, the drone of the chainsaw allowing my thoughts to wander toward what might be next. Surely Aleks would be a better alpha than Grant or Reeve had been. I didn’t know him well and hadn’t known him long, but that much was obvious.

I was thinking about building a whole new settlement when Aleks crashed into me with every bit of velocity and power a werewolf of his size could squeeze out. We went flying through the air, his arms wrapped tight around me, and hit the ground a second later, wheezing.

My gummed-up brain barely registered the groan of the falling tree or the crash a moment later, but when the ground shook with the force of it, my stomach twisted into a tight knot.

A tree had fallen, and my dumb ass had been in the way of it.

Aleks had saved my life.

Dumbfounded and panting, I stared up at him. A lock of his golden hair had fallen across his sweaty forehead, and his bright blue eyes were swimming with fear.

It wasn’t a look I was used to seeing on a wolf like him—big and strong and unwilling to show any weakness.

While we’d been working, he’d taken off his shirt and thrown it over a branch. At the time, Idefinitelyhadn’t stared. Hadn’t noticed his perfect flat abs, or how well-formed his pecs were, all dense with muscle and golden from the sun.

He held his shoulders back and his chin up, and his smile when he laughed with Leo made my heart stop.

He looked like one of those men in the ads for underwear, the ones with mostly naked men walking around dramatically in front of a storm. Or like a statue, just carved perfection.

He was only twenty, and a werewolf, and looking back, I’d known other wolves like that—Jax and Seth and Kent, before they’d left—who’d grown up so staggeringly perfect that it was hard to stand beside them without feeling like you’d come up short.

Even harder to lay under them.

No, really, harder. Because every bit of my blood had gotten all shaken around by the forces at work on my body when he’d sent us flying, and now it didn’t know where to go, but it was going in the wrong direction.

I absolutely could not get hard pinned under the future alpha and Grant’s heir, who was a full eight years younger than me and already twice the wolf I’d ever be.

But then he was patting me down, looking me over, and my cock ached worse than my back where it’d hit the ground.

I squirmed, adjusting my leg so that maybe I could hide it from him. For a few seconds, all we could do was stare into each other’s eyes.

Then he reminded me that a tree had been falling at me.

A tree!

Oh fuck, and my mistake had sent him careening toward getting flattened. Aleks might outrank me in every way that mattered, but right then, it was my responsibility to keep him safe. I was the one with experience on a jobsite.

I gripped his shoulders hard, the muscle barely giving beneath my tight fingers. “I’m so sorry,” I rasped, panicked. “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t paying attention, but I should’ve been. I know better. I do. I put you in danger, and I’m—I won’t. I won’t drift off like that again, I swear. I didn’t mean to?—”

Aleks’s hand closed over my cheek. His thumb brushed beneath my eye, and his brow puckered—not like he was mad, but like?—

Did he feel sorry for me?

At least that meant he probably hadn’t noticed my boner, though anxiety was doing a damn good job of shutting that down.

I bit both my lips shut between my teeth and went perfectly still beneath him. What was I supposed to make of this? Nobody’s ever just.. . touched my face. The steady stroke of his thumb might’ve been soothing, but I didn’t trust myself to understand what he meant. Rather than risk thinking anything, I shut down and waited, tense and nervous.

“It is fine, Cash,” Aleks said softly. “You are fine.”

I couldn’t tell if that was a question or a statement, so I nodded. “I’m okay.”

Leo, with his earmuffs around his shoulders, had turned off the chainsaw, set it down, and come over to us. He held out a hand to help Aleks up, then offered it to me as well, pulling with his full strength so I went from basically flat on my back to standing in half a second.

When I met his dark eyes, he was scowling at me. Shit, if Aleks wasn’t mad, maybe Leo had the good sense to be.