Chapter 31
Jameson
The next book starts out as badly as the last one ended.
As in Wolf is being a little shit.
“I don’t like seeing you all dressed up like that,” I tell her.
I didn’t like the dress they put on her at the citadel as soon as they found out who she was.
I don’t like this silky robe either. It’s something a Lady wears, and I’m not a man who’ll end up with a Lady.
I’m the man who steals into her room like a thief to watch her undress.
Rowan just seems confused. “Like what?”
“Like his whore.”
She doesn’t get angry at that, like she should. In her eyes, I can see her sympathy for me, and it’s much worse.
“I’m not to be his whore,” she says softly. “I’m to be his wife.”
I grit my teeth.
She hasn’t met him yet, her future husband. She’s barely halfway there, and she’s still intending to marry him, after all we’ve been through. Her duty to her brothers means far more than any warmth she might have in her heart for me.
Still, she loosens her robe and slips my hand inside, places it on her breast like an invitation.
“We can’t,” I say, even as I squeeze her. I push her back against the wall. “I can’t take one more day waiting to say goodbye.”
“This isn’t goodbye, Wolf.” Her eyes mist with desire. She draws the robe open, and I take out my cock. I bury myself deep inside her as soon as she lets me.
I fuck her like it’s the last time, because it is. I fuck her hard. I don’t care if I’m hurting her anymore.
She’s tearing out my heart.
But no matter how hard I fuck her, she only wants more.
“Yes, Wolf… give me everything…”
I bury my face in her neck. I pin her against the stone wall and fuck her little cunt, and when she makes all those pretty sounds of pleasure, I kiss her deep, wanting to silence her.
She tilts her hips and rubs against me in that maddening way, and I can’t help it; I grind against her the way I know she wants it until she explodes, coming on me, her flesh pulsing around me, sucking me in.
I lose myself in her, coming hard, groaning against her neck.
I feel like an animal. With Rowan, I always feel this way.
“Hmph.” I grumble out loud.
Megan is stretched out on the bed behind me, at the back of the cabin. Her eye catches mine, and she smirks.
It’s the middle of the night, we’re somewhere over the Atlantic, and I told her we should get some sleep hours ago. But here I am, reading again.
I’m not even sure why she’s awake. I didn’t know she was.
“How’s Wolf doing tonight?” she inquires sleepily.
She knows how he is. I already told her earlier, in our therapy session. “He’s a twat.” Book three is no different from book two in that regard.
She narrows her eyes at me.
“I think he’s saying goodbye. He’s a dumbass.” I close the tablet and set it safely aside. Again.
“I think you need to take another break. Sleep.”
I watch her eyes close, then slip the tablet open.
A few minutes later, I’m pretty sure I startle her when I swear at her book. “Fucking Christ. She’s going after him. After he abandoned her at the citadel like a little bitch.”
Megan breathes out a soft laugh. “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”
I skewer her with my gaze. “You never promised me a happy ending.”
“That’s true.”
“Have you written the ending yet?”
“Um…”
She hasn’t. I know she hasn’t.
Which means she can’t promise me a thing.
* * *
I wake up and find myself slumped in my seat, my tablet and glasses in my lap. Megan is sleeping soundly on the bed.
It’s the dead of night.
I pick up the tablet, blink my eyes fully open and slip my glasses on, and keep reading. I’ve already done the calculations. If she’s writing four or five books total, like she said, Rowan and Wolf are now about halfway through their story arc.
And Wolf is still being a dumb twat.
Rowan approaches on the rocky ledge above, between the trees. I see her, running toward the edge, her breasts bouncing in the tiny jacket that barely covers her.
She comes to the edge of the rock. I stand staring up at her.
“What are you bloody wearing?”
Besides the jacket, she’s wearing a silky, green bustle clipped around her waist. It cascades down her backside, but covers nothing in front. She has no panties on at all, just garters dangling down her thighs.
She ran out like that, in the middle of getting fitted for her marching gown?
Because of me?
Her chest heaves. “You’re leaving?”
“How am I supposed to do this with your cunt in my face?”
She jumps down from the rock, landing in front of me. I catch her so she doesn’t fall. “So don’t do it.” There’s fire in her eyes as we grip one another’s arms.
I let go first. “Play fair, Lady Rowan.”
“Fair? Like running off without a word?”
“I’m not running. I’m heading over the river before it gets too cold.”
“And that’s it? You just leave me behind?”
“We say goodbye now or in three days when you leave on your bridal march. What’s the bloody difference?”
“The difference is you never said goodbye!”
I stare at her. “Goodbye.” I press a kiss to her forehead.
She shakes her head. “No. Wolf. You’re not leaving.”
“I am. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
She glares at me, starting to shake with helpless anger. She’s shattering right in front of me, but what can I do?
Neither of us can change her destiny.
Or mine.
And our destinies just don’t align.
“Come back with me. Now,” she demands.
“You can’t give me orders, Rowan. I’m not one of your subjects.”
She steps back a bit, putting space between us. Like she’s waiting for me to back down.
I don’t.
She reaches down and starts petting herself, her fingers massaging in slow circles between her legs.“Fine,” she says, her voice small. “Then walk away, if you’re going.”
But now it feels wrong, with her standing out here, doing that. Undressed like that. It’s getting dark.
“Rowan. This is how it has to be. Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad.” Her voice is breathy, her hand moving in a deliberate rhythm. “I’m just thinking you’re the worst person I’ve ever met.”
This hurts in a way I can’t fathom.
I never wanted her to hate me. Maybe I knew she would, and I knew it would hurt. I just didn’t know how much.
“Rowan—”
“Stop saying my name.”
“Please, stop.”
“Stop what?” Her fingers don’t stop. Her eyelids grow heavy, her gaze burning with anger and the betrayal she must be feeling.
“I’m going now. And you have to go back to the citadel.”
“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’ll do what I want to. You can’t give me orders either.”
“Fine. If you want it to be like this.” I take a step away.
She stops touching herself. “You want it like this! This is your doing, not mine. Don’t you ever forget that, as long as you live, Wolf!”
I’m afraid I won’t. It’s like there’s a crack through my chest and my heart is leaking out. But I force myself to be hard. “All you’re doing is reminding me why I’m doing the right thing.”
She takes the delicate gold chain from around her waist and throws it at my feet. “Take it. I was going to give it to you anyway.”
My fingers feel numb as I pick up the chain. It’s the only jewelry she managed to keep when we fled, when the caravan was attacked.
“It’s pure gold,” she says bitterly. “It’s worth a lot.”
“I can’t take it.”
“Yes, you can. Don’t you dare give it back. You ought to get paid something for your trouble.” She starts touching herself again, and the pained look in her eyes is terrible.
“Rowan…”
“Just go if you’re going to go!” Her voice hits a hysterical note, and I turn away from her distress. I don’t want to see her this way. I can’t take it.
I run downhill through the trees and I hear her calling behind me. “Wolf!” Her voice is broken now, and I know she’s crying. “Wolf! Please, come back!”
I run until I’m pretty sure she can’t see me, and duck behind a tree, gasping.
I can still see her on the rocks, the emerald-green of the ruffled bustle bright in the dusk. She’s down on her knees, pitched forward, sobbing. She keeps stroking herself until she cries out, a sound that’s racked with pain, and her body trembles and I know she’s coming. “Wolf!” She’s still crying. “Wolf, please…”
She cries a long while as the dusk grows dark.
It’s not safe for her out here.
I consider that I may have to drag her back myself, tie her to the citadel gate to make her stay.
But then she gets up and scurries back up the incline, shaking. I scramble up through the trees as fast as I can, around the edge of the rocky cliff, following her. Keeping her in my sight.
I follow her all the way back to the citadel, until I see her cross through the back gate, before I head back down to the river.
I close my tablet. In the dimmed lighting of the jet’s cabin, the woman sleeping alone in the bed looks so peaceful, her face serene.
Nothing like the tumult of emotions churning inside me.
My heart’s beating in my throat and I’m frustrated as hell. All I want to do is grab her and kiss the shit out of her.
At this point, I’m so sure there’s so much of her in Rowan—a girl who feels so completely alone in the world, so unseen for who she really is inside, by anyone but Wolf—it’s driving me mad that Wolf’s abandoning her.
I slip off my glasses and quietly go over to her, set my knees on either side of her body, and crawl over her on the bed. Hovering above her, I put my lips close to her ear. “Wolf is a dick. He doesn’t deserve Rowan.”
Megan’s already awake. She started stirring when I prowled over her, probably breathing too hard. My pulse is pounding, her scent igniting some primal sense in me that makes my dick harder than it already was.
“You woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me that?” she says sleepily. Her eyes are still closed, but she’s smiling.
“She’s crying in the woods, half-naked, and he’s fucking leaving. What would you call that?”
Her eyes crack open. “Chivalrous?”
I grunt. “He’s supposed to make sure she’s safe. Himself. Not pass her off to someone else. And he’s supposed to catch her when she falls. That’s what a man does.”
I stare down at her until her eyes open fully and focus on mine.
“I mean, he caught her when she jumped down off the rocks. And in the trust-fall scene, remember?”
“You know that’s not what I mean.” My tone edges on a growl. “She made herself come while he left her, so she could bear the pain. He taught her how to have sex and now it’s her only connection to him, because he left.”
“He knows if her new husband sees them together, it’s a risk,” she says patiently, like maybe I missed that part. I didn’t. “By now, Wolf has heard that the man is a warlord and a notorious sadist. He’s afraid of what will happen to them both.”
“So he leaves her to the psychopath?!”
Megan just smiles. She seems way too amused by me right now.
“I think this author is a sadist,” I growl.
She laughs.
“Let him drown in the river and write in a new hero.”
“I’m already writing the next book and Wolf is very much alive.”
“Still time to kill him off.”
“My readers love him!”
“Then your readers are as dumb as he is.”
Her mouth drops open.
I stare at those sweet, soft, open lips, and my thudding dick gets the better of me.
“Fuck it.”
I kiss her, hard, my mouth claiming, then dominating, then utterly consuming hers, as I tumble head over heels into her sweetness. She’s soft and warm, even more luscious than I imagined she would be, and I devour her like I’m starving for her love.
Maybe because I am.
I’m so fucking hard, it’s maddening as I fall, deeper and deeper into her, ravaging her mouth.
So hard…
And yet I can’t fuck her.
That fact, which I can never escape, crashes over me like cold water.
I pull back, tearing myself away when it really hits me how passionately she’s kissing me back. We were eating each other’s faces off and she was moaning softly, pleadingly, her hips riding up into mine.
My cock, pressed between us, thuds with the drive to bury myself in her.
Megan blinks up at me, panting. “What? What’s wrong?”
“I shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why not?”
I swallow, my pulse pounding in my throat as we stare at each other.
“I know you were kidding,” she says softly, “about my readers.”
I was. Her readers aren’t dumb, obviously. I can barely turn the pages fast enough to feed my hunger for every word. I love the world she’s created, and no, I don’t just read it for the sex. But fuck, it makes me hard.
“Your books are great. I’m invested.” I push back, detaching myself from her. Somehow, my hips magnetized to hers and her legs became entangled with mine while we kissed.
My head is spinning with the force of the conflicting signals as I battle with myself, doing the exact last thing my body wants me to do, when I settle beside her on my back. I take a breath to calm my pounding heart.
She laughs a little, like she’s struggling to catch her breath. “I noticed. And thank you.” Her eyes meet mine, shining with affection, and gratitude I don’t deserve. “It feels so good when you say that.”
“It’s true.”
It’s also just words.
I feel like that dumb twat Wolf.
Maybe things will change, but right now, he isn’t being the man Rowan needs.
I’m failing similarly with Megan.
There’s an uncomfortable parallel there.
“I think I see myself in Wolf, actually.” I stare at the softly glowing ceiling of the jet, avoiding her eyes. “That’s a testament to how good you are.”
“Thank you. But I wouldn’t say you’re much like him.”
“We’re both cowards.”
There’s a long silence, the hum of the jet the only sound.
“Why would you say that?”
“He makes decisions based on fear.”
“So he should risk losing everything, including his life, for love?”
“Yes.”
It’s maddening how easily that answer falls out of my mouth.
I want to punch myself in the face.
“Maybe he should.” Megan’s voice is small, pensive. “But maybe he hasn’t arrived at that conclusion yet.”
Yeah. Dumb.
“Like I said.” I tug the blanket that’s wrapped around her hips and spread it out, covering us both with it. “He’s a twat.”
She snickers softly.
Then she shifts, and I feel the warmth of her body, closer to me. “Can we please snuggle?” she whispers.
That she even has to ask is so fucking wrong, it kills me a little.
“Of course.” My voice is gruff and tight, and I swear to myself that I’m not going to kiss her again. Or grope her. Or roll on top of her and grind her into the mattress.
I don’t move at all.
I suck back the soft scent of her hair as she curls against me and slips her arm around my waist, resting her head on my shoulder.
Then I feel her relax against me, and I wrap my arm over hers, trying to relax. My cock is still thudding.
There’s no way I can sleep like this.
“What about her life?” she says after a moment. “Should he risk her life for love?”
I grumble into her hair. “He should find a way to save them both. That’s what a true hero does.”
“Maybe he will.”
“Maybe I still think you should write in a new hero.”
“Maybe this one will surprise you, Jameson.”
Yeah. I fucking hope so.