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When I don’t respond, Saige continues with a bitter note creeping into her soft, husky voice. “I’m going to assume that Rylan didn’t have his entire pack here when he attacked because you killed some of them while saving me. I’ve been thinking about it. Because if he had all of his people, none of us would have survived. Am I right?”
I turn to peer over my shoulder. “A man like that never gives up something he views as his.”
She stares at me without expression; her shadowed blue-gray eyes meeting mine steadily. “Because he’s an alpha. Like you?”
There’s more than a hint of bitterness in her voice now. I hear the same note I picked up on upstairs when she refused to believe any apology I give her will be worth anything to her. The one that makes it clear she has no love for alphas and never will. It doesn’t matter that I’m not Rylan. I’m an alpha, and I hurt her, so in her eyes, we’re the same.
I can’t let her think that.
Going anywhere near her after lunging at her in Cerberus isn’t a good idea.
Just because your wolf hasn’t been acting up lately, doesn’t mean he won’t. Keep your distance. Go upstairs.
The thought doesn’t stop me. I stalk toward her, closing the distance until I have her back to the wall beside the kitchen door, and I’m leaning into her face. Mere inches separate us. “I’m nothing like him.”
“I’m supposed to know that how, exactly?” she asks, not breaking our stare and not looking away.
I don’t know if she’s even aware of it, but she likes to challenge me with those storm-blue eyes of hers. She does it so often that if Rylan had turned her, I’d be staring down an alpha right now. No doubt about it. There’s too much strength in her for her to be any less.
“You know,” I say.
She angles her chin up an inch. “No, I don’t.”
There it is again. Shifters have ruined her life. Rylan has covered her throat with scars, his packmates covered her body with them too, and she still fights.
And she always looks beautiful when she does.
Is this what makes my wolf so crazy, he bursts out of me? To silence the challenge in her stare? Or to possess her—own her—the way Rylan seems determined to?
I lower my head a little more. “Yes, you do.”
Because if I were like Rylan, she wouldn’t be gazing up at me with a look in her eyes that makes me think she wouldn’t pull away if I kissed her.
No, she’s looking at me as if she’d kiss me back. If she ever looked at Rylan the same way, she hasn’t in recent memory. Not after the wreckage he made of her life.
“Fine. You’re both alphas, you both like your expensive clothes, and you both—” She chokes back the rest of the increasingly bitter words as if they were razor blades she wants to cut me with.
I track her hard swallow on the slender column of her throat. It’s not easy to stay calm when I want to shake that thought out of her head. I’m not like him in any way.
“We both what?” I force myself to ask her calmly when, inside, I’m raging at her to see I would never try to break her the way Rylan did. I amnothinglike him.
She looks away for the first time since I pinned her against this wall, side-stepping to squeeze out from between the wall and me. “Nothing.”
Let her go. Just let her go before your wolf decides he wants to kill her.
I grip her hip, halting her. “We both what?”
Tell me so I can deny it. Tell me so I can prove I’m nothing like the man who ruined your life.
Her soft gasp of surprise almost makes me regret touching her, but I can’t let her go until I fix this. I lean closer, cupping her slender hip with one hand. “Tell me.”
I’m not expecting her eyes to widen and dart to my mouth.
I’m not expecting to become painfully aware of her breasts mashed against my chest. Of the sweet peach scent of her skin drifting right into my nose. And her lips. The top one is fuller than the bottom, and they are rosy. Sweet. Tempting me to taste. Needing it.
I catch the exact moment she stops breathing and holds her breath.
She needs it too.
