Chapter 7 #2
The change rolls through her quickly, and she’s a woman again, breathing hard, a fine sheen of sweat on her forehead and her hair wild around her shoulders. She stretches, arms over her head, spine arching, and my wolf makes a sound I am grateful no one else can hear.
She undoes the string around her leg, letting her clothes fall onto a smooth, low rock. I should look away. I should absolutely look away. I should melt back into the forest and give her the privacy she thinks she has. Go back to the estate and never speak of this.
But I don’t.
I shift back because my wolf is too much, my blood too hot. I need to be human to process what I’m seeing. I stand there behind the ferns, naked and breathless, staring.
Beautiful.
She is so beautiful, it hurts to look at her.
Sleek lines and glowing skin, the curve of her back flowing into the soft swell of her hips, her thighs, the long column of her legs.
Her hair falls in a dark sweep past her shoulder blades.
She turns slightly to test the water with one foot, and I catch the profile of her breast, the graceful line from her throat to her collarbone to her chest.
My entire body grows rigid.
The hunger I have been swallowing since the day I first laid eyes on her rises up and nearly drowns me.
I want…
I want to step out of these trees, cross that little pebbled beach, and put my hands on her.
I want to bury my face in her hair and breathe her in until my brain stops working.
I want to trace every inch of skin she has ever hidden from me, first with my fingers and then with my mouth.
I want to feel her shiver when I kiss the back of her neck.
I want to find out what sounds she makes when I finally, finally touch her the way she deserves to be touched.
I want to press her back against one of these birches and let her wrap those long legs around me. Find out if kissing her feels as devastating the second time as it did the first.
My fingers dig into the bark of the tree I’m crouched next to.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
She doesn’t know I’m here. She thinks she’s alone. Whatever I do with my eyes right now is a violation, and I know better. I should turn around.
I watch her wade into the water instead.
She gasps at the cold, and then laughs gleefully before pushing off, slicing cleanly into the lake. A few strokes carry her out past the shallow rim, and then she tips onto her back and floats, arms spread wide, dark hair fanning around her head.
She is so unselfconscious.
So alive.
She kicks a spray of water into the air and laughs again when it rains back down on her face.
She dives under and comes up shaking her head like a wet puppy, water arcing in silver beads around her.
She flips onto her stomach and swims, then flips onto her back and floats, the morning sun catching the droplets on her skin and making her glow.
She is playing. Just…playing.
My chest tightens. I have not done that in my life.
I try to think of a time I’ve ever been in a body of water for anything other than training or cleanup. Anything I have ever done without purpose, without an agenda, without something to prove or protect or prepare for. I come up empty.
“The alpha carries the pack,” my father’s voice says in my head, as clearly as if he were standing beside me in these ferns.
His hand, heavy on my small shoulder, pressing me into the floor of his office when I was only six years old.
“You don’t get to rest. You don’t get to be careless.
Every hour you waste is an hour your people are unprotected. ”
I was a child, and I believed him.
I was fifteen, and he said it again, more harshly, when he caught me out in the woods with my friends.
I was twenty, and he said it again when I mentioned, once, that I needed a break, away from the pack.
I was twenty-four, and he died, but the words didn’t stop. They just moved into my own voice.
Discipline. Duty. Control.
I don’t float in lakes.
I don’t laugh for no reason.
I don’t possess whatever it is that lets Sienna be so carefree with the whole world watching. Or even alone.
And seeing her like this now is doing something to me that I don’t know how to name. I want to go out there. I want to drop everything I have ever carried, walk into that water, and let her teach me how to be a person who knows how to play.
I stand up, and my feet move forward an inch before I catch myself.
I can’t, of course.
I can never.
So, I stand among the trees and the ferns with my hands curled into fists, watching her float and telling myself this is enough. This is more than I should have. This is already too much.
The wind shifts.
I feel it before I understand it: the change in the air against my bare skin, the subtle pivot of the breeze from crossways to behind me, my own scent rolling out across the water like a banner unfurling.
Sienna stops floating on her back in the lake. Her head comes up. She rotates smoothly, treading water, her eyes moving across the trees until they land with laser precision on the cluster of ferns where I’m standing.
Her expression goes from shock to fury in the span of a breath.
I’ve been caught.
For a moment, I consider fleeing, pretending it wasn’t me, running back into the woods. For a moment, I genuinely consider it, like a coward.
After quickly pulling on my clothes, I push through the ferns and step out into the sunlight. I walk to the edge of the pebbled shore and stop there, arms loose at my sides, and wait.
She stares at me. Her mouth opens, closes. Then, she hisses, “Are you stalking me?”
I cross my arms over my chest defensively. “No.”
It comes out of my mouth automatically, the lie, and guilt settles in my chest the second the word is said. Because of course I was. There is no word for what I was doing that is kinder than that.
“Yeah, right,” she sneers.
“You’re not supposed to be out here on your own, Sienna.”
Her eyebrows arch. “Excuse me?”
“The forest is not safe for unsupervised guests.” My voice sounds stiff and official, even to me. “You should have informed Lydia before leaving the estate.”
She laughs. It’s not a pleasant sound. Having her ire aimed at me is not something I’m enjoying.
The water is up to her shoulders, but the lake is clear, and the angle is making it hard for me not to notice that every time she moves, I can see the full curve of her breasts just at the waterline. Droplets slide down her collarbones, her nipples drawn tight from the cold.
My eyes keep lowering. I keep dragging them back up to her face.
She notices.
“Are you serious right now?” Her tone is sharp and incredulous. “You know what, I’ll take it as a compliment. It’s been a while since I was sure you even had eyes.”
“Sienna—”
“Nobody told me I needed a babysitter, Alpha Steele.” Her chin lifts.
“Nobody told me I needed supervision. I was briefed on territory boundaries. I stayed within them. If you wanted to keep tabs on me, you could have just assigned someone. Instead of…you know, personally following me around. I’m sure you have better things to do with your time. ”
She is moving while she talks. Walking through the water now, toward the shore, toward me.
Toward her clothes.
“Get out of the way,” she says, still mostly submerged.
I step back onto the moss, giving her a clear path to her pile of clothing on the rock.
And then, she’s rising out of the water. I tell myself not to look.
I look.
I cannot help it. She emerges from the lake as if out of a myth, water sheeting off her skin, her hair plastered dark down her back, every curve and plane of her body on full display.
She isn’t bothered that I’m seeing her naked.
Normally, female wolf shifters would be screaming and telling me to turn away.
She simply walks past me with her shoulders squared and her head high, like she is the one in control here. And heaven have mercy, she is.
My body is not my own. My hands ache with the urge to reach for her. I swallow against the tightness in my throat.
She picks up her shirt and starts pulling it on over her wet skin with brisk, angry motions.
All of a sudden, she laughs again—that cold, scathing laugh.
“You know,” she says, “for a man who already has a woman, you sure have the nerve looking at another one.”
I find myself confused. “What?”
She yanks her jeans up over her damp thighs and zips them as I stare at her. “Oh, don’t insult me. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“What are you—”
“You kicked me out for Lydia, Lucas.” She glances up at me, hair dripping, eyes blazing. “The way she looked at us? The way she looked at you? The way you looked at her? I’d have to be an idiot not to see that there’s something going on.”
“There’s—”
“You can do whatever you want.” Her voice cracks, just slightly, and she covers it with another hard laugh.
“Honestly. I don’t want to get in the way of your happiness.
If you had simply told me you were interested in someone…
No, you know what? Screw you, Lucas! How dare you kiss me when you have someone already?
You are trash. You are the epitome of garbage, and I’m insulted that the Goddess chose you for me.
The one thing I can’t stand is a cheater. ”
“Cheater? But I didn’t—”
“It’s fine.” She sniffs derisively. “There are plenty of good-looking shifters here, and I’m no nun. I’m glad I found out when I did. Otherwise, I would have been trying to convince you to—”
She trails off, buttons her jeans, and reaches for her shoes, her movements jerky.
Plenty of good-looking shifters? Is she planning to—
“I’ll see myself back,” Sienna says without looking at me. She brushes past me and starts walking.
My hand shoots out and closes around her wrist.
My fingers are wrapped gently but firmly around the delicate bones of her wrist. Her skin is cool from the water. I can feel her pulse leaping under my thumb, and I can feel my own pulse answering it. She doesn’t try to pull away, but she doesn’t turn around, either.
I’m looking at the back of her head, at the wet, dark curtain of her hair, at the tense line of her shoulders under the damp fabric of her shirt.
“There is nothing going on between Lydia and me,” I tell her.
She goes very, very still. She doesn’t walk away.
And for the first time since I set eyes on her in that hallway at Darius’s house, I don’t want her to.