Page 30 of Alpha's Bullied Mate
“Fuck,” he said, leaning back against the counter. He wore a short-sleeved t-shirt, as I’d come to know he liked, and folded his arms over his chest, tossing the dish towel over one shoulder. His bicep muscles pushed at the sleeves of his shirt, and I looked, my mouth dry. “You wanted to be Fenrys Randon’s Luna.”
“At one point, yes,” I admitted. “I was there when Thalia was kidnapped last year and—”
“Wait, Thalia was kidnapped last year?”
Shit.
I went quiet. I’d forgotten he hadn’t known that.
I turned away and carried on washing. Aidan stood behind me, his muscled chest pressing into my back. He loomed over me. He reached around me to turn off the tap, his arms tucked around my body. I stayed like that, closing my eyes, letting myself revel in the feel of his chest and his scent clouding around me. A small noise came from my throat when he grasped his waist and turned me around in his grip.
I tipped my head up to look at him. My hand rested on his stomach, feeling the hard-packed muscle through his thin t-shirt. His jaw tightened as he removed my hand but kept one of his own on my waist.
“What happened?”
I’d gone this far. And with the way Aidan looked at me in that moment, I’d have told him anything,doneanything he asked. Willingly. Arousal pooled between my legs as he leaned his free hand on the counter behind me, boxing me in. He wasso near, too near, overwhelming me, and part of me supposed he knew exactly what he was doing.
“During the Mating Ceremony, Thalia was kidnapped,” I said. “She had been… Caught up in some business—before you ask, I don’t know what it was—and it involved her being taken by another pack. Things got nasty, Fenrys killed their alpha. Thalia was pregnant at the time, so both his mate and cub were in danger. When they returned, Fenrys was injured and half of the enemy pack died. I had proven to be of worth during the Games so Thalia invited me to stay with them in their pack. I was officially accepted.”
Aidan’s gaze hardened as I told him the story. He truly hadn’t known this. “Did it work?”
“What?”
“The attempt to get to Fenrys through capturing his mate?”
“No,” I told him. “It didn’t. It made them stronger than ever. I can only fight you as well as I do now because he had pushed into back-breaking training after Thalia was captured, so we’d all be able to fight if we were ever in the same position. I broke my wrist trying to get out of handcuffs once.”
Much to my surprise, where Aidan had removed my hand from his stomach, he used that hold to flip my hand around to look at the scar that showed the break. He ran a thumb over it, a gentle caress.
“So he killed an alpha for his mate,” Aidan murmured. “But what of any captured member of his pack? What would he do tome?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “But I hope he does the worst to you.”
Aidan grinned. “Me too.”
I turned away in his grip and carried on washing dishes. He put some distance between us and continued to dry the plates I handed to him.
He laughed. “I can’t believe you entered the Mating Games. I can’t see you as Fenrys’s mate.”
I snarled at him and splashed a spray of water over him. He growled and whipped the dish towel in my direction. I shrieked and avoided it, watching as it landed in the dishwater bowl. I picked it out and giggled, my eyes on Aidan.
“You needed a shower, right?” I asked.
“No, I already got one—Dakota,back off.” He laughed, despite the warning, as he backed up himself, but he hit the corner of the counter and had nowhere else to go. I took my chance and ran at him, wringing the towel over his head. He swore and lunged for me as I soaked him. He grabbed me around the waist and spun me around the kitchen, hauling me off to the sofa.
It was only when we stumbled into the living room, me still holding the sopping dish towel, and Aidan soaked, that we faced Jason and Declan, who came in carrying a trash bag to clear the beer cans. Aidan stopped, set me back on my feet, and cleared his throat.
“Anyway,” he said and walked off, through the door to the living room, leaving me wide-eyed and wondering where that easiness had come from.
***
Later that night, I found Aidan sitting on a back garden porch. Wooden slats overlooked a pond, where a bench had been set up on the other side. Fairy lights were strung throughout the large garden. Clearly, I had given him enough information that he wasn’t too hasty about tying me down again. I’d had a free run of the house, peppered with questions from his pack about how I knew Aidan.
I didn’t reveal much, but enough that we’d once known each other.
“Thalia and I met on the first day of the Games,” I told Aidan straight away, sitting down next to him. “We met at the banquet with the other she-wolves and got talking right away. She had this…Energyto her, like frantic energy that made her hard to read. I liked her. She was confident without being arrogant, like one of the other she-wolves, but she was assured of herself. She always seemed to know Fenrys—and it’s true, she had. She’d met him in college, and he’d rejected her as a mate years before the Mating Games. She’d wanted to win him back. Or, at least, that’s the version they told me.”
“You don’t believe it?”
