Page 30 of The Alpha's Arranged Bride

Of course, that’s all she did.

She was two seconds away from dropping the book she’d been staring at steadily for the past three hours without reading and flying out the door again, when she heard the soft click as it opened and the even softer noise of it closing. The lock engaged and that couldn’t be done quietly. The zipper of his jacket, undone slowly, echoed in the quiet.

She froze, listening for his footsteps. He didn’t go into the kitchen or find himself something to eat off the counter. He went straight to the boys’ room. Except, he didn’t stop. That heavy tread, probably once done with confidence and power, now sounded more like a dragging, plodding shuffle. Her door was closed, and she held her breath while she imagined his hand on the knob. Twisting it. Coming inside.

Her mind flew back to that night in his bed where she’d pretended to be asleep.

The knock that came was so quiet that it was hardly a knock at all. Her mouth went so dry she could hardly swallow. “Come in,” she choked.

Her body heated up to irrational levels as her heart started to pound. It didn’t matter that she knew Agnar had pretty much promised that he would never touch her and would never want to touch her. Her body was a stupid thing when it came to him. It didn’t get the memo about what had happened, and anything he’d ever said refused to banish the unruly flames that licked her physically whenever he was near.

She’d ground against him, soaked his leg with her wetness, she’d been in his arms when he’d pressed her dangerously against a wall. She’d bitten him, dreamed about him, ached for him, and just the day before, she’d straddled his lap. She’d been bold enough to touch him many times, but never like a lover.

The second he stepped into the room in his usual black ensemble, she swore she could feel the cold radiating off him. His soft dark lashes were starred from being frozen and melting when he entered the house. His skin was still flushed from the cold. His mahogany beard had droplets of moisture clinging to it and his hair was a little bit flat, like he’d actually worn a beanie.

His gray eyes were just as cold and flat as ever.

Her heart tripped over itself and banged loudly and painfully into the cage holding it in her chest when his hands slipped under the hem of his shirt. No one could tell that there was something wrong with them from afar. She had no violent leanings, but if she could, she’d find Alexander and make him pay for days or even weeksfor what he’d done.

Agnar tugged his shirt off with a swift motion from behind his head. Watching his body move in the golden light from the single bulb in the stained-glass lamp on her nightstand only reinforced what a masterpiece he was. His gray eyes narrowed, arrowing in on her.

“Is this okay?” He glanced at the other side of the queen bed with longing.

In comparison to his home and probably most places, the room was humble. It was furnished with an antique wrought iron headboard and footboard, quilts that she and her sisters had learned to sew because it was a passion of their mom’s, and she’d shared it with anyone who wanted to learn. Out of all of them, shockingly, Rome had been best at it, but when he was almost finished, he’d torn his quilt top apart over the tiniest mistake. Literally obliterated it beyond fixing, though their mom had tried her darned best for days to put it back together. She had two nightstands, one tall dresser, and a rag rug in the middle of the floor. They were proud to make some of their furniture locally, from the trees that grew on their land. Kieran had a passion for antiques and so much of their cabins were filled with his finds.

She’d always thought he was so brave, going out there into the world. She’d joined him a few times over the years, and he’d laughed when she admitted one day as they drove home with a full load in the back of an eight-foot truck box, that she’d thought he was brave for going out antiquing.

Agnar bent and reached for his shirt off the floor.

“Yes,” she answered. She scrambled to peel back the quilt on the other side of the bed. “I don’t like you sleeping on the floor. Of course, it’s okay that you sleep here.”

He ran a hand over his beard. It had grown long and he’d stopped trimming it, so it was a bit unkempt. It didn’t look bad on him at all. She’d thought her mouth was dry before, but it was nothing in comparison to how her saliva vanished entirely when he stripped off his black fatigues and peeled his socks away and stood only in his boxers.

This was so different from pretending to be asleep in the pitch black of his bedroom. She studied him in the full light. His sheer size hit her all over again. He picked his clothes up off the floor, folding them and setting them neatly on top of the dresser at the far side of the room. Her mate never spoke to her in poetry, and she doubted he had any in his steel hard soul, but his body was poetry. The way he walked was an artform.

Despite the weight he’d lost, he was still heavily muscled. He had no tattoos that she could see, and she could see nearly all of him. She bit down on her bottom lip as she watched the graceful motions that had become instinct for him with all that hard training over the years. No tattoos, but the scars stood out, some faded and some stark, some jagged and others small. They graced his body, innumerable like the stars in the sky.

Agnar wasn’t the kind of man a person saw on billboards or in magazines. He’d never grace the cover of a romance novel and he didn’t resemble anyone she’d ever watched in any movie. She’d thought of him as a god, all cold, hard marble, but he was real. She’d felt the cold of the outside radiating off his clothes when he’d stepped into her room, but now she felt the warmth of him flood the small space.

He was a real man, with more than a sprinkling of hair across his broad chest and down his carved-out abs. He looked like a warrior, but she could see the wolf mirrored in him as well. If she licked and touched and sucked and explored him, would he respond? This man with the kind of body that was built to do one thing and one thing well, kill.

Agnar had blood on his hands. He’d killed men, wolves. He’d killed their own kind, which to her was unfathomable before she’d met him or Castor or knew anything about their pack. He’d spilled blood and he’d watched it be spilled. He was hard and cold before, and now he’d all but given up. He’d promised not to love her the way he clearly hadn’t loved his first mate and even his sons knew it. He’d demanded that she reject him.

This was her mate and a new fire kindled in her soul.

She patted the bed beside her then turned out the lamp and slid down under the covers.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Agnar turning to her and letting her touch him. She had to clench her thighs together and she felt how wet her cotton pajama bottoms were when she thought about him touching her with hands he felt were now useless. Her nipples nearly cut through her thin cotton t-shirt when she thought about him unleashing himself on her and fucking her with nothing short of the power of an animal.

She was afraid he would smell her desire when he got into bed beside her, but if he did, he said nothing. The bed dipped and then did more than dip. The heat of him and the dark scent of male, made something tighten in her belly.

She stayed on her back and so did he. She knew he wasn’t asleep, even when the silence stretched on and on, ticking past an hour. How could either of them sleep when the narrow space between them and all the room, probably all the world, was charged with tension?

“Agnar?” she whispered, even though she wanted to stay quiet.

“Hmm?” More a grunt than an actual response.

“Is this okay?” She echoed his earlier question.

---