Page 15 of Lost Touch
I pressed closer into Drew’s side, wanting to burrow into him and disappear, the bravado I’d summoned for a moment completely gone.
“I’ll keep in touch,” he said. “And we’ll see you in a month.”
“A month?” Jeannette demanded. “That’s too long—”
“A month,” Drew repeated heavily. “At least. It was great to see you.”
Alyssa looked up at her brother, eyes intent. “You too, Drew. Call me.”
She didn’t put any emphasis at all on that casual throwaway, but she didn’t need to.
Drew didn’t leave my side, didn’t remove his arm from around me. And after a moment, Alyssa went and opened the door, ushered her mother out, and turned back with her hand on the door. “Call me,” she mouthed.
And followed Jeannette out the door, shutting it behind them quietly.
We stood there in silence until both car doors had opened and closed, until the sound of the car faded away into the distance. For me, at least. Drew could surely still hear it, and I waited for him to stop listening.
At last he let out a deep sigh and let me go, stepping away and running his hands through his hair, muttering under his breath too low for me to catch the words.
I wrapped my own arms around myself. “If you hadn’t been here, would she have murdered me and buried my body in the woods?” My voice came out thin and small and terrified, exactly the way I felt.
Drew didn’t turn, standing facing away from me with his head bent down.
“No,” he said, low and rough. “I told you, you’re pack whether they like it or not. But she might’ve bullied and terrorized you until you ran off to the woods and killed yourself just to get away from her.”
Strangely, that didn’t make me feel a whole lot better.
I shivered and hugged myself tighter.
Drew turned around at last, and his face made me feel even worse. He’d wiped away any trace of emotion, leaving it blank and hard and set.
“I owe Alyssa for that.” He paused. I nodded. “I don’t think like that, by the way. That being an alpha’s the be-all end-all of existence.”
“I didn’t think you did.” That was his takeaway? That I might think he had an inflated sense of his own importance to match his mother’s warped worldview? “Can we go back to the part where your mom hates me and wishes I was dead, even if she wouldn’t do it herself? And the mate you were supposed to have if you’d done what your family wanted?”
“Sit down, and I’ll get you some more coffee and something to eat—”
“No!” The word burst out with a force, fueled by my incipient panic, that surprised even me, and Drew’s eyebrows went up. “No, fucking tell me. Just tell me. I deserve to know what I’m in the middle of!”
That quiet grating sound, I realized, was Drew’s teeth grinding together.
“Fine,” he gritted out. “Fine. Fuck!” He turned and paced away from me, spinning back once he’d gotten himself under control, I thought. “My family’s rich. More than rich. Buying politicians, multiple private jets, that kind of rich. My uncle has two sons, one alpha and one not. My alpha cousin’s a fucking waste of oxygen, and the other one’s not an alpha, soof coursehe’s worthless.” Drew rolled his eyes, grimacing. “So my uncle wants to groom me to take over the pack. Hence choosing a suitable mate for me, a female alpha from a pack like ours in Virginia.”
Well, at least that cleared up whether werewolf women could have alpha magic, but I didn’t feel inclined to pursue the subject given the cold, bleak look in Drew’s eyes and the way his hands kept flexing into fists at his sides, as if he had to work to keep the claws in.
“I started my own small tech company in my last year of college. Network security. I thought that’d get me out of my uncle’s shadow a little if he couldn’t hold money over me, but of course it turned out all the clients I thought I’d gotten on my own, he sent me. I turned the company over to my second in command and left for a while to clear my head. Ended up blackout drunk in some shitty bar in northern Nevada, and I woke up in a cell down the hall from yours. And you know what happened after that. Any more fucking questions?”
The cold, biting rage in his voice struck me like a blow, so much more painful than it would’ve been if he’d hit me with those fists or speared me with his claws.
I stumbled back a step, my own hands shaking. The way he was looking at me…like he hated me. Like he blamed me.
Maybe I shouldn’t have purposely antagonized his mother, who clearly agreed with her—brother? Brother-in-law?—about what Drew’s future ought to look like.
“No,” I whispered. “No more fucking questions.”
Drew stared at me for a long moment, a muscle in his jaw jumping like crazy. And then he took a step toward me.
And I stumbled back again, nearly tripping over my own feet, catching myself at the last second on the banister since I’d backed myself all the way to the staircase. Drew made an aborted movement, arm out as if to catch me when I fell, and stopped dead when I let out a little whimper of fright I couldn’t keep in and cringed out of his reach.
