Page 8 of Ravaged Wolf
“Okay.”
He climbs the stairs, no hurry, and lowers himself beside me, leaving me as much space as he can without squishing himself against the wall.
“Oh. Shit. I forgot.” He pats the pockets on either side of his cargo pants. “I brought you something.”
He pulls out red cans of soda, one from each pocket, both beaded with condensation. All of a sudden, my throat is bone dry.
“You like this kind, right? You’re not partial to the blue kind?”
“Yeah, this kind’s good.” Mom doesn’t let me drink soda, but I’ve traded with humans at lunch before. I love everything sweet and bubbly.
He passes me a can and keeps the other for himself. I wrap my fingers around it. It’s beautifully ice cold. I exhale and press the aluminum to my temple. I can’t stop myself.
His lips curve. “I thought you might be thirsty.”
I don’t want to think about him knowing that I’m in heat. “How did you know I was here?” I ask, sliding the can down my cheek, bathing my burning skin with refrigerator droplets. It’s heaven.
“This,” he says. There’s a sudden tug in my chest. I startle, my hand flying to press against my breastbone.
“What was that?” I squeak.
He flashes a quick smile. “The bond.”
“Do it again.”
I feel another gentle yank.
“Whoa.” I tuck the can between my knees and press my palms over my heart. He yanks again. It’s so weird, almost like the hard thump after a skipped beat, except the thud is coming from a place a little deeper and closer to the stomach.
“How did you know how to do that?” I pick the can back up and pop the top.
He shrugs a shoulder. “I just did.”
“Do it one more time?”
He chuckles softly, and once more, there’s a pulling sensation, like I’ve been hooked by an invisible line, but it doesn’t hurt. It almost feels like that birthday morning excitement, only more physical. I reach out blindly to tug back, plunging into that neither-here-nor-there space where my wolf is watching, wide-eyed with her tail thumping, but there’s nothing to hold on to and nothing to grab with.
“How do you do it?” A demanding note creeps into my voice, and immediately, my nerves blare a warning. I don’t challenge males. Ever. But I’m also wildly curious.
“I had a leg up,” he says. He doesn’t react to my tone at all—no narrowing eyes or warning rumble from his wolf. “I was getting so much from you, I got a good sense of where it was coming from.”
“What do you mean, you got stuff from me?” Again,before I can check myself, I speak with a sharpness that would get me either snapped at or smacked at home.
“Earlier. You were scared,” he says, very quiet, but very clear. “I tracked the feeling upstairs. I was gonna bust the door down, but my dad, my cousin Art, and my two older brothers followed me, and they wouldn’t let me do it. We had a whole showdown in the hallway. Then you seemed to chill out, so I let them drag me back home.”
“You were at the door?”
He flashes another small, deprecating smile. “Before I got tackled, I was about to kick it down. It was going to be totally badass. You’d have been so impressed. You would have fallen in love with me—” He snaps his fingers. “Like that.”
He’s teasing. The situation is horrible and humiliating, and he knows it, but he’s making fun, and he’s not asking questions I don’t want to answer. The gratitude lodges in my throat.
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Y’all build the walls thick up in the teens.”
“And your family held you back?” I can’t even picture it.
A smudge of red appears high on his cheeks. “I hope to hell none of your neighbors checked their ring cams. We looked like a pack of idiots.”
