by J. L. Wilder
“Fine,” Marco snapped. “Be back at the cave by sundown, though, if you’re coming at all. I don’t want to deal with you sneaking in and waking us up in the middle of the night again.”
“Jesus. That happened one time.”
“It happened twice and you know it.”
“That’s not fair,” Burton said. “It happened once since I joined the...you know. The pack. Whatever we’re calling it.”
“We’re a pack. There are four of us. It’s a pack. Stop trying to dodge that.”
“Fine. The pack. I was only late getting back one time since I joined you. The other time—”
“The other time, you were trying to steal food from us.”
“I didn’t know you yet! God, are you ever going to let me forget it?”
“Well, how would you feel?” Marco demanded. “You’ve imprinted on her now. You love her. How would you feel if someone came into the cave in the middle of the night and you thought her life was at risk? How would you feel if you thought you were going to have to kill someone to keep her safe, and then that person became a member of your family?”
Burton started to snap back that he would deal with it, that he had always dealt with everything life had thrown at him and that there were certainly more difficult things in the world than adding a member to your pack.
But he paused.
Maybe Marco was right.
He had lain awake last night while the others had slept. He wasn’t yet allowed to join their nest in the middle of the cave—Ryker and Marco didn’t want him close—but Sophie had found ways of reaching out to him, extending a leg or an arm from the pile to make contact with him as she slept. Last night, he had been lying with her ankle hooked over his and brooding about the fact that he was here with these people who didn’t want him and probably never would.
What would he have done, in that moment, if a stranger had come into the cave? If he had perceived a threat to his omega, to the one person who made this new situation feel like home?
He would have attacked. He would have sought to kill.
But that didn’t make it fair, he thought fiercely, for Ryker and Marco to go on treating him the way they were. It was understandable that they had been defensive and territorial when he’d first arrived. But now they were telling him that he was a part of their pack. And yet, still, they persisted in treating him like an enemy.
He turned away from Marco without answering him and made his way down to the riverbank to find some berries and put them in his hat.
As he made his way through the reeds, he was surprised to come upon Sophie, kneeling by the river, a pile of plant matter laid out beside her. She was patting mud into place in the bottom of a newly woven basket, and as he watched, she set it out beside her to bake in the sun.
Suddenly, the feelings he had been dealing with since he’d joined up with the pack boiled over.
He had stayed here for Sophie. He had imprinted on her. He wanted to be with her. And she wanted to be with him. He could tell by the way she looked at him. He could read the desire in her eyes.
They hadn’t been allowed to spend any time alone together. Their interactions had been monitored. Ryker and Marco were both afraid of Burton. He knew that. They were afraid that Sophie was going to get hurt.
I shouldn’t be denied the right to my omega just because they can’t get over their fears.
He emerged from the bushes. It was just the two of them now.
She looked around, hearing him, and smiled at the sight of him. “Burton!” she said. “I thought you were working with Marco today.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t want to tell her about the argument he and Marco had gotten into. He didn’t want to worry her. She already worried too much about the inability of her three alphas to get along with one another.
Besides, what he had in mind for her was a lot more fun than worry.
He reached down, took her hand, and pulled her to her feet, causing the reeds to spill out of her lap. Then he scooped her up in his arms and tossed her into the deepest part of the river.
She came up sputtering and laughing. “Burton!” she cried. “What are you doing?”
He stripped off his clothes, dropped them in a heap by the side of the water, and jumped in after her. The current was firm but gentle, light enough that they could easily swim against it, but powerful enough to make them drift if they weren’t careful. Burton allowed it to carry him to her side and caught her up in his arms.
Her wet skin sparkled in the sunlight. “We have work to do, you know,” she protested, still laughing.
“We work too much.” He kissed her, pulled off her wet shorts, tossed them over to the riverbank, and guided her legs around his waist. “We never have any fun, you and me.”
“I know,” she said. “You know how I’ve been wanting you. It’s driving me crazy.”
He wrapped his hands around her hips, his fingers digging into the meat of her ass, and pulled her closer. “I’ve imagined how you’d feel for days now,” he said.
“And?” She rocked her hips, rubbing herself against the length of his cock.
He groaned, his head falling back. “Better than my wildest dreams,” he said.
“And we’re just getting started,” she laughed. “Are they going to come looking for you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. Let them. I’m allowed to do this.” He pressed into her, just a few inches, and lost his train of thought for a split second. He held her very still, trying to recover. “I’m allowed to fuck my omega,” he said. “They don’t get to tell me I can’t.”
“No,” she agreed. “They don’t. And I don’t think they want to. They’re just worried you’re going to hurt me. They don’t know. They don’t understand.”
“You want me as much as I want you, though, don’t you?”
“I think maybe even more.”
“Impossible.” He pulled her flush against him, sinking into her completely, and the moan she let out was enough to make birds take wing.
Burton dug his toes into the silt at the bottom of the river to keep the current from pulling them off course. The water rushing around them pressed her more tightly against him, though. He held her still, enjoying the way she felt, throbbing inside her, wanting to move but forcing himself to wait. Who knew when he would get her alone again? He wanted to make this last.
Sophie began to grind against him, her hips rocking up and back in a strong and fluid motion. She was good at this, he realized. He knew enough of her story to know that she didn’t have much experience, but it seemed to come to her naturally. As for Burton, he had been with his share of women, all of them betas, and it had never been like this. Not with any of them.
She’s made for it.
He lost track of his surroundings. The only thing in the world, as far as he was concerned, was her body. The only thing that mattered was their hands on each other, pulling each other closer. It felt as if he was getting deeper and deeper inside her with each thrust.
Her lips found his, and she kissed him passionately, pulling him into her body in that way, too, and the water flowed around them. Burton couldn’t tell anymore where he ended and she began.
“God,” he said, his voice somewhere between a moan and a mumble. He didn’t sound like himself at all. “How did we wait so long? How have we been walking around together for days now without doing this?”
She shook her head. She didn’t know either.
He threaded his fingers through hers and wrapped his arms around her, twisting her arms gently behind her back. She hummed happily, leaning back into the cradle he’d made, changing the angle at which their bodies were connected, increasing the pressure.
He was going to lose his mind.
“I can’t—” Burton gasped.
“Do it.” She rode him furiously, eyes closed, head thrown back, wet skin gleaming. “I’m going to come, Burton, God, I want you with me. Do it.”
It was all the encouragemen
t he needed. With a final thrust and a roar that sent the water up in a wave around him, he came, feeling her body convulse around him.
Burton held her against him for several minutes as they recovered, their muscles relaxing and their breathing returning to normal. Finally, he carried her over to the bank, his steps slow and forceful against the current, and set her beside the basket she had been weaving. He crawled up out of the water himself, pulled on his shorts, and lay back in the sun to dry.
“That was...” Sophie seemed lost for words.
“Yeah,” Burton agreed. “It was.”
“I’m just sorry we waited so long,” she said, lying back beside him, her hand finding his.
“I wondered if maybe it wasn’t that important to you,” Burton confessed.
She looked over at him. “You did? How? How could you not know?”
“Well, you had Ryker and Marco to take care of you,” he said. “It’s not as if you weren’t getting your needs fulfilled.”
“But there’s no one else who can give me what you can,” Sophie said.
“Why? Do I do it differently from how they do?”
“Well, sure you do,” Sophie said. “But that’s not really what I mean. I don’t know.” She rolled toward him. “I don’t know how to explain it, exactly. If you had nothing to eat but steak for every meal, you’d never be hungry. But you might still feel cravings for vegetables, or for chocolate. You wouldn’t feel like you were getting everything you needed.”
Burton laughed. “Which one am I, then?” he asked. “Am I steak or veggies or chocolate?”
“It’s an analogy, Burton.”
“Okay, but like, in the analogy, which one of your examples is me?”
She laughed and rolled on top of him. “You’re a big chocolate cupcake,” she informed him. “With extra frosting and sprinkles.” Then she leaned over him and kissed him deeply, and Burton wrapped his arms around her and forgot all about food for a while.
Chapter Twelve
MARCO
Marco returned to the cave with the day’s catch to find that Ryker had beaten him there, a fact that was surprising for a number of reasons.
“You’re alone,” he said, feeling stupid for stating the obvious.
“Sophie wants to go work on her baskets,” Ryker said. “I left her by the side of the river.”
“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” Marco asked anxiously.
“Because of the bears, you mean?”
“Well, they did almost kill me,” Marco said. “And Sophie was nearly attacked too, you told me.”
“That wasn’t near here,” Ryker said.
“We don’t actually know where it was,” Marco pointed out. “I wasn’t in my right mind when I got to you. I don’t know how much ground I covered between you and the bears. Unless you know something you’re not telling me—”
“I’ve told you everything I know,” Ryker said. “The day we found you, I did a perimeter check. Ten miles away from the cave in every direction. They’re not here.”
“That doesn’t mean they couldn’t come here,” Marco said.
Ryker nodded. “They could,” he agreed. “But they won’t. Things are different. It’s not like it was when we were on our own, when we were easy targets for bears because they were bigger than us. We’re a pack now. The group of us, acting together, is stronger than any bear. We can take them out. And if they catch our scent, they’ll understand that, and they’ll steer clear.”
“Burton didn’t steer clear,” Marco pointed out.
Ryker frowned. “Where is Burton, anyway?” he asked. “I thought you and he were checking the traps together.”
“Most of them were empty,” Marco reported, holding up the lone squirrel he’d found. “Burton offered to go collect berries, so we split up a while ago.”
“Are you fucking with me?” Ryker jumped to his feet. “You left him alone out there? Sophie is out there!”
The pieces clunked into place in Marco’s head. “Shit!”
Then they were running, both of them, side by side. The world flew by in a blur. Ryker was the only thing that remained stable in Marco’s vision. “Where is she?” he gasped. He was running so hard that his muscles were already beginning to cramp. “Where did you leave her?”
“River,” Ryker bit, picking up speed. “By the rocks.”
Marco’s head spun. If something happened to Sophie, if Burton took advantage of this opportunity to attack her or hurt her, it was going to be all his fault. He was the one who had let the thief go off alone. He might not have known that Sophie was on her own out there, but they had agreed to watch Burton at all times until he had proven himself trustworthy, and that hadn’t happened yet. Far from it.
Putting his head down, he ran harder.
The riverbank came up on them so suddenly that they almost didn’t slow down in time. They almost went splashing into the water. But the sight before him was enough to bring Marco up short.
Sophie and Burton lay on the river bank, half-dressed, their fingers entwined, staring up at the sky. It was obvious what they had just been doing.
Relief washed over Marco like a wave.
All this time, he’d been living in fear of what Burton might do when he got Sophie alone. All this time, he’d been afraid that Burton had never really imprinted at all, that he had been faking somehow, and that he would use his new closeness to Sophie to harm her.
It was obvious that that hadn’t happened.
Burton was a thief. He stole things, and he had stolen this moment with Sophie. They should have seen it coming. They should have known he would find a way.
But it didn’t matter.
His intentions had been pure. That was what mattered. That was the only thing that mattered.
“What the hell is going on here?” Ryker asked.
Marco looked over. His friend didn’t seem to be feeling the same relief that Marco was. If anything, he looked angry.
“Ryker!” Sophie was clearly startled. She sat up and faced them, but she didn’t scramble to put her clothes on, though Burton did. “And Marco,” she added.”
“What’s going on, Sophie?” Marco asked.
“I mean...” She shrugged. “You can see what’s going on.”
Marco nodded. He could. “You’re all right?”
“I’m great,” she said, beaming.
Marco owed Burton an apology, he knew, and he was about to give it, but Ryker spoke up again. “I knew you couldn’t be trusted,” he said to Burton.
“Stop it, Ryker,” Sophie snapped. “He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s my alpha every bit as much as you are.”
“He’s also the man we caught trying to steal from us. Sneaking around our cave in the middle of the night. Did you forget that part?”
“Frankly, yeah, I did,” Sophie said fiercely. “He was hungry. He smelled food. I’m not going to hold it over his head for the rest of his life. I probably would have done the same thing in his shoes.”
“She’s right, Ryker,” Marco said quietly.
Ryker glared at him. “I thought you were on my side in this.”
“We don’t have to take sides,” Marco said. “It doesn’t have to be that way. Come on. All we cared about was protecting her, right?”
“That’s still what I care about,” Ryker said. “Are you questioning that?”
“No. I’m just saying...look at them. They were on their own together. It might not have been on our terms, but it happened, and they’re fine. Sophie’s fine. If he wanted to hurt her, that was his chance.” Marco moved a little closer to Ryker. “I get it. You’re mad. But you’re not mad at him.”
“You don’t think so?”
“You’re mad at us. We’re the ones who slipped up. We’re the ones who promised ourselves we would watch them until we were sure. We fucked it up, and if anything had happened, it would have been on us. I’m furious with myself about that. I get it. But nothing did happen.”
“I w
ouldn’t hurt her,” Burton said, struggling to his feet. For the first time since he had come to their camp, it struck Marco how much younger Burton was than himself or Ryker. His face was clear, his hair thick, his muscles lean and wiry. He looked as if he was still growing into himself. He was Sophie’s age, maybe a year or two older, Marco thought. In a lot of ways, he probably needed someone to look up to.
“I know you’re not going to hurt her,” he said. “But you understand why we had to be careful, Burton, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Burton said. “I get it.”
Ryker sighed. Marco could see that he wanted to argue further. But he was smart enough to know that Marco was right. No harm had been done and getting rid of the animosity between themselves and Burton was what was best for the pack as a whole. It was good that things were happening the way they were.
The four of them returned to the cave and settled in to eat lunch together. Sophie sat between Ryker and Burton, which Marco was surprised to find made him happy. He would have expected to feel burned by the fact that she had chosen not to sit with him. But he could see that it was beneficial for her to be close to Ryker right now, to calm him down while he was upset, and to help bring Burton more tightly into the fabric of the pack. Marco was the one who didn’t need her at the moment.
In a way, seeing her with her other alphas, knowing that she was happy and cared for, was almost as good as being with her himself. It was strange, but it was the truth.
Still, when lunch was finished, he was pleased to see Ryker beckon to Burton to follow him. The two men grabbed the fishing rods Ryker had made and headed down to the river, leaving Marco and Sophie on their own.
“I guess Ryker’s going to teach him to fish,” Sophie said, watching them go. “I hope he doesn’t give him a hard time.”
Marco shook his head. “He won’t,” he said. “The fact that he wants to go off alone with him is a good thing. You know that, right?”
“I think I do,” she said. “It’s hard to be sure.”
“You get why we were nervous about him, don’t you?” Marco asked.
“Not really,” Sophie admitted. “Ryker wasn’t that way about you when you first arrived. Is it really just because of the fact that he was trying to steal? Because that seems like overkill. Anybody would steal food if they were starving. Anybody.”
