Page 6

This couldn’t be real. I couldn’t be lying on the cool, damp grass beneath the old oak, completely naked, with Julia Thorne passed out on my chest, my knot still buried inside her.

I would never have done something so astronomically, unbelievably stupid.

She was my best friend’s little sister, the same little sister I’d fought with every time we’d been in the same room for the past four years.

If I’d only fucked her, that would have been stupid enough, but I’d knotted her.

I didn’t know what the hell had come over me; I never knotted the girls I was with.

That shit was reserved for mates, and I respected that.

Or at least, I thought I did. I also thought that I had a hard rule about not fucking girls who were virgins, but I’d thrown that one out of the window, too.

If it hadn’t been obvious from the clumsy, trembling way she’d touched me, I would have known the second I pushed into her and her face pinched in pain for a few gentle strokes before it faded into pleasure.

I’d knotted my best friend’s little sister, taken her virginity in the grass on the outskirts of a party because—because what? I’d wanted to?

Yeah. I’d wanted to. Julia Thorne might be infuriating, but she had grown into an undeniably beautiful woman, and my wolf had never been good at differentiating between all the ways she made my blood run hotter.

With her eyes closed and her breathing even, her expression soft, it was difficult to imagine the absolute devil of a woman she was while awake.

She’d collapsed, breathing hard, onto my chest in the wake of our shared climax, and a few heartbeats later, she’d been dead to the world.

It was a blessing I didn’t deserve, but one I would gladly take.

Once the urgent, insistent hunger had subsided, it would have been mortifying to meet her eyes and tell her we had at least twenty minutes to wait until my knot went down and we could separate.

Better that she sleep through it and leave me to my self-flagellation.

It seemed like hours passed before the swell of my knot was reduced enough for me to slip out of her, but when I did, she stirred.

“Shit,” she murmured. “I drooled on you.”

Blinking up at me, sleepy and fucked out, she smiled. I had to leave. Rolling her off me as gently as I could manage, I got to my feet, scanning the grass around us for our clothes.

“Get dressed.” I scooped her dress up from the ground where I’d discarded it, throwing it in her direction. If I looked at her sitting naked in the moonlight, her pale skin glowing and her hair already mussed from where I’d buried my hands in it and tugged, I was going to make another bad decision.

“So we’re not going to talk about this?” Her voice was small and oddly vulnerable, and I sighed.

All the girls I’d ever been with had asked that, but I honestly hadn’t expected the same from Julia.

I had assumed she would recognize this for the mistake it was and be keen to move on. Clearly, I had overestimated her.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” I said. It was the same thing I’d said to every other girl, and it felt wrong even as I said it. Julia wasn’t every other girl: she was my best friend’s little sister and a pain in my ass.

“Nothing to talk about?” she echoed, and I moved on to the next stage of the hook-up aftermath response: changing the subject.

“I mean—your magic. Obviously. That’s great.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Julia said. I should have known that wasn’t going to work on her. Every other woman I’d been with knew when she’d been dismissed, and she wasn’t going to question the Alpha. Julia had never respected my rank, and there was plenty of fight in her.

“Look, this isn’t exactly my ideal scenario either,” she continued as I pulled my pants back on.

“Contrary to what I’m sure you think, I haven’t been wandering around these past few years thinking, ‘gee, I wish Ethan was my mate.’ But you are, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise just because the truth is inconvenient. ”

I froze. Her mate? Surely she didn’t really think that. It made no sense.

“I’m not your mate, Julia,” I said because there was nothing else to say.

“Then what the fuck just happened?” she replied. “Because that sure as shit felt like a newly-formed bond to me.”

Had things been different, I might have agreed with her.

The sudden onset of desire, the need I had felt for her, like water in the desert, might easily have been mistaken for the tug of a newly formed bond.

I’d certainly never felt that way about any of the women I’d been with before, but I’d never felt as much for those women as I had for Julia.

I hadn’t felt protective of them the way I always had her, even if that feeling was buried beneath several layers of frustration.

“You don’t know how a newly formed bond feels,” I pointed out.

“Neither do you!” Julia retorted. It hadn’t taken long for her attitude to make a return, and there was a terrible part of me—a part getting louder by the minute—suggesting that I simply hadn’t fucked her well enough, that maybe I should try again.

“Maybe not, but I know how sex can make people feel,” I said, shoving my shirt back on and trying desperately to smother that awful, hungry voice. “Females, especially if they’re… not as experienced, tend to mistake simple attraction for something more. You get attached.”

For a moment, Julia said nothing, only fixed me with a long, flat look.

“You’re right,” she said, for the first time. Then, “I’m pretty attached to the idea of kicking you in the balls right now.”

I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. I should have known better than to get myself into this position in the first place.

“Please don’t be difficult,” I started, but even as the words left my mouth, I knew they were wrong. Julia’s eyes narrowed, and her voice was sharp and furious as she hissed.

“Difficult?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, taking a deep, calming breath.

“We can talk about this in the morning, Julia,” I said. We were clearly both too emotional to get anywhere tonight. I could only hope that a night of sleep might give us enough distance to be rational.

Julia, of course, had no interest in being rational.

“We’re talking about it right now, asshole,” she insisted. “You knotted me. Do you do that with every quick fuck or am I just special?”

There was nothing I could say in my defense. It was a lapse in control that I was far too experienced to have made.

“I got carried away,” I admitted, and Julia gasped, clutching her heart in mock delight.

“Wow, so I am just special,” she exclaimed, breathy and fake. “Or—”

“We’re not mates, Julia,” I snapped. “We can’t be. It’s been years since you first shifted, we would have known before now. It’s impossible.”

“More or less impossible than me seeing out of my blind eye?” she shot back.

It was a stupid argument: those two things weren’t connected.

Magic had always been unpredictable and wild, but shifter biology was as predictable as the sunrise.

No matter how strong the urge had been between us, no matter how insane I’d felt when she touched me, it simply could not be the bond.

It was high emotions and hormones. That was all there was to it.

“Why are you so insistent about this?” I asked. “You clearly don’t want to be my mate, and I don’t want to be yours.”

I was a bachelor, and I liked it that way; I had enough responsibilities as it was; I didn’t need a mate to worry about.

My wolf had other ideas, howling and clawing at my insides, and I hoped Julia couldn’t see the effort it took for me to hold him down.

She’d only think that made her right. In reality, it made my wolf a twitter-pated idiot.

“I’m not some hysterical girl with a crush, Ethan,” Julia insisted. “You didn’t make me fall in love with you through the sheer power of your dick. I’m not trying to like—trap you.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“What are you saying, then?” It was a familiar challenge: I’d seen her right eyebrow twitch upward and her arms cross in exactly that manner a hundred times before. A hundred times before, she’d listened to my explanation and found it wanting.

“I’m saying that—that sometimes attraction is just attraction.

You don’t like me, and so you’re trying to find a justification for…

this,” I said. I might not be too proud to admit that I’d noticed Julia’s beauty years ago, but she was certainly not going to admit she’d only kissed me because she wanted to.

Sure enough, she only scowled back at me.

“So you don’t think there’s anything weird about this at all?” she said. “We’ve been at each other’s throats for years, and suddenly we’re so horny for each other that we decide to go to town in the middle of a field at the Solstice celebration? Be real, Ethan.”

“I am being real.” I was so tired of saying the same thing, of her refusing to listen. “It’s been an emotional evening, and it’s far more likely that after the fighting and the making up and the excitement of the revelation about your magic, we both just got… carried away in the moment.”

“So carried away that you knotted me. I remember.” That was the second time she’d mentioned it, and I couldn’t help but feel guilt twist in my stomach.

“Do you want me to apologize?” I said. “Fine, I’m sorry I knotted you.

I’m sure you wanted to save that for your real mate.

” Even as I spoke, my wolf roared inside me.

He didn’t want anyone else knotting her; she was ours, as far as he was concerned.

Easy for him to say—he didn’t have to deal with her.

“You’re insufferable,” Julia hissed through her teeth. She offered no other rebuttal, though, so I took my chance to press pause on this god-awful conversation.

“Well, you won’t have to suffer me after tomorrow,” I said. “I’m taking you home first thing in the morning. Do you need me to find you some witch tea before you leave, or do you have some at home?”

Even in the dark, I could see the way her cheeks darkened. For a moment, she looked vulnerable, caught off guard, and my wolf whined. He wanted us to go to her.

“I’ve got some at home,” she said. “Or Alyssa does, anyway.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. If Alyssa found out, there was no way she’d keep it from Caleb.

“You’re not gonna tell her—” I started, but Julia cut me off.

“I’ll tell her I made a mistake with a knot-happy blockhead. It won’t be a lie.”

Relief curdled in my belly. I didn’t have any right to be relieved. Caleb had trusted me with Julia’s safekeeping, and I’d thrown that trust back in his face. Now, I wasn’t even man enough to admit what I’d done.

“Fine,” I said.

“Fine,” she echoed. Most of the fight seemed to have leaked out of her, and she looked so small, so goddamn young. I held out my hand.

“Are you coming back to the house with me, or—”

“Fuck off,” she snapped, and I took a step back. Tired and defeated and vulnerable as she was, her eyes still blazed with defiance, and my fingers twitched with the desire to touch her again. My wolf yipped in agreement, but I pushed the instinct away.

“I’ll leave you to cool down,” I said.

“You do that.”

My wolf snapped and growled as I turned my back on her, walking steadily back toward the fire, and the party, and the town.

This time, he was right: we shouldn’t be leaving her out in the dark on her own.

There were rumors of Arbor hunters taking females from islands all over the archipelago, and even if those were nothing more than idle stories, there were plenty of strange shifters still roaming Ferris in the aftermath of the party.

It was madness to walk away from her, but if I’d stayed—if I’d stayed, then I didn’t know what I’d do.