Page 8 of Captive Mate
Nope, this was going to drive me insane. “Matthew?”
“Yeah?” His voice was thick, like his fangs were showing.
“Are you going to break the door down?”
A long pause. “Jury’s still out on that,” he said ruefully, and I laughed a little despite myself. “Look. I hate you. You got my pack members killed. And I’m fucking crazy in love with you. I hate myself. I want to tear the door off its hinges and fuck you through the wall, rip you to pieces and then tuck you in bed and hold you all night while I tell you how beautiful you are.”
My lower lip hurt. I realized it was because I was biting down on it, hard. How the fuck was this making me…hard.Iwas getting hard, my cock thickening and pressing against the fly of Nate’s stupid tight jeans.
Oh, gods, there was something really, really wrong with me.
There was a thump against the door. His fist? Or maybe his forehead. “You asked, Jonah,” he said in a low almost-growl.
I swallowed hard. I couldn’t trust him, and I didn’t trust him. But I could at least give him something, one true thing that might make him let his own guard down a little.
Besides, I really,reallyhated that fucking name.
“Arik.”
“What?”
I sucked in a deep breath. It shouldn’t have felt as meaningful as it did to tell him my name, but maybe the fairies had something, with their obsession with the importance of it. And I almost never used it. I had more aliases than most guys had pairs of boxer-briefs.
“My name is Arik. Not Jonah.”
I hadn’t turned on a light when I went in, and there was only one small window set high up above the shower, so when the door rattled, I could see the light seeping underneath it go dim. Matthew had sat down, then. I let out a silent breath of relief. Sitting was good. Sitting meant breaking down the door wasn’t happening until he stood up again.
He sighed. “I’m glad to hear it. Jonah’s an awful name. It didn’t suit you at all.”
Now I was still half-hard, and also kind-of-sort-of starting not to dislike him. Ugh. “You don’t sound surprised.”
“That you lied?” He snorted a laugh. “No. Not surprised.”
Well, I wasn’t touching that with a ten-foot pole. He sounded almost normal, and I wanted out of this bathroom eventually. I seriously was fucking hungry — for anything that wasn’t bread. Gods, what I wouldn’t have given for a nice Cornish game hen cooked rare. I doubted this pack would have anything more sophisticated than a box of frozen chicken nuggets. Not that I’d turn that down at this point. Even if they were served still frozen.
I needed to get out of this bathroom. What was with this pack? Every one of them seemed to want to chivvy me or drag me or lock me into various crappy outdated rooms.
Unfortunately, it looked like the only way to get out, and get something to eat, and maybe get a few hours of sleep, was to somehow come to a truce with Matthew. Find common ground.
And wasn’t that fucking ironic. That was what he’d been trying to do when he first came to Kimball’s territory, summoned under pretense of burying the hatchet after years of muted hostilities between the two packs. I’d fucked that up for him — or helped, since with or without me Kimball was never going to simply make peace. And now here I was.
“You told me to run and hide just now.”
A pause. “Yeah?”
“So I’m gathering that you don’t want to —” I couldn’t say it, which was bizarre. I’d never shied away from saying anything, and often the more uncomfortable it made whoever I was talking to, the happier I was. But the word tasted foul and heavy on my tongue.
He knew what I meant, though. “No, I don’t want to,” he said, very low. “I shouldn’t want to. Fuck. Of course I don’t want to.”
Still not so reassuring. “Then you need to tell me how to help you not do that. Because I can’t stay in this bathroom forever. And you could get through the door in about two seconds anyway, so it’s not the greatest solution.”
“It helps when I can’t see you. I can still smell you, and hear you, and I know you’re there — but just removing one of my senses makes it a lot less overwhelming.”
And wasn’t that interesting. The part of my brain that still had analytical functions filed that tidbit away to mull over later, when I tried again to figure out what had gone wrong with my spell. It might be helpful. It might not. But if I could get a handle on the shape of the spell as it was now, instead of the way I’d envisioned it, I could maybe unravel part of it without undoing the whole thing. Make it a little easier to live with.
For me. And only for me. Of course. Fuck Matthew. He was nothing to me.
It didn’t matter that he’d pushed himself in front of me during a tense meeting when Adam, the Kimball shaman who’d overseen my work for the pack, had raised his hand like he meant to hit me. Or that he’d straight-up told Sam Kimball that there wasn’t going to be any alliance without Matthew taking me as his mate — and taking me away from a pack that anyone could see didn’t like me much.
