Page 38 of The Wolf Professor

“Like when?”

He felt his cheeks deepening to beetroot. “Oh, you know, when I had a crush on a girl as a teen. That sort of thing.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.” She looked up at him from under her lashes, her eyes deep and dark and her lips parted, and his wolf kindly jerked on his cock. Which, considering he’d come like a freight train only half an hour ago, was concerning. “You’ve got to understand, I didn’t hang out with wolves back in Selig. Consequently, those traits probably weakened.”

“I guess I’m not very knowledgeable about the whole shifting thing.”

“Believe me, neither am I.” Max scrubbed at the back of his neck with his hand. “Look, Charlie. I don’t understand why this happened, though thank the gods it did, because if I hadn’t found you, who knows what would have happened. What were you doing out there alone?”

She hung her head, shuddered slightly. “I was just trying to get a Muber and… the guy pretended he was one of their drivers. The next thing I knew a whole gang had jumped out of the car and grabbed me. I guess they like to pull that one on unsuspecting folks. I should have known better, but I kind of left the party in a hurry.”

“Why?”

“Tod got pissed off with me. He thought I was there because I wanted to get back with him.”

“Do you?”

“No, no way. It’s completely over between us.”

His wolf nearly howled with joy.

Shut the fuck up, you low-life hound.

That thought brought the purpose of this conversation sharply back in focus. He took a sip of coffee, then put his cup down—carefully this time. “Charlie, we need to place some boundaries around our interactions.”

A frown pleated her brows. “How do you mean?”

“I think you should work in another room. Keep your distance from me.”

Her eyes widened. “Really, Max, seriously?”

He nodded. “I’ll put a desk in the snug for you.”

“I honestly don’t think that’s necessary.”

“Charlie, please don’t argue,” he said, more harshly than he’d meant to. “I’m wrangling with the dark side of my nature here.” Her frown deepened and he struggled to find the words to explain. “Wolves… we… we have a history of dominance, aggression, sexually inappropriate behaviors,coercion of females into mateship, chasing, biting…” He drew a sharp breath. “It’s extremely difficult to know that is a—a part of my ancestry… that I could act on it. Turning wolf last night, it deeply worried me, to be honest.”

“How can you say all this, when your wolf saved me?”

Max pinched the bridge of his nose. “I know, I know, thankfully. And gods believe me, Charlie, I’m trying to make sense of that right now. But one thing I do know, there is a shadow side to my psyche that I must not let loose.” He couldn’t tell her how bad it was, that if he hadn’t spilled his seed this morning to an image of fucking her wildly, he wouldn’t be able to string logical words together right now. Worse, he might even vault over the desk and grab her, kiss her… and, recalling his fantasy, it wouldn’t stop there.

Almost brusquely, he said, “Truly, it’s better if we put some physical distance between us.”

To his surprise, instead of immediately acquiescing, her eyes challenged him. “Why are you so intent on seeing the dark side of your wolf?”

“W—what?” His chin retracted.

“This idea you have that wolves are wild uncontrolled rapists or something. There have been many loving mate bonds through history, male wolves who were fiercely loyal and helped to raise their cubs. Human women willing to forsake everything to be with their wolf. Why, when there’s all this evidence, do you carry so much shame about your wolf?”

That made him blink. Truth was, Max didn’t know. Not really. Oh yeah, he’d read enough about the dark nature of his kind. But maybe it was just as much his mother grinding the fear of the gods into him about his inner wolf, her sneers of derision during visits to the Hunt pack, her grim remarks. “Just look at them, Maximillian. So uncouth.”

Was it shame that had made him distance himself so completely from his genes? Was that why, when they reared up in him, he was totally unprepared for the wolf to manifest?

He tried to gather his thoughts, a muscle in his jaw ticking.

Before he could answer, Charlie continued. “When you rescued me last night—that wasn’t the dark side of your psyche, Max. You were gentle and kind, you checked out my wounds, ran me a bath…” She was pleating her fingers in her lap. “Yousavedme, from something that would have been so much worse than your wolf could ever be. That is not the act of a wild, uncontrolled beast.”

He ground his teeth together, feeling the points of his incisors. He ran his tongue over them. Gods, were they sharper than usual?

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