Chapter 1 #2
She scrambled back, clutching the neck of her cello, her knuckles white. "I... the door was open."
"The door is broken," I corrected. I was standing on the ice, looking up at her in the box, but I still loomed over her. The cold coming off the ice was nothing compared to the heat raging inside me. Being this close to her was a mistake.
The scent was intoxicating. Up close, it was a physical weight. Vanilla and fear. The fear was delicious. It triggered every dark, dominant instinct I had spent twenty-two years suppressing. My canines ached, lengthening slightly in my gums.
"Who are you?" she whispered. She didn't look at my face. Her eyes were glued to the scar that ran down my chest, the jagged, raised ridge of flesh.
"I'm the guy who’s about to call campus security," I lied. I wasn't calling anyone. I wanted her to run. I needed her to run, because if she stayed, I was going to do something that would ruin us both. "Name."
"Maya," she breathed. "Maya Sterling."
Maya. The name tasted like sugar on my tongue.
"Well, Maya Sterling," I growled, bracing my hands on the ledge of the penalty box, leaning in until my face was inches from hers.
I saw her breath hitch. I saw the pulse fluttering frantically in the hollow of her throat.
I wanted to put my mouth there. I wanted to bite down until I tasted her life. "You are trespassing."
"I just wanted to practice," she said, and surprisingly, there was a spark of steel in her voice. She wasn't fleeing. She was terrified, yes, but she wasn't leaving. "The acoustics... they're better here."
"The acoustics?" I let out a harsh, dry laugh. "You broke into a Division I hockey arena because you didn't like the sound of the practice rooms?"
"It's suffocating in there," she blurted out, her eyes finally meeting mine.
They were brown. Not a flat mud brown, but the color of polished mahogany, deep and rich and full of secrets. And in that moment, I saw it. I saw the same cage in her eyes that I felt in my own chest. She was trapped. She was drowning.
The Wolf stopped snarling and started purring.
Protector. She needs a Protector.
"Suffocating," I repeated, my voice dropping an octave, losing the harsh edge and turning into something velvety and dangerous. "And you think it's safer out here? With me?"
I leaned closer. I couldn't help it. I inhaled, dragging a deep breath through my nose, filtering her scent. She smelled like arousal now. A spike of feminine heat that mixed with the vanilla.
She didn't lean away. That was the thing that nearly broke my control. She should have been scrambling over the back of the bench. Instead, she leaned in, just a fraction of an inch. Like a moth drawn to the incinerator.
"I don't know who you are," she whispered.
"Leo," I said. The name left me without permission. "My name is Leo."
"Leo," she tested the word.
My vision swam. The gold was leaking into my sight.
I gripped the edge of the boards so hard the wood groaned under my fingers.
If I touched her—if I put one hand on that soft, pale skin—I would claim her.
Right here. On the bench, in the cold, with the smell of violence around us.
I would rip those sensible clothes off her body and breed her until she smelled like nothing but me.
The thought was so vivid, so violent, that it snapped me back to reality.
I shoved myself away from the boards, putting five feet of distance between us. The loss of her warmth was instant and painful.
"Get out," I snarled, turning my back to her. I couldn't look at her. "Pack your shit. Get out. If I find you here again, Maya, I won't be asking."
I heard the frantic rustling of her packing her instrument. The click of the case latches. The scramble of her boots on the floor.
"Leo?" she asked, one last time from the doorway.
"Go!" I roared, the sound echoing like a gunshot.
She ran. I heard the heavy metal door slam shut, sealing her out in the cold.
I stood there on the ice, shivering in my towel, half-hard and furious, listening to the silence returning. But the silence was different now. The air still held the ghost of her vanilla scent.
I looked down at the wooden ledge of the penalty box where I had gripped it.
There were four deep gouges in the wood. Claw marks.
I ran my thumb over the splintered timber. The Wolf was awake. And now that he had found her, he wasn't going to let me sleep until he had her.
I was in trouble. We were both in so much trouble.
Maya
I ran until my lungs burned.
I didn't stop until I reached the library quad, my cello case banging rhythmically against my hip. The cold air seared my throat, but my face was burning hot.
I collapsed onto a stone bench beneath a flickering lamppost, gasping for air, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. Thump-thump-thump.
My mind was reeling, trying to process the last ten minutes. The darkness. The eyes. The sheer, overwhelming size of him.
Leo.
He had been... terrifying. He had looked at me like I was a meal. Like he wanted to tear me apart.
But as I sat there in the freezing dark, touching my fingertips to the hollow of my throat where his gaze had lingered, I realized the most terrifying thing of all.
I wasn't shaking because I was scared.
I was shaking because, for the first time in my life, when he had looked at me with those strange, golden-flecked eyes, I hadn't felt like a doll on a shelf.
I felt like prey.
And God help me, I wanted him to catch me.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket. The screen lit up with another text from my mother.
Mother: Are you practicing? Remember, focus is everything.
I stared at the words, then looked back toward the dark silhouette of the arena in the distance.
"Focus," I whispered to myself, the word tasting like a lie.
I knew, with a sinking, heavy certainty, that I wasn't going to be focusing on Elgar tonight. I was going to be thinking about the scar on his chest, and the way he had smelled like a storm about to break.
I stood up, shouldering my cello. The wind howled through the trees, sounding eerily like a wolf calling to the moon.
I walked back to my dorm, but I knew the truth. I had left something back there on the ice. And sooner or later, I was going to have to go back and get it.