Page 38 of Wolf It Down, Knot Me Up

“Look, I didn’t come down here to get judged. I’ve had enough of living with regret, so I don’t need three more men to feel guilty about.”

She steps over the log, and then she’s gone, up the track into the dark, fast, before any of us gets a word out.

“You fucking ass,” Roman roars, on his feet, but I barely hear him.

Under the anger, one thing cuts through and stays. She came down here already halfway to sending us back, and instead of giving her a single reason to think twice, I cracked open the worst thing that ever happened to her and used it to win a point. She handed me her grief, and I handed her a reason to run. Fuck!

I stand quickly, a growl ripping from my chest. “I’m going after her. Roman, you stay here.”

“You sure you can manage that,” Grayson mocks with a sarcastic tone, “without fucking it up worse than you already have?”

I snarl at him, then sprint into the woods after our Omega.

10

LUCY

Imake it maybe thirty feet along the track before I look back, and there’s a shape stepping out of the firelight after me.

He’s big and charging in my direction fast.

My heart slams into my throat, and I break into a run. I don’t even have to see his face, as I know from the outline that it’s one of the Alphas, all shoulders and chest. My sneakers pound the dirt with each fast step I take, roots grabbing at my feet, while dark trees swallow the track ahead.

“Lucy!” Wolf growls. Of course it’s him, yet hearing his voice lights the whole fire in my chest again. Fury and shame also crash over me at once, since he had no right to sit there and call me out in front of everyone. Sure, it was exactly what I was doing, hunting for a reason to see if taking the pills was even an option, but he read me in two seconds flat.

Which is why I’d rather die than talk to him. So I run.

“Go away!” I fling the words over my shoulder and push harder, lungs already burning, cold air scraping down my throat.

The track narrows, the pines crowd in, and the last of the firelight dies behind me. Somewhere amid the panic in my head, a voice reminds me exactly how it felt to have his hands on me in the ferns, how much I wanted to lean back into all that heat, and I hate that voice. I want to bury it here in the dirt.

I glance back, and he’s bigger, closer.

Behind me, his footfalls pick up. “You can be angry!” he shouts as he gains on me, and God, he doesn’t even sound out of breath. “Just stop running before you break your neck in the dark.”

“Stop chasing me and I will!”

“No.”

I put on a burst of speed out of pure spite, glancing back again, and he’s right there. Oh, shit!

I face front and fly forward.

The track bends and blows open into a small clearing where the pines fall away, and the moon pours down through the gap, laying the whole space bare. A tree stump sits off-center, waist-high and pale. In the distance, the lodge lamps burn low and gold, close enough to see, too far to save me. My foot skids in the dew. I stumble, and that half second is all he needs.

His hand clamps around my wrist. He wrenches me around mid-stride, and the whole world spins, moon and trees and darkness. I crash into his chest with a gasp knocked clean out of me. Both my palms smack flat against him, his heart going as hard and fast as my own under my touch. Heat pours off him, and for one breathless second, I’m exactly where every screaming cell in my body has wanted to be all night.

Then I shove him. Hard.

“Leave me alone, Wolf.”

I stagger back, and he lets me go, watching with those intense eyes, his chest heaving for breath. I keep backing away over the grass until the backs of my thighs hit the stump. The breeze lifts the hair off my overheated face, but it’s doing nothing to cool me down.

“Why were you running?” he demands.

“You’re the one who came crashing through the trees like a bear after me.”

“Thought you’d like that.” He steps closer with a sly grin. “That’s the whole fantasy, isn’t it? Girl runs and a big bad thing chases her down, then catches her.” He drags his tongue slowly across his lower lip.