Page 105 of The Alpha Dire Wolf
He was right behind me now. A second later, he was in front of me. Blocking my path. I stepped around him and kept going. I’d gotten three more steps before Lincoln appeared back in front of me. He grabbed my shoulders, stopping me.
“Please—”
“Don’t touch me,” I hissed, shaking his hands free of me. “I want no part of your plan.”
“You don’t understand,” he growled, twisting to keep facing me as I moved around him once more.
I stopped, facing him. “You’re right, I don’t!” I shouted in his face. “Because nobody will tell me a damn thing, including you. I thought you were, but it was just lies. You didn’t even have the decency to tell me that you were using me to get closer to me. You had a plan to take me to bed because somehowthatwould prove whether I was evil or not to some senior citizen wolf who probably can’t even see me!”
Lincoln’s mouth opened, but I didn’t let him get a word in. Not yet. He could damn well wait.
“And to think,” I said quietly, the anger fading, replaced by cold disdain, “I was starting to care for you. To think that maybe, somehow, there was something between us.”
“Thereissomething between us,” Lincoln insisted.
“Yeah. A wall. One I’m never tearing down,” I said coldly, walking on and trying to ignore the feeling of his eyes on my back.
“Sylvie,” he said, jogging after me. “You’re operating with only half the truth here.”
“Am I?” I asked, meeting his eyes without flinching at the blue and gold fires. “Did you, or did you not, hide the truth from me?”
His face screwed up in a grimace. “It’s not that simple,” he protested.
“Yes,” I said softly, “it is.” Then I kept going.
“You claim you want to know the truth. Now you’re walking away, refusing to hear it.”
I laughed. “Your problem is thinking that I could believe a word that comes out of your mouth. You would say anything to get me in bed, it seems. What would you have done if you got me there? Checked my hymen? If it’s intact, was I a good enoughgirl for you? If you broke it, would you be my savior? Bad news, mister wolf, it’s long gone. Guess I’m the bad girl now.”
I hadn’t even lifted my foot from the ground when the darkest, angriest snarl I’d ever heard erupted from Lincoln’s throat. It was the first time he’d ever directed it at me, and I froze, basic human fight-or-flight instincts kicking into high gear and urging me torun.
Lincoln stalked up next to me and around the front. “Hate me if you must,” he said with bared teeth, “but don’t youeversuggest that I would use you for sex like that.”
His chest was heaving, his eyes narrowed to slits. “Maybe I didn’t tell you everything. But I had reasons for that. I’ll tell you, if you’d like to hear the whole story. Or you could claim to want to know but walk away anyway. Judge me on half the information. Just like my people tried to do to you until I came up with thisplan.”
I ground my teeth together at the challenge in his voice.
“A plan, by the way,” he added in a calmer, less threatening voice, “that was designed to try to prove youinnocent, by the way. Though I’m sure that gets in the way of your fun little narrative that I was doing everything in my power to bend you over and fill you from behind until you screamed your throat raw with pleasure.”
His eyes bored into me the entire time, giving me no room to breathe, no room to conceal the primitive, need-driven reaction that occurred deep within me at his words. A reaction I could not control, though I did not desire it.
“Fine,” I said hoarsely, able to only inject a fraction of the sarcasm I wished for, “tell me the real story.”
Lincoln eyed me for a second or two and then nodded once. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Back to my cabin. Where we can sit and talk, like civilized people who are willing to actually listen to what the other has to say. Instead of shouting in public.” He gestured around us. “These are my people. They don’t need to see my dirty laundry aired like this. They have enough problems and fears of their own right now. I need them to know I will solve them all as well,ifcooler heads prevail.”
The care for his people was admirable, even through my anger. I could not take that from him.
“Fine.” I set off for his house, not waiting to walk there with him. It was a handful of minutes’ walk, and we made it in silence.
“Any water?” he asked, doffing his shoes and heading right for the kitchen.
“Okay.”
He served us a pair of glasses filled with cold, clear water, putting them down on the table. We sat stiffly, facing each other.
