A Pack of Vows and Tears

by Olivia Wildenstein

  46

  After feasting on leftover lasagna, I showered and changed into one of his T-shirts that smelled so strongly of him it made my head spin. Did I also smell like sandalwood and sawdust now? Or did August smell like me? Or maybe our scents had mixed and created a completely different aroma.

  I asked him as I helped him pull a sheet over the couch.

  His freckles seemed to darken at my question, which of course prompted me to ask, “What?”

  He spent an extra-long time tucking the sheet under the seat cushions before straightening up and rubbing the back of his neck. “They meant that we smelled like we”—he snatched the coverlet from the coffee table and unfolded it—“like we’d had sex.”

  “Oh.” I wrinkled my nose. “So . . . sweaty?”

  A bark of laughter burst out of him.

  I tossed the pillow I’d been stuffing in a pillowcase at him. He caught it and finished my half-ass job.

  “What did I say now?” I asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “What sort of strenuous sex have you been having?” He was still grinning.

  I dragged my hand through my hair. “I, um . . . haven’t.”

  “Never?” His grin settled into a faint smile.

  I was certain I was beet-red.

  He simply said, “Huh,” which was really worse than not saying anything at all. “I didn’t mean to make you feel embarrassed.”

  “You didn’t. It’s just a really weird conversation to be having.” I straightened the coverlet he’d tossed over the couch. “On the upside, I don’t know what I’m missing.” I sat down, the T-shirt with the small Watt logo riding up. I tugged on the hem. “I know you said you got used to the mating link, but you know what you’re missing, so it must suck.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I’ve had so much on my mind lately between Mom and the pack and work that I haven’t had much time to dwell on it.”

  “Apparently men think about sex every seven seconds.”

  He snorted. “Is that so?”

  I leaned over and flicked his arm.

  He shook his head, but his grin increased. “You’re really going to keep that up?”

  “Until I leave.”

  That zapped the smile right off his face. He sat down next to me, his weight dipping the couch. “You shouldn’t have to leave again. It’s not good for your body.”

  “It wouldn’t be good for my mind to stick around. The day Liam’s no longer Alpha—”

  “Could be decades from now.”

  “—I’ll come back.” I stuck my hands between my knees and squeezed them.

  “Ness . . . ”

  “Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay? I’m really tired.”

  Sighing, he wrapped an arm around my shoulders, dragged me into his body, and kissed my temple. I closed my eyes, enjoying the proximity of him, the smell of him. Enjoying it too much.

  Another reason I needed to leave . . .

  I had feelings that weren’t sisterly at all toward August, and that would just make things weird between us in the coming months.

  I ducked out from underneath his arm. “Mind if I turn off the lights?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  I got up from the couch and walked over to his front door. I touched the little panel and then returned to the couch. Moonlight filtered in through the open window, but even without moonlight, I could see well in the dark. Probably not as sharply as a real wolf, but more sharply than a human. This was how I saw the great lump sprawled on the couch.

  “Take the bed, Ness.”

  “But it’s your bed.”

  “Didn’t we just have this conversation?”

  “Fine.” I padded toward the ladder and climbed up to the mezzanine, then crawled over the giant bed and slipped underneath the thick comforter. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I heard the recording again.

  And again.

  If you make it look like a hunting accident, you can blame the hunter.

  I kept my eyes open until the darkness turned a bit brighter.

  A bit greener.

  A bit bluer.

  And I was running.

  Next to a big black wolf with smiling silver eyes. You think you can catch that squirrel, baby girl?

  I darted after the fluffy rodent that spiraled up the trunk of a pine and snatched it right off the tree. Too easy, Dad.

  Snap his neck quick. You don’t want it to suffer.

  A second later, the squirrel stopped moving. We feasted on the squirrel, blood and gore dripping from our noses. Well, mostly from mine.

  My father was watching on, eyes shining with pride. Suddenly, he whipped his head to the side, ears pricked up, and whirled around, muscles coiled to leap. Ness, run!

  We didn’t have time to run.

  A bullet whizzed through the inert air and buried itself into his pelt with a pop. He faltered and tumbled, and blood sprayed out of him, covering my face, mixing with the squirrel’s blood.

  I whimpered and whimpered, my lament disseminating through the woods like torn dandelion florets.

  Suddenly, a heavy weight pinned me to the supple ground, and I flailed, clawing my attacker, trying to get him off me, snarling.

  “Ness, wake up! It’s just me.”

  My lids flew open. August was straddling me, my wrists cuffed in his hands. A line of blood seeped out of a thin gash right beneath his eye.

  I gasped. “Your face!”

  “My face is fine.”

  “You’re bleeding.” I struggled to free my wrists from the vice of his hands. He let go, and I hovered my fingertips over the strip of skin I’d removed. I didn’t think touching the cut would staunch the reddened flow, so I wiggled out from underneath him, and then once I was sitting up, I tugged the hem of my T-shirt up to the wound.

  “Shoot. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” He shut his eye as I applied pressure.

  The blood reminded me of my father’s. Except there had been so much more in that forest.

  I shuddered and shut my lids.

  Large, warm hands clamped my cold cheeks. “Look at me.”

  I did.

  “It was a nightmare. You’re awake now. You’re safe.”

  I pulled my bottom lip into my mouth as I lowered the fabric to peer at the torn flesh. The hairline cut was already sealing. “I didn’t get you anywhere else, did I?”

  He smiled. “Not for lack of trying.” He sat back on his heels, his smile flickering as his gaze dropped to the inches of bare skin between the band of my black underwear and the bunched-up cotton T-shirt I was still holding.

  I released the hem, and it fluttered back down.

  Palming his cropped hair, August turned to get off the bed, but I reached out and caught his elbow.

  “Can you stay with me? Please?” I felt incredibly childish for asking. “Just until I fall back asleep?”

  Several seconds slipped by before he gave a nod so heavy it almost made me regret asking. I lay back down and tucked my hands underneath the pillow.

  “I’ll try not to attack you again,” I said, pressing my cheek into the creased fabric that was damp with tears or sweat—perhaps both.

  I watched as August attempted to get comfortable beside me. He didn’t venture under the comforter. His long legs ensconced in a pair of gray sweats spanned the entire length of the mattress.

  “Did I steal your side of the bed?” I asked as he threw one of his arms over his head.

  He was sprawled on his back, his T-shirt riding up, revealing taut brown skin dusted with a trail of dark hair. I snapped my eyes closed, but the image was already seared behind my retinas and was doing strange things to my stomach . . . And lower. I squeezed my thighs and flipped over.

  “I usually take up the entire thing,” he said.

  I slid to the edge of the mattress to make myself smaller.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to give you more space.”
<
br />   And myself.

  I needed more space.

  He grunted.

  I didn’t flick him; I didn’t dare touch him. But he touched me. He dragged me back toward the center of the bed. Except his hands were nowhere near my body.

  “How did you do that?” I asked, part enthralled, part freaked out. Controlling another person’s movements without touching them resided in a realm of magic I just couldn’t wrap my mind around. And yes, I know . . . I could transform into a werewolf.

  “I pulled on the rope connecting us.”

  My navel still pulsated. “Can you teach me how to do it?” Not that I’d have much use for the ability once I was gone . . .

  “You have to focus your mind on that rope. Visualize it. For me it’s blue and shiny. Once you can see it, you contract your stomach, and it reels it in. That’s how I do it, anyway. Maybe for you it’s different.”

  “Can I try?”

  He nodded.

  My brow puckered as I concentrated. I saw the rope. It wasn’t blue but it was shiny. I wrapped my mind around it and sucked in my stomach. I felt a tightening, but August’s body didn’t even budge an inch.

  “I’m bigger and heavier than you.”

  I tried again. Failed again. “Can you feel it at least?”

  “Yes.” He smiled. “It tickles.”

  “You can haul my body over several feet, but when I do it, it tickles? Damn. That’s unfair.”

  He turned up the force of his smile but winced when it tugged on the flesh I’d clawed. I reached out and ran my thumb over the cut, and his breath caught.

  “Does it sting?” I asked.

  “I’m fine, Ness.” He dragged my hand away from his face.

  Our heads were so close I could see the shape of each one of his freckles. I remembered trying to map out constellations on his skin when I was a kid. I remembered succeeding, although I didn’t remember the names of the ones I’d found.

  “What are you thinking about?” His voice was a gravelly whisper.

  “I was trying to remember which constellations I’d matched to your freckles.”

  “Cassiopeia. You were convinced this”—he took the index finger of the hand he was still holding, set the tip of it on his injured cheek, and dragged it down, then straight, then down again, and finally up—“was Cassiopeia.”

  His warm breaths hit my nose, and yet it was my stomach that felt warmer, not my face. I dropped my eyes to his mouth, wondering what it would feel like to kiss him. His breathing hitched as though he could read my train of thoughts, as though he could sense it through our link. Perhaps he could.

  I slid the finger he still gripped out of his hold and glided the tip across the hard plane of his cheek, over the dark stubble of his jaw, down the side of his strong neck. I watched my index’s path as I traced the edge of his body, as my finger rounded his broad shoulder and dipped along his carved bicep. When my finger met bare skin, his flesh pebbled.

  I kept waiting for him to put a stop to my exploration. I kept waiting for him to ask me what had gotten into me, but he stayed silent, allowing me access to his sinful form. I outlined the sharp edge of his elbow, then drew a straight line down the inside of his forearm, where the skin was the softest, stopping when I reached the center of his palm.

  Only then did I dare look up into those mossy eyes that had enchanted me my entire childhood. His pupils pulsed, devoured his irises. I inched closer to him until my lips were aligned with the trail of dried blood on his cheek. I pressed my mouth to his skin and darted my tongue out to lick away the coppery smear. Never in a million years would I have imagined licking August’s face. Perhaps in fur, but not in skin. In fur, the act would’ve been deemed playful, affectionate. In skin, it was intimate.

  August, who’d lain perfectly still, finally stirred to life. The hand I was still touching clamped over mine, cocooning my fingers, and his other hand snaked underneath my head and threaded through my hair. Gently, he tugged on it to unfasten my mouth from his cheek.

  “Ness . . . ” My name felt like a gust of night wind, the sort that made fir needles shiver and sway. “If you kiss me, then you can’t leave,” he murmured.

  It took me a moment to make sense of his words. “Why not?”

  “Because you can’t feed a starving man, then take away his food.” If his voice hadn’t been so low and raucous, I might’ve poked fun at him for that metaphor, but his timbre told me he was serious.

  “You’ll find better food,” I finally said, heart fluttering the gray cotton that had coiled around my torso.

  The fingers cupping the back of my head relaxed, slid to the nape of my neck, then back up. “How long?”

  I thought he was asking me how long I was planning on staying, and I said until the morning.

  “No, Ness. How long have you felt this way about me?”

  Oh.

  Oh . . .

  I lowered my eyelashes, heat snaking up my chest like a warm current. “For a while now. Since the lake. But this link . . . it confuses me. Every time you touch me . . . even when you do it by mistake—”

  “I never do anything by mistake.”

  I jerked my attention back to his face, the warm current spreading and heating up every part of me. “Well, when it happens, it does things to me, August. Things I don’t think I should be feeling. Things I don’t think I should be telling you about.”

  But here I was, confessing my deepest, darkest secrets.

  “Is that why you got mad at me for calling you Dimples or kid? Because you thought it meant I only saw you as a little girl?”

  I nodded, and the audacity that had taken ahold of me began to slip through my fingers like crumbling rock.

  He stayed quiet so long that I said, “If you don’t say something soon, I’m going to die of embarrassment.”

  His fingers spiraled up the column of my neck and stilled on the back of my scalp again, tipping it infinitesimally upward. “What would you like me to say?”

  I twisted up my lips before mumbling, “That you feel a little bit of the same things I do.”

  “But if I said that, I’d be lying.”

  My heart squeezed in humiliation, and then my lids clinched.

  “I’d be lying because whatever you feel, I feel it tenfold. But I’ve been feeling this way since you walked into that living room with that chin held so high. Since before this link snapped into place between us, which makes me reticent of letting this kiss happen at all.”

  I opened my eyes, humiliation replaced by something else entirely. Something that made the tether between us thrum. “Why?”

  “Because once you’re far from Boulder, far from me and our link, you’ll stop wanting me, but I won’t stop wanting you.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “That I won’t stop wanting you? Yeah. I do. I was in—” He licked his lush lips, making them glisten. “There was an ocean separating us, and I couldn’t get you out of my mind, Ness. And it screwed me up real bad. I wasn’t focused on the team, on the mission. All I could think of was you and what the pack was putting you through, and what you were feeling. And then when Cole told me Liam—”

  He rolled onto his back, releasing my hand but curling the other around my shoulders. I laid my head in the crook of his shoulder, my hair fanning over his arm. He wove his fingers through it, making my scalp tingle, making all of me tingle.

  “When Cole told me Liam made a move on you, I was blinded by such jealousy that I made a grave tactical error that put one of my buddies at risk. It was bad, Ness.” He shuddered and closed his eyes a long second.

  I placed my palm over his beating heart, trapping its brisk rhythm with my fingertips. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault, sweetheart. I left you. Not the other way around.”

  And now I was the one talking about leaving. What if he did find better food? The mere thought of that waitress or Sienna resting where I lay had me gritting my teeth.

  “I lied,” I
said, trying to ease the tension in my jaw. I kept my gaze on the palm flattened against his chest. “I’ve had a crush on you since I was a kid. A real kid. Which I know is disturbing. But you were everything to me. You meant everything to me. Remember the day you let me tag along on that movie date of yours with Betsy, or whatever her name was?” Her face flashed behind my lids. “I hated that she had curves and brown hair, and that I was as flat as a board and blonde. I hated that you kept touching her hair. Her hand. I hated it so much that I faked a stomachache so you’d take me home. So that you’d stay with me. So that you’d touch my hair.”

  He didn’t say anything for a little while, as though trying to locate the memory. Or maybe he was rethinking what he’d told me, about liking me after my declaration.

  “Her name was Carrie.”

  Oh, goodie. He remembered her. Worse, he smiled as he reminisced. A punch in the ribs would’ve hurt less.

  He looped the ends of my hair around his fingers. “She broke up with me that night, because I chose you over her.” His smile grew a little broader. “I knew you had a crush on me, but—”

  “It really wasn’t a crush; it was an infatuation.” I grimaced. “And I honestly have no idea why I’m telling you all this.”

  “I think I know.”

  “Really?”

  He rolled onto his side. “Because you’re trying to test my willpower.” He stared into my eyes. “Or break it . . . ”

  “Is it working?”

  “When have you ever failed at anything?”

  I smiled, but then I didn’t. Then, in a rush of boldness—or foolishness—I closed the distance between our mouths, fitting mine on top of his.

  A groan rumbled out of his chest, and he skated his mouth off mine. “Are you staying?” His chest rose and fell.

  “I don’t think I can—”

  He winced.

  “Let me finish my sentence. You didn’t let me finish my sentence.”

  His gaze tripped over my face. “Finish your sentence.”

  Heart palpitating against my jaw, my lips, my chin, my forehead, I repeated what I’d said, but added the final word, the one that would change everything.

  For him.

  For me.