Page 104 of Hayden's Haven
“Damien told me.”
“Asshole.”
“He was trying to prepare me for the possibility that you wouldn’t come back.”
“I was always going to come back for you, Mila! None of this, being Damien’s second or helping Drake, none of it means anything without you!”
“You’re going then?” she asked, her voice soft, nervous. She thought he was going to leave her behind. That’s exactly what he had planned on doing. He couldn’t take her to his birth pack, subject her to a broken pack full of shifters who’d forgotten what it meant to be part of a pack, to have pride in one another, loyalty. . .everything that made a pack strong, beyond mere brute force.
“I haven’t decided,” Hayden confessed.
“Did you know your right eye twitches slightly when you lie?”
“It does not,” he said, reaching up to his eye.
“You’re right. But you wouldn’t have checked had you been telling me the truth.”
“Hell, you’re too smart sometimes.”
“Please, Hayden, no more lies, even to protect me. Okay?”
“I’m supposed to protect you. That’s my job. Before being Damien’s second, or Drake’s brother, or anything else, my job—first and foremost—is to protect you and make you happy.”
“That’s good, because I want you to go to Drake’s pack. That will make me happy.”
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You want me to leave you?”
“No!” she cried. “I want you to be whole again. You need to be there, to find whatever you lost there so long ago.”
“I need you, Mila. Always you.”
“Then we’ll go together.”
“It’s too dangerous there. I won’t put you through that again.”
“You’ll protect me,” she said with the utmost confidence. “Which is another reason why we can’t blood-bond.”
He really hated when she used logic against him. This wasn’t going as planned. None of this was going as planned. He was supposed to discuss the possibility of going to Drake’s pack for a few months and then returning to be with her. They would have blood-bonded before he left of course. Now she refused the blood-bondandplanned on coming with him, putting herself in danger.
She slid her hands around his neck. “I don’t need a blood-bond. I simply need you, do you understand that?”
He understood, he just didn’t like it, any of it. “So where do we go from here?” he asked.
“Back to my place,” she said as she leaned up to kiss him. The kiss was long, deep, and everything he had been dreaming of for weeks, but she was holding back something. Or maybe it was him, knowing she wasn’t going to blood-bond him, that he’d never have the one true connection to her.
“I thought you said we were going to your place,” he commented as she headed in the wrong direction for Aloe’s house. She merely threw a coy look over her shoulder as she led him back to his cabin.
His heart raced. “You’re moving in with me?”
“Technically, since I’ve been living here for the last three weeks, I think you’re the one moving in with me. At least until we go to Drake’s pack,” she said as she pulled him by his shirt into the bedroom. “Now strip, beefcake.”
Beefcake?She hadn’t called him that since the bakery. Hayden quickly undressed, enjoying this side of Mila.
“I have a present for you,” she said as she withdrew a black cloth from the nightstand. “Turn around.”
“Bossy,” he said as he turned around at the edge of the bed.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” she said as she stood behind him and tied the blindfold on him.
