The Rogue Alpha I Rejected

Chapter 1

Reilly

The raid left two of ours bleeding and a Hillsford scout dead in the south pasture. That should have been the end of the night. Marshall found me in the yard with blood drying on my sleeve and said they had a rogue in the holding cabin.

“He crossed during the fighting,” Marshall said. “Didn’t run when we boxed him in. Asked for you by title.”

“Alive?”

“Alive. Armed when we took him. Not armed now.”

“Hillsford?”

“Doesn’t smell like Hillsford. Doesn’t smell like us either.”

I wiped my hands on my pants and started down the path.

The holding cabin sat under the ridge, away from the hall, built for nights like this.

One room. One stove. A door that locked from the outside.

I had used it twice since my father died.

Both times I had handed the man inside over to someone else and gone back to work.

Edward was in the infirmary doorway when I passed, too old to send to bed and too young for the cabin. I pointed at him without stopping.

“You stay up here.”

He lifted his chin like he wanted to argue and then didn’t. Marshall stayed with him. I went down alone.

The cabin lamp was already lit. Two of my wolves stood outside. I told them to wait at the turn in the path, not at the door. They didn’t like it. They did it.

I opened the door.

He was sitting on the bench against the far wall with his wrists tied in front of him and his ankles free.

Tall. Dark hair gone longer than pack regulation.

A cut on his cheekbone that had already stopped bleeding.

Coat still on. Boots muddy. He looked at me like he had been waiting for a specific person and I was her.

I closed the door.

“Name,” I said.

He didn’t give it. He breathed in once, slow, and his whole body changed. Shoulders locked. Hands fisted against the rope. His eyes went from assessing to fixed on my face in a way that made the back of my neck go hot.

I knew his name before he opened his mouth.

Owen.

It landed in my head with no courtesy and no explanation.

Owen. Then the rest of it hit, low in my stomach, sharp enough that I put my palm on the table to stay upright.

Heat. Scent. A pull that had nothing to do with command and everything to do with the fact that I could smell him now, really smell him, and my wolf stopped pacing and paid attention like she had been waiting three years for this exact air.

Mate.

I said, “No.”

Out loud. To the room. To him. To the thing in my blood that did not care what I said.

“Reilly Landers,” he said. His voice was rough. Not loud. “Acting Luna. I know.”

“I didn’t ask you what you know. I asked for your name.”

“Owen Tillson.”

Tillson Ford. The burned pack. The story Hillsford liked to tell when they needed a villain with no one left to argue. I had heard the name in council. I had not expected it to come with this.

“You crossed my river during a raid,” I said. “You asked for me. Talk.”

He stood up. The rope on his wrists made a small sound.

He was taller than me by enough that I had to lift my chin.

I did not step back. The cabin was too small for stepping back.

He smelled like cold air, blood that wasn’t his, and something under that I felt between my legs before I had a word for it.

“Hillsford staged that raid,” he said. “They wanted you looking south. They’re moving men along the west cut. Not tonight. Soon. Your alliance is not an alliance. It’s a schedule.”

“That’s a convenient thing for a Tillson rogue to say.”

“It’s true.”

“And you came here to tell me out of kindness.”

“I came here because if Hillsford takes this ridge, they take the river, and then there’s nothing between them and the ranges I’ve been working. That’s not kindness. That’s the map.”

I should have called Marshall. I should have sent this man to the cells under the hall and written a letter to Alexander Hills and gone to check my wounded. I stayed where I was with my hand on the table and the bond climbing my spine like a hand.

“Sit down,” I said.

He didn’t. He looked at my mouth.

“You feel it,” he said.

“Sit down.”

“Say you don’t.”

“I am not doing this with you.”

“You already are.”

I crossed the space because standing still was worse. I checked the rope myself, fingers on the knot at his wrists, which was a mistake. Skin. Heat. His pulse under my thumb. He made a sound that was not a word and I felt it in my teeth.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Then stop touching me.”

I didn’t stop touching him. I pulled the knot looser because a tied man in a bond-spike is how people get bit, and the second the rope slackened he turned his hands and caught my wrists. Not hard enough to mark. Hard enough that I felt every finger.

We stood like that. The stove ticked. Someone laughed up the hill and then it went quiet again.

“I came to warn you,” he said. “That’s still true.”

“Then warn me and let go.”

He let go.

I didn’t step back far enough. The bond didn’t care about distance in a room this size.

I could feel where he was without looking, which was a problem I did not have time for.

My nipples were tight under my shirt. I was wet.

I had been wet since he said my name. I hated that I could track it that clearly.

“Hillsford will ask for you,” I said. “If they find out I had a Tillson in this cabin and didn’t send him.”

“Then send me.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what.”

“Make it simple.”

He laughed once, no humor in it. “It isn’t simple. You smell like you want to put me on that floor and you also smell like you’re about to walk up that path and pretend this didn’t happen. That’s not simple.”

“You don’t talk to me like that.”

“Then send me up to your beta and go to bed.”

I should have. I looked at the door. I looked at his throat. The cut on his cheekbone had a smear of dirt in it. I reached up and wiped it with my thumb because I had lost the thread of what I was allowed to do in my own cabin.

He went still.

“Reilly.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what.”

“Like you already get to.”

His hands came back, this time at my waist, over the shirt, thumbs against the edge of my belt. I could have broken the hold. I am not a small woman and I am not untrained. I didn’t break it. I put my mouth on his.

It wasn’t careful. His teeth caught my lip.

I made a noise into him that I did not recognize as mine.

He tasted like cold and blood and the inside of a warning I had not finished hearing.

His hands slid from my waist to my ass and pulled me against him and I felt him hard through his pants, thick, already pressed to my hip like we had skipped every step I needed.

I bit his lower lip and he swore and walked me backward until the table hit my thighs.

“Wait,” I said, which was not the same as stop.

He waited with his forehead against mine and his hands still on me. Breathing like he had run. I had both fists in his coat.

“This is a mistake,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I have a pack on that hill.”

“I know.”

“If I do this I still have to decide what to do with you in the morning.”

“I know that too.”

I kissed him again because talking was making it worse.

His tongue was in my mouth and my back was arched over the table and one of his thighs pushed between mine until I was sitting on the edge with my legs open around him.

I pulled his coat off his shoulders. He got my shirt out of my belt and his hands went under it, hot on my ribs, then higher, palms on my breasts over the binding I wore for patrol.

He made an impatient sound and yanked the binding down so my breasts were in his hands, bare, nipples caught between his fingers.

I gasped. It was ugly and plain. He ducked his head and put his mouth on my right nipple and sucked and I grabbed his hair hard enough to hurt.

He didn’t stop. He licked, bit down just enough that my hips jerked, then moved to the other one and did it again while his hand worked the first, rolling the wet nipple between finger and thumb.

“Off,” I said, pulling at his shirt.

He leaned back only as far as he had to.

Shirt over his head. I got a look at him in the lamp—scar on his left side, dark hair on his chest, stomach tight—and then I had my mouth on his throat so I would not say mate.

Skin and salt. His pulse against my tongue.

He groaned and shoved my shirt up and off.

The binding followed. Cold air on my breasts, then his chest against them, the hair there scraping my nipples until I was grinding on his thigh with no rhythm I had chosen.

His hand went to my belt. I let him. He opened it, yanked my pants down with my underwear still inside them, and they caught on my boots.

I laughed once, breathless and angry at the boots, and he dropped to his knees and pulled the whole mess off, boots and all, and then I was sitting on my own table naked from the waist down with a rogue between my legs.

He looked at me there. I almost closed my knees. He put his hands on my inner thighs and held them open and put his mouth on me.

I slammed one hand back on the table so I wouldn’t fall.

He licked a line up through the wet and found my clit like he had been told where it was.

Flat tongue, then the point of it, then he sucked and I made a sound I hoped the men on the path could not hear.

He didn’t tease for long. He held me open with his thumbs and ate me like he was starving and angry about it, nose pressed in, chin wet, two fingers pushing into me while he sucked.

I was tight around the fingers and soaked around them at the same time.

He turned them and found the spot inside that made my legs shake and stayed on it.

“Owen—”

He hummed against my clit. I came on his mouth hard, hips jerking, thighs clamped on his head, the orgasm tearing through my stomach and out. He kept licking me through it until I pulled his hair because it was too much. He stood up with his mouth shining and kissed me so I tasted myself.