Page 143 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

He helped me settle against the pillows, then reached for the blanket at the foot of the bed. His hands were careful when he pulled it over my legs, so careful I wanted to scream at him and kiss him again in equal measure.

Then he stepped away but I caught his sleeve before he could go too far.

He froze.

I didn’t look at him. “I’m still mad.”

“I know.”

“Don’t sound relieved.”

“I am not.”

“You are.”

A pause. “Yes.”

The honesty almost pulled a laugh from me. It didn’t quite make it.

“I am mad,” I said again, because it mattered that he understood the shape of it. “But I am not ashamed.”

His breath caught.

I looked at him then. “Don’t make me carry shame for wanting you. I have carried enough things that didn’t belong to me.”

His face changed and the gold in his eyes dimmed slightly, not gone, but softened by something that hurt worse than hunger.

“I don’t want that,” he said.

“Then help me not do it.”

He looked down at the hand I still had curled in his sleeve. “Tell me how.”

I released his sleeve and lay back carefully. The bite ached now, the heat fading into a dull pulse that felt too much like loneliness for my comfort.

“Stay close,” I said.

His gaze lifted.

“Not in the chair by the door. Not across the room pretending distance solves things.” I looked at the chair beside the bed. “There.”

The request cost me, and he knew it.

“You are angry,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You still want me close.”

“Yes.”

The word came out hard. A challenge. A confession. A problem.

Ian’s face changed. Then he nodded once and sat in the chair beside the bed, not touching me, not taking the hand I had not offered, not hiding across the room where both of us could pretend the kiss had not happened.

For a long time, we said nothing. The moonlight shifted across the floor. Outside the windows, the ocean moved in the dark, steady and indifferent to werewolf politics, accidental mate bonds, and women who kept making decisions their survival instincts considered questionable.

Inside, the bite pulsed under my bandage, no longer only a wound and not yet anything I trusted.