Cruel Mate: Bully Pregnancy Wolf Shifter Romance (Nightstar Black Ops Wolves Book 2)

Chapter 3 - Zander

No longer in the mood for Sandy and her advances, Zander stormed off in the opposite direction to the manor, deciding it best to take the long way back to the bonfire.

He needed some time to think. Who did Layla think she was, insulting him when he had only been teasing her?

It might have been just what he needed to cool down if not for the fact that Sandy continued to follow him, clearly not getting the hint.

“Zander, this is stupid,” she called after him. “We’ve been beating around this same bush so long now. Can’t you just give in already?”

After Layla’s berating, he was in no state to deal with this right now. Halting, he whipped around to face Sandy and growled, “If I wanted you, Sandy, I’d have had you by now.”

It was harsh, even for him, and he saw the flash of hurt in her eyes, yet he had never been one for backing down once he had set himself on a path. And so he continued down it. “Maybe another time. Not tonight. I’m tired and I’m frustrated and I’m hungry. Just leave me be, would you?”

Sandy took a half-step back, looking visibly deflated. “I…I guess.”

Feeling deflated himself, Zander turned and continued on down the path he had chosen.

What the fuck is this woman doing to me? He wondered. He had never turned down a woman who was throwing herself at him before, especially not one he actually found attractive.

And yet, whilst he had been looking at Sandy, all he had been able to see was Layla’s angry little face glowering back at him, and he felt again the urge to wrap his fingers around her throat and show her who was boss.

She was frustrating, infuriating, and annoying, and yet damn, was she hot.

Fuck!

He tried his damnedest to shake the turmoil within him as he made it back to the lawn and found the bonfire still in full force. More pack members had joined the festivities, some of them having shifted to play fight or run off into the woods. Some were returning, shifting back into human form just within the shadows of the tree line where the real humans couldn’t see them.

There weren’t many of them living in Nightstar, but there were enough that all the pack knew when and where it was acceptable to shift. Of course, sometimes things went wrong, but at a bonfire on a full moon, most were too drunk to even realize what they might have seen.

And Jack was insistent upon integrating properly with the humans, unlike Karl Ryker and his crew, who had kept the human world at bay by force, making more problems than fixing them.

If it was one thing they had learned in all their years in black ops, it was that the supernatural world didn’t do well when it tried to remain entirely separate from the rest of the world. Now they were lucky enough to have an alpha who understood that, who kept them safe the only way he knew how, by making sure all of his members were careful and only trusting a select handful of humans to bear the burden of their secret.

Not all at the bonfire were aware of that secret, and it was abundantly clear when he returned to his friends.

Almost as if she had been intending to bug him just a little more, Layla was amongst them, sitting upon a log bench and practically on top of Kane’s knee. She laughed at something he said before turning her twinkling eyes on Will.

They looked as if they were having a great time with Layla in their midst. And the two humans who had joined them also seemed to be having a whale of a time.

“Do you really think you could keep up with us?” Eddie asked Layla as Zander drew nearer.

“Do you think I couldn’t?” Layla asked, and Zander saw the spark in her gaze. It was the same one she’d had in the woods with him, only this time it was playful and not at all threatening.

“I, for one, would like to see you try,” Will said. “I’ve never known a woman to drink us under the table.”

He held out an open beer bottle to Layla. With the cockiest of grins, she snatched it from his hand and proceeded to chug it.

She coughed a little as she finished and wiped a dribble from her chin before taking the beer that Eddie was holding out for her.

“Go easy there, doll,” Kane advised, reaching an arm around her to steady her when she threw back her head so hard to chug the second bottle that she almost tipped right off the back of the bench.

Just seeing Kane’s arm wrapped around her made Zander’s blood boil. Was she trying to start a fight?

“Jeez, woman, do you have a gag reflex?” Will gasped, and Zander’s stomach churned. He knew what all his friends were thinking. They would all like to be the one to find out first.

But not if he had anything to say about it. Zander fought the urge to grab her wrist and yank her right out of his circle of friends.

Before he could do so, Jason, one of the humans who had settled into the group, said, “You’ll make one man very happy one day, girl.”

That was it. Zander couldn’t stand the way they were all gawking at her anymore. She deserved more respect than that, and the fact she was encouraging their attention only infuriated him more. Didn’t she have any self-respect at all?

He took a step forward, his foot crunching on some loose gravel within the grass, but Layla was the only one who seemed to notice his presence. The others were all too intent on her.

And when her gaze met his, her eyes went from twinkling to dark. The wry smile dropped from her lips, and she scowled so deeply at him that it hurt his soul.

By the wolf gods, he wanted to show her a thing or two.

“Sorry guys,” she said in an all-too-sweet voice, turning a charming half-smile on the rest of his crew. “Looks like the party pooper has just arrived.”

She looked him dead in the eye as she rose to her feet, her body moving in such a way he couldn’t help but admire it, and said, “I had better go and see if the other women need some help before our stick-in-the-mud beta gives me what for again.”

Zander bit his lip. He wasn’t about to rise to the bait and cause a scene.

Instead, he silently watched her go, slipping around the circle as if she wanted every one of them to get a good whiff of her scent before she went. And the way all of their gazes followed her, he knew it had worked.

“If you will excuse me, too,” Jason said, hopping to his feet, “I think I’ll give her a hand.”

He hadn’t even joined her at the refreshments table before another human beat him to it. The two men were practically drooling all over her, just like his friends had been. It was sickening.

Fighting every instinct, he dropped down onto the log where she had been, nowhere near Kane’s knee, and growled low in his throat when her scent enveloped him.

“What the hell has gotten into you?” Kane asked, angling his head around to look at him out of the corner of his eye.

“I’m tired,” Zander shrugged. Kane didn’t look convinced, but he just lifted his own shoulders and turned back to Will and Eddie.

“What were we talking about before that hot piece of ass interrupted?” he asked, taking a swig of the beer he had been about to hand to Layla before Zander had interrupted.

Zander didn’t even hear the other guys” response. He could barely hear anything at all save for the music blasting from the speaker system as he tried his hardest to zero in on the conversation being had at the refreshments table.

It was next to impossible to hear anything over his friends talking and the music.

He was just considering making an excuse to grab himself something to eat when Will landed beside him, opposite Kane, and jammed his elbow into his ribs. “What’s with you?”

“What? Nothing!” Zander replied a little too quickly. He struggled to clear his throat and shook his head, trying to clear that, too.

“She’s got her hooks in you, doesn’t she?” Will asked, following Zander’s gaze.

“What? No, what do you mean?”

Will pursed his lips as if trying not to laugh.

“Oh, he’s got it bad!” Eddie exclaimed, pointing at him with his half-empty beer bottle.

“Fuck off! She’s annoying as fuck!”

“She’s hot as fuck, you mean,” Kane growled, and the way he looked Layla up and down made Zander cringe.

“No, I mean what I said.” The way his friends all exchanged knowing glances made him flinch. “What?”

“Nothing,” Kane said, smirking around his bottle as he took a drink.

“What Kane means to say is, you really do have it bad,” Will said, clapping Zander on the back.

Eddie leaned forward in his lawn chair and looked Zander in the eye.

“We don’t blame you,” he said, smiling. “She is super hot.”

She is not! Zander thought. He wanted to yell the words at them, but he knew that would only convince them more.

Sure, Layla was attractive, but she wasn’t the number one hottest she-wolf in the world, and yet every single guy in Nightstar seemed to look her up and down every time she walked by.

“Come on, Zand, we all know what you do when you like a woman,” Eddie laughed. He threw an unopened beer at Zander as if to take the sting out of the truth as he added, “You can’t just be nice. It isn’t in your nature. You act like a bad guy and tease and torment until she’s so frustrated she can’t decide whether she hates your guts or wants to live in your bed forever.”

Zander clenched his jaw. “That’s not true,” he said through gritted teeth, twisting the cap off the bottle. He took a swig, trying not to rise to the incredulous expressions all around him.

“Prove it,” Will goaded, and Zander bit the inside of his lip. How the hell was he supposed to do that?

“Looks like she’s getting all the attention tonight,” Kane commented, inclining his head in Layla’s direction, and when Zander followed it, sure enough, she had been approached by a third human.

Sure, human men were drawn to she-wolves like moths to a flame thanks to their attractiveness, but still it was infuriating as hell.

If she took a single one of them up on any offer, it could be dangerous for the entire pack. At least, that’s what he told himself as he rose to his feet and prepared to intervene. “Excuse me while I go and handle this and prove to you all I do not like Layla fucking Keely.”

He drained his beer and dropped it onto the discard pile before marching away.

One way or another, he was going to prove to them—and himself—that he didn’t like her annoying, infuriating ass one bit.