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He pours himself some scotch, barely looking at me as he asks, “Is it what you want?”
“I want the mating pact between Ashton Daniels and I dissolved. I want it dissolved or else—” Or else, what? I’ll leave the pack forever? They can’t force me to stay, but the thought of trying to live in the human world on my own, without my father’s financial support, terrifies me.
“Never resort to ultimatums, Bailey,” he says calmly. “It puts you in a weak position and ends a negotiation.”
“It’s not a negotiation. It’s just…I can’t be with him. The thought of the mating ceremony alone disgusts me.” My face gets hot talking about it in front of him. I quickly add, “And I don’t want to have to live with him and be the mate he wants me to be.”
Tears roll down my cheeks and I swipe them away, but the words I don’t want to say, the ones I haven’t dared myself to even think, force their way out, pushed by my panic. “I’m afraid.”
Now that I’ve acknowledged my fear, the full force of it grips me. Sheer terror, to my bones. Worse than the thought of leaving the pack, worse than the idea of sleeping on the street somewhere or starving to death. I would rather die than be forced into a mating with Ashton.
“Don’t be,” is all Nathan says. Again, so confident, when I’m an emotional wreck. He reaches into a side table drawer and produces some tissue for me to dry my sniffles away, but there’s no other comfort, just his unfaltering belief.
And it’s more reassuring than anything else he could have possibly done.
“You’re not going to be mated to Ashton Daniels.” He sits beside me and I’m acutely aware of his body heat through his thin pajama bottoms. “You’re going to make a choice. Tonight. Are you leaving the pack, or are you staying to be my queen?”
My mouth dries up and I gulp down my drink. It doesn’t help. “You’re not going to give me time to think about it?”
He shakes his head and takes the empty glass from me to put it on the coffee table. “You’ve thought about whether or not you want me. You can’t hide it from me, Bailey. Every moment that we’re together, you’re thinking about what it would be like. Not to rule over the pack at my side, but what it would feel like if I touched you…”
He leans into me, traces the line of my jaw with his fingertips, barely skimming my skin as they move lower, over my throat and to the collar my sweatshirt, and I can’t help the noise of longing that I make.
He’s not wrong. I have thought about it. I’ve thought about it a lot.
The wide collar of the shirt slips from my shoulder easily, and he leans to press his lips there. “What it would feel like if I tasted you.”
Another small, mewling noise escapes me.
His hand is suddenly pushing my face up, forcing me to meet his gaze. “Haven’t you?”
I swallow, my nerves and uncertainty mingling with the desperate pull I feel between us, and there’s no use denying it. “Yes.”
“I know you have.” His crooked, self-satisfied smile only lasts a moment, fading into a hunger that shakes me to my core. “Because I have, too.”
His mouth covers mine and I shudder at the modicum of relief his kiss provides me. My body throbs at the softness of his lips, the sweep of his tongue, the way he threads his fingers into my hair to tilt my head back, leaving me breathless and completely under his control. I grip his shoulders, bunch his cashmere robe in my fingers and kiss him back, hard, desperate to fulfill the pounding need between us.
My hands slip beneath the robe. I have to feel his skin, need to feel him against me. He shrugs the garment off and the motion takes me back to the night of the ceremony, the firelight on his broad shoulders, and I sink my nails into them the way I’ve ached to in my fantasies. He takes a sharp breath against my panting mouth and nips at my lower lip. It hurts. I love it.
Because the truth is, I don’t want to just fuck him. I want us to destroy each other in our passion.
I lean back to pull my sweatshirt off, and he goes one step further, grabbing my bra and giving it a sharp, strong jerk. The straps cut into my flesh before they give way, utterly ruined. I’m in his arms again, reeling from the dizzying sensation of his hot skin flush against mine. Another crushing kiss and his mouth moves down my throat. With one huge hand splayed on the small of my back, he guides me down on the sofa cushions, covering me. I open my legs, wrapping them around his waist despite my jeans and shoes. The latter bump him, and he barely breaks his concentration as he reaches back to roughly pull them off.
