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It makes me hate him with every fiber of my being.
“It is up to me actually, and I’ve said no. I’m not interested in discussing it any further; if you’ll excuse me, I have another meeting to get to.” I don’t, actually, but he doesn’t know that. Now that he’s shown up here, I’m worried he’ll keep poking around.
If Callum gets close enough to the pack house, he could not only smell Tess, but mind link to her since she’s still part of his pack. I selfishly don’t want her knowing he was here. It’s not like she seemed keen to return to his pack, but I see no reason to tempt fate. Not when the fates are clearly not on my side.
“We’re not done talking about this, Parker,” Callum protests, calling after me as I walk away from him, but I am done. It takes everything in me not to slam the office door on my way out.
* * *
No one will look me in the eyes when I make it back to the pack house. I can feel the hair at the back of my neck stand up as everyone makes themselves scarce. I take the steps two at a time up one staircase then the next. Somehow, I’m not surprised when I make it to the third floor. No one’s guarding the door, and it’s wide open with no sign of Tess inside.
“Dammit!” I spit into the empty room.
Where the hell is she?I link to Eloise, who I left in charge this morning when I headed to the office. She wasn’t my first choice, but I’d been battling one hell of a hangover, so I didn’t want to go out in search of a better option.
The gym.
The gym? Why the hell are they in the gym? There’s probably been people in and out of there by the dozens. Seeing her. Smelling her. Shit.
I make it downstairs to the main floor to the pack house gym in no time flat. The scene that greets me does nothing to ease my building anger. Everywhere I turn, this woman is causing me problems. The gym is flooded with members of my pack failing to mind their own damn business.
“Everybody out,” I growl.
Tess looks over her shoulder at me from where she’s squatting with weights in the corner. Someone that small shouldn’t have such a perky ass, it feels wrong somehow. But hell if I catch myself staring at it just like every other man in the room.
“Now!” I shout when they don’t get out fast enough.
Eloise gives me a bored expression as I storm toward them. “What part of staying in the room did you not understand?” I ask her. My instructions were explicit that Tess not go anywhere else in the house. She’s a flight risk, but she also clearly draws far too much attention to be wandering around out of my sight.
“Well?” I stare at Eloise, waiting for some sort of response. Tess has already turned back to her workout, studiously ignoring me.
She walks over, standing toe-to-toe with me, and lowers her voice to a whisper. “When you’ve had to stand by listening to the poor thing crying for hours on end, then you can yell at me for not following your directions. If I left her locked in there a minute longer, she’d have probably jumped off the balcony and you would have come home to a splattered mess.”
“What does she have to cry about?” I scoff. I made sure meals were being delivered this time, and my bedroom was practically ripped right from the pages of a magazine. The bedsheets alone cost a small fortune.
“You’re a real dick, Dom,” Eloise mutters, shouldering past me.
“Watch it,” I warn her, but the words might as well have been pointed at a brick wall. She gets away with too much shit because we grew up together, but I make a mental note to speak with her later about carrying on like that in front of someone who isn’t one of us.
“She’s right; you are a dick,” Tess says cheerfully as she finishes her last squat and turns to face me.
I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me as I study her. She’s sweating, the edges of her hair—coming loose from a braid—plastered against the side of her face, her chest heaving. She looks like she’s been properly fucked, and it makes my dick stir uncomfortably in my pants.
It doesn’t help that this is the most relaxed she’s been since I barged in to find her in Luca’s bedroom. She looks warm and pliant. She looks the way she felt when I kissed her.
That thought doesn’t help the situation with my dick, either.
“I want to know what your plan is.” Tess puts her hands on her hips, drawing my attention down to her small waist and the oversized gray pants she’s got on. They look like they’re cinched at the waist about as tight as they can go for her to be able to keep them up.
“Are those my sweatpants?” I ask. Fuck, that’s sexy.
“I needed something to wear,” she answers defensively. “Now answer me. What the hell are you keeping me here for? You don’t enjoy my company any more than I enjoy yours, and you can hardly punish me for being on your territory when it’s your own men that have dragged me here twice against my will.”
“You’re just staying here until the rogues are taken care of.”
No, tell her she’s staying forever, my wolf whines.We don’t need to be alone anymore.
His desperation makes me wince but not cave. She can’t stay forever, my reasons for rejecting her in the first place haven’t changed. I know that the right choice would be to reject her a second time—there’s no way the fates would make a third attempt to force her on me—but I’m just weighing my options.
