Page 16 of Cruel Alpha (Nightfire Islands Alphas #1)
“Alyssa!”
Someone was pounding on the door, incessant and deafening, making me jump. Tea splattered over my hand onto my new lounge set. I hissed at the heat of the liquid, setting the cup down as I rushed to the door. Caleb was on the other side, frantic and bloodied, and my heart rate spiked.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as he barreled into the room. “What happened to you? Is it Arbor? Do we need to—”
He frowned, shaking his head as he held out a hand to stop me.
“No, no, it’s not that. I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, and relief rushed through me.
“Then what the hell happened?” Up close, he looked awful. Bruises were blooming on his left cheekbone, and there was a gash above his eye, still oozing blood. He was shirtless, and for once, I wasn’t distracted by the cut of his abs because he was mottled with bruises all over his stomach, too. Deep within, my wolf was whining; her mate was hurt.
“That doesn’t matter,” he said, as if he didn’t look like he’d been put through a mincer. “Where are the kids?”
“They’re napping,” I told him, irritation beginning to take over from fear. “It’s a miracle your commotion didn’t wake them.”
“Good. Good,” he said, beginning to pace. “And Julia?”
“She went for a run.”
“Okay.”
He didn’t say anything more, just continued pacing, his hands balled into fists. Whatever he’d barged in here to say was clearly on the tip of his tongue because he kept taking deep breaths in as if to speak, only to clamp his jaw shut and continue his pacing. I’d been having a perfectly nice afternoon until he’d disturbed my peace, and if we didn’t have Arbor wolves at the door, my patience for his tortured bullshit was running short.
“So… where’s the fire?” I asked. He stopped.
“What?”
“You come barging in here—making me spill tea on myself—just to ask where Julia is?”
“No,” he said. “I—sorry about the tea.”
His eyes darted down to the stain on my stomach, and I immediately regretted bringing attention to my attire. Julia had convinced me to buy the sage green jersey lounge set at the market last week. It had just come over from the mainland, according to the seller, and it was so soft and such a pretty color, and I did deserve to treat myself. The problem, however, was that the shorts skimmed the very tops of my thighs, and the neckline of the spaghetti strap top dipped low. I hadn’t thought anything of it; I didn’t plan on wearing it out of the house, but I was suddenly aware of just how much skin was on display.
Caleb seemed to notice, too, because he blinked hard before he met my eyes again. He looked… lost, angry, and oddly vulnerable.
“What is it?” I asked again, lowering my voice, feeling like an asshole. I wanted to reach out and touch him, but he was coiled and tense like a cornered animal.
“The twins,” he said. “Are they mine?”
It was so entirely unexpected that for a moment, I forgot to be angry that he would ask.
“You know they’re yours,” I said, but he shook his head.
“No. No, I didn’t.”
Okay. The anger had arrived.
“I definitely remember telling you that,” I said, “I remember telling you, and I remember you and your father kicking me out of the Pack for it.” Caleb winced, and I hoped the shame hurt. If it did, it clearly wasn’t enough because he continued:
“You were never—you were never with anyone else?”
The question was like a punch to the gut, but I refused to let it faze me.
“You don’t get to ask me that,” I said, cursing myself that I could not keep my voice from trembling.
His knuckles went white where he gripped the back of the couch, and when he spoke, his voice was strangled with emotion.
“Please, Alyssa. Please just tell me—”
“I was never with anyone else!” I cried, only just managing to hold back tears. I wanted this conversation to be over. I wanted him to leave. He didn’t, though; he slumped against the back of the couch, hanging his head.
“I’m so fucking stupid,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. He didn’t need a reply, but I was going to give him one.
“You seriously thought I was lying?” I demanded. That was almost worse. Did he really think I was so low? What would I have lied for? Did he think I’d gone out and gotten myself knocked up specifically to trick him? A tear slipped down my cheek without my permission.
“I didn’t—I never knotted you,” he said, as if I didn’t know that, as if I wasn’t there. “No one told me until ten fucking minutes ago that it doesn’t—it doesn’t work like that with witches. I thought it wasn’t physically possible.”
Suddenly, I was ten again, sitting on the stairs and listening to Dad and Pauline have the same argument they’d been having for as long as I could remember. He was yelling that he would never knot another woman, that he hadn’t known my mother would get pregnant, and Pauline was calling him an idiot. I’d always assumed he’d been lying, but school had never covered human or witch biology—I’d had to buy a book from the market in secret in order to learn about my own body and my own magic—it wasn’t such a stretch to think that Caleb and my father might have held the same mistaken belief.
If he had… if he had, then that changed everything.
“Please tell me what you’re thinking,” said Caleb.
“I-I don’t know what I’m thinking,” I said, honestly. “Everything I believed for the last three years is just…”
The tiniest smile curled at the edges of his mouth.
“Tell me about it,” he said, and I couldn’t help huffing a laugh in return. Somewhere in my throat, though, the laugh became a sob, and Caleb rushed forward, his big, warm hands cupping my face, trying to wipe away my tears even as they fell.
“You have to believe that if I’d known—if I’d thought even for a second that they were mine, I would never have—”
“Don’t,” I choked. “I don’t want to think about that right now.”
“Then tell me what I can do. Anything, Baby. I swear, whatever you want. I’m so fucking sorry, Alyssa. I’ve been sorry for three years, and I’ll probably be sorry for the rest of my life. You deserve so much better.” His hands dropped from my face to my waist, pulling me against him. His scent enveloped me, and I couldn’t believe this was really happening. I’d dreamed of this, dreamed of apologies and declarations and softness. “You’re perfect,” he breathed against my hair. “They’re perfect. I want—I know I don’t deserve it, but if you let me, I’ll spend forever making this up to you.”
If I were smart, this would be the time I’d sit us both down and write out a laundry list of demands, starting with public acknowledgment of our bond and the twins’ legitimacy. I wasn’t smart, though. I’d never been smart when it came to Caleb.
“Let me, Alyssa,” he whispered, gripping me tighter as I raised my face to his. “Let me make it up to you.”
My eyes fluttered shut as he leaned down, expecting to feel his lips on mine, but the kisses I received were dropped onto one eyelid, then the other. My forehead was next, then each of my cheekbones and the tip of my nose. When I could finally feel his breath on my lips, he hovered there for several drawn-out seconds before he finally put both of us out of our misery.
This kiss was nothing like the one we’d shared at that fateful party. That had been nothing but raw desire, the pull of the bond too strong for either of us to resist. The desire was no less present in this one, but there was tenderness, too. As hard as he held me to him, his mouth was soft and searching on mine.
The hot flash of his tongue against my top lip had me whimpering, melting into his embrace as I opened up for him. One of his hands abandoned my waist to fist in my hair, tipping my head back so he could lick into my mouth, sending shockwaves straight to my core. I was utterly lost in his touch, in the euphoria of finally being known, being accepted, and I could hold nothing back. When he slipped a knee between my thighs, I gasped, grinding down on the hard muscle of his leg. I was so wet already, and the slide of it was maddening.
I could have come right there, riding his thigh, but Caleb clearly had other ideas. Returning both hands to my waist, he walked me back until I felt the hard edge of the kitchen counter digging into the small of my back.
With a last nip to my bottom lip, Caleb abandoned my mouth to begin kissing a trail down my neck and down onto my chest. At the same time, his hands played with the hem of my tank, his fingers beginning to stroke my belly beneath it. As his lips moved down, kissing along my clavicle and onto the tops of my breasts, his hands moved up, dragging the fabric of my shirt with them, caressing every inch of skin along the way.
I probably should have cared that, at any moment, the twins could wake up, or Julia could return home from her run and discover us, but that part of my brain had shut up shop when Caleb first kissed me. I let him push my shirt up over my breasts—neither of us patient enough to take it all the way off, leaving the material bunched under my arms—so he could take one of my nipples in his hungry mouth. He sucked hard, raking his teeth across the sensitive flesh, and I had to stuff my hand in my mouth to muffle my pleasured whine. He didn’t let up, though, moving across to my other breast, pausing for a moment to leave a dark bruise on its underside before he took my other nipple in his mouth. Every pull of his mouth and scrape of his teeth sent sparks of pleasure straight between my legs, and my hips bucked impatiently, my thighs pressed together in a vain attempt at friction.
When he finally let up, it was to drop to his knees. My heart hammered in my chest as he took in the roundness of my belly and the white stretch marks that had marred the skin since the birth of our children. His fingers traced the patterns of it, followed by his lips, and my eyes filled with tears. Kneeling before me, his face bruised and battered and so damn beautiful, Caleb looked like a fallen angel. His icy blue eyes blazed with want, and I still couldn’t quite believe that all this desire was for me. There could be no doubt about it, though, when he rasped,
“You’re perfect.” Then his gaze turned dark. “And these shorts should be illegal. ”
Without waiting for a reply, he yanked them down my legs, exposing my dripping pussy, and I flushed with embarrassment. I’d never been so exposed; our first time together had been frantic and rushed in the dim light of his bedroom. Now, though, he was looking at the most secret parts of me as though I was a meal he wanted to devour. As his tongue parted my folds, hot and perfect against the sensitive flesh, all the breath left my body in a moan that I could not hold in.
My hand flew to his hair, anchoring myself in the black strands as he drove me to the edge of madness with his tongue; long licks with the flat of it had me bucking mindlessly against his face until his firm grip on my thighs forced me to stop and submit as he flicked my clit with the pointed end. My legs were turning to jelly when he finally slid a finger inside me, and I gasped. I wanted to plead with him for more, to tell him how good it felt, but he’d broken the link between my brain and my mouth, leaving me unable to do anything but writhe and moan and whimper under his onslaught.
When I looked down, he was watching me intently, the lower half of his face obscured where he was still dedicated to his task. As he slipped a second finger in beside the first, he drew my clit beneath his lips and sucked, driving me wild as I desperately rode his long fingers. A ruinous coil of pleasure was building inside me, and I had to grip the edge of the kitchen counter to stay on my feet as my orgasm crashed through me. My toes curled as waves of pleasure rolled over me, Caleb’s sinful mouth refusing to let up until I was gasping and trembling and spent.
For a few moments, the afterglow was calm and tender; Caleb pressed lazy, open-mouthed kisses to the insides of my thighs and the roundness of my lower belly as I panted, hazy and blissed out. Then he rose to his feet—his lips shiny with my slick, his gaze ravenous—and I realized he wasn’t done with me.