Page 64 of The Alpha's Gamble
Declan cut me off by hauling me into another kiss, rough and insistent, a claiming more than a caress. When he pulled back, my bruised lips throbbed in the cold air, and my head fell back against his hand, my neck muscles turned into jelly.
“I’d never regret kissing you,” he said, low and hoarse, eyes blazing gold. “Never. I regret not kissing you the moment I got you out of that interrogation room. I regret not kissing you ten years ago, kissing you and pinning you down and knotting you until you screamed my name.” His arms tightened painfully, and he gave me a shake that almost rattled my teeth. “I wasnotbreaking up with you. I was trying to tell you I want you to stay with me. For real. No blackmail. You really don’t remember asking me to kiss you the other night?”
I stared at him, head whirling with too much information all at once, too many assumptions crumbling and reforming into a new reality. Declan, with his rumpled dark hair, the golden glow in his black eyes, jaw set, rigid with tension. Dangerous and strong and the alpha-est alpha I’d ever known.
He wanted me. For real.
And I…
“I asked you to kiss me when I was drunk, I remember that,” I whispered. And then it finally twigged. “But you said no. You wanted me to ask you again?”
“Because you were drunk,” he agreed. “And I told you to ask me again. It was fucking killing me all day. The second I woke up, I was waiting. Not that I slept much. And you didn’t even mention it. Even when I—I thought you were blowing it off because you regretted it.”
“You want me.” I had to say it aloud in order to believe it, and even then it sounded so unlikely. “For real. You want to—like a, a lover?”
The smile that got me lit up the whole desert—or at least it did for me. It reached his eyes, making them sparkle, and brought out…fuck. A dimple. He had a dimple in his right cheek.
It didn’t make an actual sound, of course, but I swore I felt and heard something crack in my chest.
I had it bad.
In fact, I loved him.
Fuck, I really loved him. I hadn’t even known what love felt like, and maybe that was how it’d crept up on me.
But this had to be it, this expanding feeling in my chest, the spinning of my head, the way his arms around me felt like the home I’d never realized I needed.
“Like a lover,” he said softly, leaning down and brushing his lips over mine in the gentlest possible tease. “Like anything you want. As long as you’re mine. As long as you choose to be mine, you can have anything you want from me.”
I only wanted him. The words stuck on my lips, though. If I dared to trust him that much—it felt like falling, spiraling down, dizzy and disoriented. Except that I already had him holding me. Maybe he wouldn’t let me fall after all.
“I only want you.”
I stretched up, pressing my mouth to his, kissing him rather than being kissed.
He took it over within half a second and had me bent over his arm and ravaged.
And that was more than fine with me.
A loud throat-clearing interrupted us, how long after I didn’t know. A little whine left my throat as he lifted his head and broke the kiss. I’d gotten one leg wrapped around his hips, my straining cock desperately trying for enough friction.
It couldn’t possibly be enough, not when I was ready for him to bend me over and plow me into next week, sand and spiky cactus plants and scorpions and an audience of hard-bitten bodyguards be damned.
I blinked up at Declan as he turned his head, looking as flushed and dazed as I felt, and glanced over. “Yes?”
I gave whoever was standing there a lot of credit for not turning tail and scurrying away at that extremely unwelcoming syllable.
“Liam’s got them both stable enough for now,” said a deep male voice. “But we need to call in a Medevac, and you should be long gone before they get here. We’ll say we found them like this. If one of those assholes tries to claim otherwise, I’ll take care of it.”
I leaned my head into Declan’s shoulder and let out a sigh of relief. If they were calling a Medevac then everyone was still alive. Okay, so I maybe wouldn’t be losing a lot of sleep over Walter’s fate. But the driver—well, he’d been perfectly happy with the idea of leaving my corpse to rot in the desert. On the other hand, I didn’t want to be a killer. Not even in self-defense.
Declan sighed. “We’ll be there in a minute.”
Crunching footsteps receded, leaving us alone in the quiet of the night again.
Another sigh, and a kiss to the top of my head that had me smiling into his shoulder like a moron.
“Come on, let’s get you home,” he said.
