Page 36 of Alpha's Bullied Mate
Then I finally removed the soggy, wet clothes and threw them on the floor. I was petty enough that I would leave them there.
I didn’t want to pretend to be his mate. I had always dreamed of finding my mate and knowing exactly who it was right then and there. I didn’t want that concept to be mocked by an alpha who would let a non-shifter dictate his life. A mate should have been full of love, or even a tentative friendship until it bloomed. Aidan was not my mate, and I didn’t want to pretend he was.
Or maybe, deep down, in a place I didn’t want to admit, hemightbe my mate, and that terrified me because of who hewas. What he did to me. He incited the fight-or-flight reaction in me. Was that why everything had felt so different between us? When he’d looked at me in the woods, right before we’d kissed, before that passionate frenzy had clouded our senses, had I realized he was my mate?
Surely not…
I didn’t want to think about it. Slowly, I washed myself in Aidan’s shower gel, my tears falling harder as I surrounded myself in his scent, wishing he was there, wishing I could sink my teeth into him. Wishing I could unleash every inch of anger and tension in my body on him.
I turned the shower scalding, and when I left the bathroom, slunk to his bedroom, and pulled on a t-shirt that he’d left out for me, as he did every time I showered, then found him on the porch, alone.
Chapter 19 - Aidan
Floorboards creaked Dakota’s return. I sat on the porch.
“I sent the rest of the pack out,” I told her quietly. My whole body stopped and stiffened when my own scent hit me, coming off her. She had used the standard soap before now, but this time, it smelt like she’d smothered herself in the shower gel I used. When I turned around, she wore one of my t-shirts that barely fell to her upper thigh. I saw a flash of my own boxer shorts underneath.
I was stupid to have not bought Dakota her own supplies.
My plan to have her in my hold was failing. She was walking around in my clothes, which seemed to stake a claim. Now I was left with Dakota slowly easing into a comfortable version of herself, a she-wolf I tried to ignore feelings for.
“Are you done yelling at me?” I asked her.
“It depends,” she muttered. “Are you done being an asshole?”
“According to you, I have always been one. That’ll probably not stop anytime soon.”
She tutted at me and rolled her eyes. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”
“When it comes to you? No.”
“I’m sorry I landed your pack in it,” Dakota said. “I didn’t mean to. I was trying to prove a point, I got ahead of myself, and I—” She stopped, frowned at the ground, and shook her head. “Actually, no, I’m not sorry. You deserve to know that I didn’t run. They deserved to be landed in it for giving me an out. You deserve to know thatyou’rethe one with trust issues. I know Iran twice, but I was a lot more angry then. A lot more kept in the dark.”
“I still keep you in the dark,” I said about more things than she knew.
“Not nearly as much. Did you grill the pack?”
“I dragged Jason into a sparring match. We punched it out.”
If she noticed any bruises on my face, she didn’t point them out. I liked that about my pack. We were rough and ready; we could joke and laugh and be immature sometimes, but we had heart. We were family, there for each other. We could spar with each other, work out arguments and tension that naturally happened when we were in close quarters for so long, but at the end of the day, we had each others’ backs.
“Do you feel it?” Dakota whispered after we lapsed into some silence. “There’s this… Change. Between us. Am I imagining it, Aidan?”
I winced. It was the very question I’d been trying to avoid answering even in the privacy of my own mind.
“I’ve changed the tactic for going after Fenrys,” I said, sharply changing the topic. But Dakota didn’t let me.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” she said. “I want to talk aboutthis.”
“There is nothis,” I told her through gritted teeth. “You’re—”
“What? Making things up? Go on, go ahead and tell me that. You’ll find yourself on your ass, Aidan.”
“Yeah? You want to spar with me? Go ahead, I’m amped up. I haveplentyI want to work out with you.”
“How about you just fuck it out with me instead?” she snapped. Then she stopped, and I couldn’t help look at her. Once again that week, I felt weirdly vulnerable under her gaze, hit by her words and what they did to me. Stripped me bare, made me think she knew exactly what plagued my dreams. Her, beneath me, writhing, my name on her lips, her tight, wet heat clenched around me.
The door to the living room opened and someone stopped short. “Did I interrupt something?” One of my pack, Sam, asked.
