Page 44 of The Alpha's Gamble
And then Declan started to shake, his teeth vibrating against my skin and shudders going through his whole big body.
I froze, gasping for air, eyes wide with horror. Gods, was he having a seizure or something? Losing his grip on reality? Had Walter magicked him somehow too, and now he was going to flip out and rip me limb from limb? And yes, I’d take a couple of his limbs with me, but that didn’t make the prospect any less terrifying.
He let out a weird, strangled sound around his half-mouthful of my shoulder. And suddenly it clicked.
Laughing. The bastard waslaughing. Atme. And trying to muffle it in my own skin!
“Fuck you! Fuck—fuck you for—I hate you so fucking much, Declan!”
He pulled his face away from my shoulder and laughed out loud, a low, rich rumble that shook me in a different way.
“Oh, fucking Jesus Christ,” he wheezed after a long minute of me lying there with my face burning and my body stiff as a board in his grasp. “Shit. Blake. What’s worse?” And then he was off again, cackling like a fucking madman. “The pleated khakis,” he gasped at last. “Or the blackmail?”
Well, when he put it that way…okay, fine, what an asshole, but…I closed my eyes firmly, taking deep, even breaths. I wasn’t going to laugh. I wasn’t. No matter how infectious those low chuckles were, especially transmitted through his chest directly into me.
Especially not when I’d suddenly imagined Declan in pleated khakis looking like an admittedly really hot douchebag.
A spasm hit me. I choked and forced myself to cough to cover it, and that squeezed my muscles around his knot, and then his laughter broke off in a groan.
“Fuck,” he said right in my ear, his hot tongue tracing the edge of it. “I don’t think I’m getting soft anytime soon. But I’m not fucking you again until you answer the question.” His voice took on extra resonance as he asked again, “What’s worse?”
I wanted, desperately, to say the obvious: the blackmail, of course. Who wouldn’t? But gun to my head…and I couldn’t choke out the lie, not with that alpha command ringing in my ears and in my brain and in the empty space inside of me where a connection to another person ought to have been, wanted to be.
The blackmail. I formed the words with my mouth. No sound came out.
Declan shifted his arm, stroking his hand up and petting my chest, running a finger around one of my nipples. It perked up almost painfully, and he scraped another circle with the tip of his nail on my areola. My cock stirred in answer. His hips moved slightly, just enough to punch a quick exhale out of me.
“Not answering’s practically an answer,” he said. “Unless you’re being stubborn, not wanting to do what I tell you on principle. But I would’ve thought you’d learned better than that by now.”
I had to deflect somehow. Dodge the question. Make him forget he’d asked it.
I clenched down hard around his knot, which really hadn’t gotten any smaller. It didn’t feel like an invasion anymore. It felt like it belonged there, a part of me, wedging me open and keeping me vulnerable in a way I couldn’t even hate.
And fucking helplessly, hopelessly aroused, too. I couldn’t forget that for so much as a second. Particularly not with that hand moving across my chest, tweaking the other nipple, plucking and twisting and making me writhe against him. My breath came faster, chest rising and falling. More rising than falling, pushing my nipple into his hand.
“I wasn’t interested in him,” I managed to choke out, “because he wasn’t hitting on me. He was stalking me. Something you don’t seem to be willing to admit.” Because that might mean he’d need to take what had happened behind the casino more seriously? And the fuck, why hadn’t he followed up on that? I’d started to feel like Declan meant to gaslight me; was I the crazy one? Declan seemed intent on making me think so. “I was attacked the other night. I was followed today. And you’re blowing it off and distracting me arguing about whether or not I wanted to fuck this guy.”
“Who’s arguing?” Declan thrust lightly, swiveling his hips, his knot putting almost agonizing pressure on that sweet spot inside me and all my other overstimulated nerves. “What’s worse, Blake?”
Gods triple dammit, I was the one who was supposed to be deflecting! “I’ll answer you if you answer me. Oh, fuck, please don’t—” He tugged my nipple hard, and I thrashed back into his chest only to be instantly pinned there as he let go with one final pinch and flattened his arm across my chest, hand wrapped loosely around my throat.
I subsided into gasping whimpers.
“Okay, I’ll humor you,” he said. “Maybe you were being followed. Maybe he didn’t want to fuck you, and he had some other nefarious intent. You were attacked the other night, I’ll grant you that. But this is Vegas. There are all kinds of crazies here. You can’t assume anything at all. And I think you’re getting paranoid.”
Paranoid. Right. Which did not, thank you very much, mean that they weren’t after me.
Definite gaslighting. What did Declan have to hide? A lot, probably, starting with his past and ending with the present. And it didn’t look like I’d be getting any more out of him. Either he didn’t care that someone was after me, or he truly didn’t believe it. Either way, I’d never felt smaller and more insignificant—a real achievement, considering how my family had treated me my entire life. Brook always thought that getting praised for being an alpha had made me arrogant. It hadn’t; my arrogance, such as it was, came from within. It’d done nothing but underline how inadequate I was to be called an alpha at all.
Just like Declan was underlining it now, with added italics.
“Your turn,” he went on. “Answer me.” His voice held a quaver of laughter and the depth of an alpha’s command all at once, a combination that shouldn’t have had me melting in his grasp and helplessly pushing my ass back onto his knot.
My head spun. “The pleated khakis,” I muttered. “You absolute dick.”
He let out the laugh he’d clearly been suppressing. “I knew it.” He took my earlobe between his teeth and nibbled, rolling his hips again. His cock had gone so deep in me I didn’t know if I had any internal organs left. The pressure throbbed through my whole torso. “You’re unbelievable, you know that? Such a fucking snob, Blake. Nothing’s good enough for you.” Another thrust, this one so hard I yelped. Yeah, there went my lungs. I resisted the urge to look down and make sure I couldn’t see the outline of him imprinted through my skin. “Except my knot. That’s good enough for you, isn’t it? That’s exactly what you deserve.”
Maybe it was exactly what I deserved. The hand on my throat tightened, cutting off enough air that I had to struggle to get a full breath.
