4. Chapter 4
Roman prowled the hall like a wolf overdue for a run.
He and Lance had spent hours reliving childhood trouble, arguing over whose memory was right, laughing until their sides ached, and still something sat wrong in him.
Something unsaid. Or maybe it was guilt, for not knowing what Lance had gone through, for breaking the promise he’d made to always protect him.
He ended up outside Lance’s door, his hand hovering over the handle, arguing with himself. His code of honor said leave him be. Every other part of him said go in. He told himself he only wanted to talk, if Lance was even awake. Then he pushed the door open before he could think better of it.
The room was thick with Lance’s scent, spice and warm vanilla, and it made Roman ache.
He gripped the door frame, knuckles white, and made himself stay while his gaze traced the length of Lance, the sheet rucked down past his hips, his chest bare and rising slow, his throat tipped back against the pillow.
Moonlight laid shadows across his face and his tousled hair.
Asleep. That should have been Roman’s cue to go.
Then Lance shifted under the sheets and gave a soft moan, and what was left of Roman’s resolve went with it.
He crossed the room slowly, like the floor might give him away, and lowered himself to the edge of the bed.
Up close, Lance’s scent was overwhelming, and he let himself drown in it before he leaned down.
His mouth found the warm skin below Lance’s ear first. Then the line of his jaw.
Then, finally, his mouth, soft, a question more than a kiss.
Lance made a sleepy sound and kissed him back before his eyes were even open, and that was all it took.
Roman cupped the side of his face, thumb along the sharp line of his jaw, and took the kiss deeper.
One slide of tongue against tongue and desire slammed through him.
Lance’s hands came up into his hair and pulled him down, and Roman went, following him back into the pillows, fitting himself along the warm length of him.
Lance arched up, seeking, and the friction tore a groan out of them both.
An overwhelming need rolled through Roman, to touch, to take, to keep him for good.
He got a hand under the sheet, palm spreading over hot bare skin, and Lance gasped his name like it was the only word he had left.
If anyone ever tried to take him away again, Roman would shred them into a bloody pile of flesh.
A snarl ripped the silence and jolted him awake, half into a crouch before he understood the sound had come from his own throat. The room swam back into focus. Empty. His chest was slick with sweat, his shorts tented over his hard, aching cock, and his hand was fisted in nothing but his own sheets.
“Dammit.” He scrubbed a hand down his face, hauled himself up, and headed for the shower. Under the cold water, he tried not to remember the wet dreams he’d had as a teenager about a grown-up Lance.
***
Lance woke before the sun was all the way up, and the longer he lay there, the clearer it got how badly he’d messed up.
The bed was the problem. Soft, warm, clean sheets, and he’d slept the whole night through for the first time in more nights than he could count.
No one chasing him. No boots marching toward him in the dark, no reason to be over a fence and gone before first light.
The whole cottage smelled like Roman, cedar and something under it his wolf wanted to roll in, because all of it was Roman’s.
He’d woken slow and warm and hard, already turned toward the far end of the cottage where the alpha slept, wanting him before he was even properly awake.
He could still feel where Roman had kissed him in the dream, mouth on his throat and lower, a phantom heat that hadn’t cooled.
That was the trouble, in one word. He lay there and wanted a man he had no right to, wanted him so badly his skin felt two sizes too small for his body.
Before he could do anything stupid about the ache between his legs, he forced himself out of bed.
He’d borrowed a soft blue shirt and kept it on even after his own came out of the dryer, and refused to think about why.
He let himself out the front door for a lungful of air that wasn’t half Roman.
That was the whole plan. Cold air, distance, a few minutes to put out the heat still banked low in his gut before he did something he couldn’t take back.
So he walked. Away from the cottage, away from the scent soaked into every wall of it, out across the wet grass until the building was a good way back and he could finally pull a breath that was just morning.
A bird racketed in the eaves of an outbuilding, too cheerful for the hour.
The far gardens were stupid with white flowers.
Somewhere in all that quiet he let his guard down, the way he never did, because for once he was listening to his own head instead of the world around him.
He smelled them a half-second before he saw them, and by then it was too late.
Four wolves fanned across the open ground between him and the cottage, the tree line a long sprint at his back.
His gut dropped. Pack muscle, the kind Merritt could shrug off if this went sideways, and they’d been waiting on him.
“Morning,” Lance said, and kept his hands loose.
“The stable rat’s back.” The one in front said it like a punchline he’d been saving. “Heard the prince dragged something in.”
“Original. Did the whole welcome committee workshop that one?” He kept his weight even and his voice exactly as bored as he needed it. “You the pack genealogist? Pay must be brutal.”
They wanted him small, and a half-blood with a mouth ruined the picture. Too damned bad.
“You smell wrong,” another one said, stepping in. “Always did. Like something that ought to be put down before it turns.”
“Wow. And I just had a bath. Soap and everything.” Lance clicked his tongue. “What’s your excuse? You smell like wet dog.”
The circle tightened. The back of his neck went cold, and right then the smell of horse came up out of nowhere, out of years ago, and the morning slid sideways.
He was nine. The give of another pack’s stable wall against his spine, the rough plank catching his shirt.
Three older boys with that same smug certainty all over their faces, the kind that said nobody was coming.
Nobody had come. He’d learned the lesson.
You get yourself out. There’s no one over your shoulder. No one at your back.
A hand closed on his arm and yanked, and he was twenty-two again, heart slamming.
“Where you going, rat? We’re talking.”
“Hands off me.” His voice didn’t shake. He gave himself that. “I mean it. Last warning, and it’s the only one I’ve got.”
The man laughed and dug his fingers in.
Lance never got to throw the elbow he was lining up. The growl hit first. It came off the porch low and savage, and it went through Lance’s chest and into the four wolves like a hand clamped on the back of every neck. His own knees wanted to fold, and the sound wasn’t even aimed at him.
Roman stood at the top of the steps, no shirt, the pack mark stark on his chest, his pale blue eyes gone yellow.
Then he came down the steps slow, easy, like he had all the time in the world, and his voice, when it came, was low and ice-cold, somehow worse than the growl.
“Take your hands off him.”
The grip was gone before the sentence finished. The wolf who’d grabbed him stumbled back so fast he nearly went down, and not one of the four could hold Roman’s eyes for more than a second.
Roman walked through them like they weren’t there.
He put himself square in front of Lance, one shoulder turning to wall him off from the rest, and laid a hand flat on his chest, over the borrowed shirt, over a heart still going like a rabbit’s.
Just left it there. Lance hated how much his whole body wanted to lean into it.
“He’s my guest. He’s under my protection.” Roman finally looked at the one who’d done the talking, who’d found something fascinating about his own boots. “You’ve got a problem with that, Doyle, you bring it to me. Not him. Me. Now get off my land before I forget you’re kin.”
They backed off. They tried to make it look like their own idea instead of a retreat, and didn’t sell it, and then it was just the two of them in the cold morning with that idiot bird still going in the eaves.
Roman turned to him. The yellow ebbed out of his eyes, and what replaced the fury was worse, something open and scared, all of it for Lance. He couldn’t take being looked at like that. He looked at the flowers instead.
“You’re shaking,” Roman said.
“You always make this big an entrance, or am I special?”
“Lance.”
“I’m fine, Rome.” And there it was, the thing the whole sorry morning had come to teach him, settling in cold and final while his hands still trembled.
He made himself say it. “See, though? This. This is why I have to go. It’s not just the ‘nats out there. It’s in here too.
It’s everywhere I stand next to you, and it’s never going to stop, and one of these mornings you won’t get to the porch in time and it’ll be your blood on the grass—”
“They wouldn’t dare,” Roman snarled.
“Maybe. Maybe not. But it doesn’t have to be them.” His throat worked. “I can’t. I won’t risk you. I’m leaving. Now.”
He braced for the fight. He wanted the fight, he realized, wanted Roman to argue him out of it the way Roman argued him out of everything, because as long as they were arguing he didn’t have to actually go.
Roman’s jaw set in a line Lance knew from when they were kids, the one that meant the prince had stopped asking.
“Fine,” Roman said. “You’re leaving.”