Page 12 of Wolf Unleashed
“And yours.”
“Which is why I don’t think she would have left without me. The last time I saw her, she seemed panicked, anxious. Then she was gone. No goodbye, no note. She was gone, but her clothing was still in the house. Nothing was missing. Just my mom.”
Tiernan took a deep breath, not wanting to ask, but he needed to know. “Did your father ever do anything to you, babe? I mean, if he killed your mother because she was shifter, he had to know you might be one too.”
“I don’t recall him ever hurting me. But after my mom l-left, things changed. He ranted and raved. Pulled me out of school just before my twelfth birthday and got me a private tutor. All my lessons were centered around the history and violence caused by shifters, how they were abominations that needed to be dealt with. I told him I didn’t like the tutor, that I wanted to go back to school and that I missed my mom. He flew into a rage. That’s the last thing I remember before the car accident.”
“Car accident?”
“I woke up in my room with medical equipment around me. I’d been in a coma for five months. I don’t remember the accident or the weeks before it. After a few more weeks of recovery, the tutor returned to the house, and I spent the entire summer catching up on schoolwork like nothing had happened.”
“He isolated you from the world.”
“Not really. I was allowed to play with my friends again. I think that’s when I started understanding how he and that damn tutor were effectively brainwashing me with all of their anti-shifter garbage. I’d said some stuff in front of my friends, and they told me I was anti-shifter. I’d never even heard the term before. Sure, I knew shifters existed, but I’d never met one. All I knew about them came from my dad and tutor. I looked up anti-shifters online to understand what my friends had called me.
“I read about the groups. And all the hate. My father was one of them. I guess I was too. My friends stopped calling me. I spent the next year reading as much as I could online until my dad looked at my search history. He took the computer away.”
“Sounds like you’d made up your mind by then.”
She nodded. There was more. He could see it in her eyes, but her teeth began chattering.
He stroked her cheek. “I’m glad you gave us a chance, Alyssa. I mean, not just me. Shifters.”
“I didn’t want to become like him. All that hate, Tiernan…” Her entire body was shivering now.
“I’ll be right back, babe. I need to find some wood for a fire and get you warmed up properly.”
She pulled the sweater off her legs and held it out to him. “You can’t go out without a top.”
He chuckled as he wrapped it around her legs again, this time tying a loose knot, so she’d get the message and leave it on. “My wolf regulates my body temperature enough for me to run naked. I can certainly do without my sweater while I gather wood.”
“Then I’ll go with you. It will go faster if I help.” She started to rise, but he pushed her back down. “I’ll be right outside the cabin, a few hundred feet at most.” She didn’t say anything, but she was scared, and he understood why. One by one, the people she loved left her.
“This isn’t like with Maddox or even Rafe,” he added, holding her head between his hands, looking into her eyes. “I’m not leaving you. I’m just getting firewood. Yell if you need me. I’ll hear you, and I promise I won’t be far.”
She nodded, grabbed him by his neck, and pulled him in for a long kiss. Her lips felt like ice. He needed to get a fire going fast.
Within twenty minutes, Tiernan gathered an armful of dry wood and found matches in one of the other buildings. Soon after, he had a roaring fire going. After wringing out her jeans as much as possible and hanging them from a nail in the mantel to dry, he scooped her up from the bed and brought her to sit in his lap by the fire.
“You’re freezing,” he said, running his hands along her body. Even with the down jacket she wore, and his sweater wrapped around her legs, she seemed unnaturally cold. She hadn’t been sleeping well lately, the nightmares coming with increased frequency. That and all this hiking and running from shifters was taxing her.
She leaned back, her cheek resting against his shoulder. “We could get naked. You could warm me up the old-fashioned way.”
He laughed. “You are a temptress, but I don’t think Rafe would like to find me balls deep inside you.”
Her fingers slid along his neck, her thumb caressing his collar bone. She aroused him so easily.
“You worry about Rafe too much. He may be an alpha, but he’s not alpha over us,” she said, taking off her jacket and tossing it aside. Her color had returned, the warmth of the fire helping considerably. “He’s seen us together several times now. Hell, back at the dorm, he offered me up to you like I was a dessert on a silver platter.”
“You were dessert, but that just proves my point. He gave you to me. He decided I could have you each of those times, except in the boathouse. We were already fucking when he entered. Wasn’t much he could do about us at that point.”
“You’re forgetting I’m not his to give, and he knows that. You were with me—us— because the three of us agreed.”
“You know nothing of alphas, Alyssa. When you’re in a pack, you learn to take orders, spoken and implied. There’s an entire nuance of language beyond the spoken word and consequences when you don’t obey.”
Her hand drifted over his pecs and played with his nipple. That felt so damn erotic, but not as good as sinking into her wet heat, which he craved right now. Her arousal wrapped around him like a fine mist settling on every inch of his skin, stirring him to such heights he couldn’t think about anything other than being inside of her.
“What consequences?” she asked.
