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“Yes. I know you want to leave, but this is my one chance. Mylastchance. We both know it, and I… fucking hell, Helene. How can I convince you to choose me when you won’t even talk to me?”
“Choose you?” I look down at the ring on my finger. The bite on my neck is permanent, but after his reaction when he saw me without the ring, that might as well be permanent, too. “Wow. I didn’t think I was supposed to get a choice.”
I don’t know what hurts him more: my flatly conversational tone, or what I implied. I wasn’t wrong, though. He didn’t let me choose—and, in his next breath, West remedies that.
“Then reject me.”
His voice is a ragged whisper. Because of that, I had to have heard him wrong. No way he said what I thought he did.
“What did you say?”
“Reject me,” he whispers, his voice slipping beneath the cracks of the door. “That’s all you have to do. Reject any bond we might have and maybe I can finally find the strength to give up on you. Then you can finally have what you want. Me gone from your life.”
If only it was as easy as that. Say the words, and no more conflicted emotions when it comes to West… I wish I could.
But I can’t.
I don’t want to believe that I spend three years leading him on, or that I’m being cruel now by refusing to do what he said. The opposite, actually. As an omega she-wolf, his pain is my pain. I’ve done everything I can to blunt it, even knowing that we’ll never be.
If I reject him the same way that Quinn did, I would break this male even more than I already have. If I let him believe that I want him gone from my life, I’d crush him.
All it takes is one half of an intended pair to say the words “I reject you” andmeanit for the promised mate bond to snap. When Quinn did, West was glad. He wanted Quinn to set him free. But if I do it… it won’t work the same way because we don’t have a mate bond.
That’s the problem. We never had one, so if I make him hear me pointedly reject him, all I’m doing is ripping open the gaping wound in his chest I gave him three years ago and rubbing some salt in it.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I whisper back.
“You don’t think I’m hurting now?”
I know he is. “We can go home. Talk it out over after a little distance between us.”
“Reject me first. My wolf won’t stop me from returning you to Hickory then.”
Even if that was true… “I can’t.”
“I’ve never asked you for anything. Not like this. Not like you did to me. But if you ever care… if you ever loved me… do this, and then maybe it won’t hurt so fucking bad.”
“West, you don’t know what you’re asking—”
“Yes, I do! Damn it, Helene. Reject me!”
“I can’t.”
His voice booms through the door. “Why not?”
“Because I wouldn’t mean it!”
Even before the last word of my shout finishes echoing, the door flings open.
His chest is heaving. That’s the first thing I notice. It’s heaving, slicked with sweat, without any shirt in sight. He’s got on a pair of jeans and nothing else. Fresh from his run in his fur, he yanked on his jeans and left it at that. Probably because he didn’t expect me to look at him again.
I’m looking now.
His hair is mussed. His eyes are a striking golden shade that tells me he’s seconds away from losing control. Arms hanging at his side, though his hands are curled into fists. No claws that I can see, but that doesn’t reassure me.
He’s looking at me with a hungry, yearning expression, but his human side is still calling the shots as he takes one step past the threshold into my territory.
I could stop him. I could tell him to turn around, to get off my territory, to leave me alone… he would listen. No doubt in my mind that he would listen.
