AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CYRUS
After I cleaned the bathroom,I got out of the cabin as fast as I could, before Audrey’s scent could make me uncomfortably hard again, and found Knox pacing a trench in the ground in front of the porch.
His posture was so tight, I was afraid he’d pull something, and when he wrenched around to march my way, I could see his eyes were wild — but thankfully not dark with his wolf.
By some miracle, the collar was holding. The question was, for how long?
“I should have known,” he snarled at me. “Everything else about her is fucked up. Of course her heat would be the worst-case scenario.”
“Bishop’s got it handled.” And just Bishop. No matter what my wolf wanted.
“Like he handled her heat before?” He clenched and unclenched his hands and his lips curled back in a snarl in an obvious challenge.
“We should have known, but we didn’t,” I told him, my wolf heaving to take control and put Knox in his place for daring to challenge us. He might beanalpha, but I wasthealpha, and I had the strength to prove it.
But that wouldn’t help him calm down and I needed him calm to keep the collar intact. Because when it broke, his wolf would take over and not care if Knox wanted to be mated to Audrey or not.
“I’m going to find Rafe and let him know we’re here and that we need to stay. Then I’m going hunting. Come with me.” Maybe putting some distance between him and Audrey would help.
“I can’t hunt as a human.” His gaze jerked to the cabin door and the muscles in his jaw flexed. “And I can’t leave her.”
“You can’t fuck her, either,” I warned. “She won’t be lucid enough to say yes or no, and she has her hope set on Whil being able to transfer the bond.”
“I’m not going to ruin any chance she has of getting rid of me.” But he didn’t look away from the cabin.
How much of his feelings were because of the bond and how much because he actually cared for her? He didn’t like being around people, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have feelings. While he’d kept his distance from her and refused to talk to her, he’d spent the entire trip watching her.
Did he see what I saw? Did he see a shy, uncertain woman who’d been beaten down her entire life? And did he see how hard she was trying to keep up and be brave and face a realm filled with things she’d never experienced before?
Probably. He wasn’t dumb. He just couldn’t stand crowds or closed off spaces.
“Just hunt with me. Even if you stay in human form it’ll help control your wolf from breaking the collar.”
He turned his wild-eyed gaze back to me, his expression stricken. “The bond won’t let me leave her. Not when she’s like this.”
“Are you going to be able to stay away from her?” I didn’t want to force him to go with me, but we needed meat. I had to go hunting and I needed to know he wasn’t going to cause problems for Bishop.
“Yeah.” He huffed a bitter laugh and glance back at the cabin, his expression strained. “Never thought myconditionwould actually be good for something.”
He stormed to the far end of the porch, jerked around, and came back, resuming his pacing. It set my nerves on edge, but I knew it was the only thing burning off the angry energy building inside him.
“I won’t be gone long.”
He grunted his acknowledgment but didn’t look at me, and I headed down the path into Kelna.
The town was small, maybe five or six dozen houses, but the buildings were bigger than the average “village” house I’d seen in my travels on diplomatic missions with my parents and were well-maintained.
I found Rafe, his wife, Neera, and their daughter and her new husband, along with most of the villagers in the meadow behind the town. The wedding had been two nights ago, but it looked like the festivities were still going.
Both Rafe, the town magistrate, and his wife assured me we could stay as long as we needed and offered to send someone with food right away. I told her I’d collect everything after I’d gone hunting and take it to the cabin since I was positive Audrey didn’t want the townspeople hearing her having sex.
The next five days consisted of hunting and picking up baskets of fruit, vegetables, bread, and baked casseroles, and doing my damnedest to stay out of the cabin and the overwhelming scent of Audrey’s arousal.
As it was, I still had to jerk off multiple times in the day just to be able to focus. And Ineededto focus because Knox was hanging on by a thread, Bishop was fully consumed with Audrey, and Audrey was getting worse. Not better.
A heat fever usually peaked at the end of the second day or the beginning of the third, then the need to mate slowly diminished over the next couple of days from every couple of hours to eventually a few times a day, and then the woman’s temperature returned to normal.
But Audrey’s temperature remained high — thankfully not dangerously high like it had been when it first started but still high — and the duration between matings was getting shorter and shorter.
