Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
We lay there in silence for long enough that I almost would’ve wondered if Rob had fallen asleep except that I could feel his muscles all stiff underneath me. But finally, he sighed deeply, and the tension drained out of him like the receding of the tide.
“Let my arms go, at least,” he said, a resigned-sounding rumble that I felt in my own chest.
I shook my head. He didn’t deserve the courtesy of an argument.
“Please just let my arms go, Finian. You’ve made your point.
Your magic’s better than what I bought from that shaman in Idaho, which I knew in the first place, and I knew it wouldn’t work long after you knew I was here.
I shouldn’t have come back at all and given you time to compensate for—” He stopped short, as if he hadn’t meant to say that.
I almost sobbed with relief. He’d known I’d probably turn the tables on him if he took my bait, but he’d done it anyway.
Which meant Rob wanted me enough to take a risk. Not only the risk of breaking into my house and tying me up, but the risk that I’d recognize him. Talk to him. Make him talk to me.
Or maybe that had been the point. He wanted me to, but he couldn’t ask.
Knocking on my door, after almost twenty years, and with his face and body so altered—and his mind, I was willing to bet, hadn’t escaped the trauma unscathed either—would’ve been more of a risk for him than all of his elaborate stalking and breaking and entering.
This got him what he wanted, while he pretended it wasn’t.
Kind of like the way he’d tied me up and let me have what he knew I wanted, without my having to ask for it, either.
Maybe the biggest risk for him, his greatest fear, had been that I’d actually say no when he gave me the chance.
I pushed impossibly closer to him, burying my face in his neck. My biggest fear also amounted to him saying no. I wanted to glue myself to him so tightly that he could never shake me off.
“What are you going to do if I untie you?” I asked him, trying not to sound like the answer might break me. I definitely failed, because now that we’d settled down quietly, Rob’s alpha senses would be able to pick up every skip of my heartbeat, every hitch in my breath.
Another heavy sigh lifted and lowered me.
“The right thing to do would be get my knot to go down as quick as I can and then walk out and never come back.” I bit his collarbone. “Ow!”
“That so didn’t actually hurt.”
“I was humoring you. Untie me. I’m not going anywhere, and we both fucking know it.”
That might’ve made me a lot happier if he hadn’t sounded so miserable about it, and I probably should’ve left him bound for a while just to show him.
But I’d started getting chilly, even with my very own alpha heater underneath me. I wanted blankets, and I wanted his arms around me, and comfort outweighed petty revenge any day.
“Fine,” I grumbled, but my voice shook a bit. Tingles of apprehension and thrills of suspense skittered along all my nerves and veins, my blood feeling fizzy. “I’ll humor you.” He started to argue. “No, shut the fuck up, Rob, this is me humoring you. Not the other way around.”
His soft laugh nearly undid me. I lifted my head up and kissed him, hard, licking that laugh off of his lips, wondering if I’d ever have him exactly where I wanted him again.
You can let him go now, I told my restraints. This time they cooperated, obediently slithering from around his wrists and falling to the floor with a soft thump.
I held the kiss as Rob’s limbs were freed. Moment of truth.
His arms wrapped around me instantly, one hand cupping the back of my head and pinning me in the kiss, the other hand sliding down my back and finding the curve of my ass. Both of his hands fit perfectly, like I’d known they would.
He’d always fit me perfectly in every way, so why should this be any different? This didn’t feel like something new, but a continuation, although that might have something to do with my years of pathetic, one-sided fantasies.
Then again, he’d tracked me down and watched me obsessively while I jerked off and then forced his way into my house and my body and my life, so maybe it hadn’t been so one-sided after all.
“I missed you,” Rob whispered, as if he’d read my mind, and nibbled on my lower lip. “Every fucking day. I couldn’t stay away anymore. I’m sorry. I’m nothing but trouble, like your mom always said. But I couldn’t stay away.”
I wiggled around, making him loosen his grip enough that I could push up and look into his face.
Those eyes left me breathless. They always had.
The look in them made my heart beat faster, and that part was new. He’d never gazed at me with that kind of yearning, hungry and desperate and expecting to be hurt.
“You’re going to tell me,” I said. “I mean it. You’re going to tell me everything.”
“No. Not everything.” That had the ring of total finality, and that steely glint to his eyes underlined it.
“Some,” he amended, as I raised my eyebrows at him.
“I found out what happened to my parents. I’ll tell you that part.
And some of—I haven’t lived a life you’d like very much, Finian.
I’m not exactly Prince Charming, inside or out.
I didn’t get these scars doing something nice. And they’re ugly as hell, I know.”
Rob had been kind of vain when he’d been younger.
Not his most attractive trait, ironically, and it’d always made me feel like shit given the ugliness I’d seen when I looked in the mirror.
But now his lack of that hot-guy arrogance caught at my heart, and I found myself stroking the side of his face, gently, like the smitten teenager I’d been so long ago.
“I’m the last person who’d criticize someone’s fucked-up face,” I said, because it wasn’t like he’d never noticed my own disfigurement. “Ugly? Really? You’re a gorgeous alpha and you always have been. And you know it. I’m the ugly duckling here.”
Rob blinked at me. “Excuse me?” he said blankly.
Gods damn it. I didn’t exactly enjoy talking about my face!
“The ugly duckling, like in the story, the one that everyone laughed—”
“I know the fucking story, Finian, I’m scarred, not brain-damaged,” he snapped.
“Okay, for one, the ugly duckling grew up to be stunning, and for another, you were never anything else! Like that famous model with the mole. It just made her hotter. Same with you. You were such a cute kid. And then I came back to see everyone, you know, from a distance, about fifteen years ago—”
That hit me like a bucket of hot water, instant, sizzling, blinding rage. “You did fucking what?” I almost shouted at him. “Fifteen years ago—fifteen—I would’ve—”
“Yeah, I know you would, and it was a bad idea and I needed to stay away, but I saw you. And you weren’t that cute kid anymore. You were, I shouldn’t say what you were, because you were still only about eighteen. It makes me sound like a perv.”
That brought my anger to a screeching halt, because I couldn’t believe my fucking ears.
A perv. This man who’d gotten himself into my bed by pinning me down, telling me about how he was going to fuck me whether I agreed to it or not, and then daring me to say no while he ate me out and I cried.
But ogling me from a distance when I’d been eighteen and he’d been twenty-two. Right. That made him a perv.
I collapsed onto him in a fit of hysterical laughter that I couldn’t have controlled with a gun to my head, howling with it, until the paroxysms transmuted into sobs. He held me through it, not saying anything but a muttered, “Jesus fucking Christ, Finian.”
Maybe he knew I’d reached my absolute outer limit for the different types and intensities of feelings I could endure for one day.
Finally, I wore myself out, and I tipped my head back on his arm… he’d turned us onto our sides, I realized, and his knot had finally gone down, his cock soft enough to pull out of me. I already wanted it back.
Rob reached up, stroking the side of my face the way I’d touched him.
So carefully, his long, roughly callused fingers tracing the contours of Kazakhstan as if he’d never seen my face before.
The corners of his mouth quirked. Not quite a smile, but his eyes had a warmth and softness I felt like it’d be tempting fate to try to put a name to.
I cleared my thick, scratchy throat. Gods, laughing fits like that were almost more cathartic than crying jags, but they left me feeling like I’d been on a week-long bender.
“You’re not ugly,” I rasped. Ugh, I sounded gross too. “You could never be ugly. The scars aren’t pretty, but neither are you.”
“You’re pretty enough for both of us,” he said, and he actually sounded like he meant it.
I tried to keep my eyes open as he leaned in to kiss me, because that expression on his not-pretty face had me as fluttery as if I’d really still been eighteen.
But they closed despite myself, and by the time he finished exploring my mouth at his leisure, I’d nearly melted into the bed.
The past week of nearly frantic worry and suspense and confusion and doubt had left me a ragged shred of a werewolf, and getting fucked twice and having a hysterical fit had taken the last bit of my energy.
Stick a fucking fork in me. Or an alpha knot.
It didn’t matter, because within a few minutes, I’d be passed out either way.
“I need to sleep,” I said. “You need to sleep too. Right? Please stay. Promise me.”
“I want to take my pants off first. And what you left of my shirt. It’s not like I can borrow one of yours, either.”
“That’s not exactly answering my question, Rob.” I held his gaze steadily, because I wouldn’t be letting him off the hook. Not this time.
That hint of his youthful uncertainly crept back into his face. “I couldn’t stay away before, could I? But I’m not making any—”
“Rob. Yes, you fucking are. Promise me.” I couldn’t beg. That would be pathetic.
But the tremor in my voice gave me away, and he sighed, shaking his head in defeat.
“I’m not leaving tonight. I’m not leaving right away.
I can’t promise I won’t need to go—I have things I need to—stop looking at me like that!
I promise I’ll never actually leave you for real unless you tell me to.
Okay? Fuck. I’m here. You caught me. You can do whatever you want to with me. ”
My hands curled against his chest, fingers digging in. “I kind of want everything,” I said, heart beating somewhere in my throat.
“You may change your mind once you know where I’ve been. But I—I’ve never changed my mind about you. Never.” He sounded as raw as I felt, the arms around me trembling slightly.
“No more never,” I whispered. “How about always? Okay? Let’s see where that gets us.”
Outside, the snow fell heavily, not quite muffling the sounds of the raccoons clattering and chittering around on the deck, without a care in the world for me or my magic or for the lurking alpha werewolf, the fearless little fuckers. One of them squeaked absurdly loudly.
It made me laugh, and Rob smiled in answer—for real, the corners of his eyes crinkling. When he pressed his lips to mine, his kiss held that smile and all the promises he hadn’t yet said aloud. But he would. I knew it. I had faith again, for the first time in twenty years.