Page 21 of The Alpha Dire Wolf (Bloodlines & Bloodbonds #1)

Sylvie

I t only took one step closer to the house to confirm it. The pinpricks intensified the second I tried it. Whatever danger was about, whoever was watching me, they were inside.

I searched the windows frantically, trying to peer inside, to get an idea of who it might be. There was no identifying car in the driveway and none on the nearby street either. Whoever it was, they weren’t a known entity.

Could it be one of my uncles? Had they heard about their mother’s death and finally decided to drag themselves back out from wherever they had been?

That was a possibility, but why would they not have parked in the driveway?

I ruled them out. They’d been gone too long anyway. There was nothing here for them.

My search of the windows was fruitless, thanks mostly in part to the bright sun making it impossible to see through them. Whoever was inside had a prime view of me, however, which was not ideal.

The situation left me with two choices as I saw it. Option one, the stupid and reckless one, was to simply walk up to the house and go inside. Being that it was stupid and reckless, however, I discarded it, choosing instead to go with option two—run away as fast as I could.

Or in this case, drive away. I started backing toward my car, hoping whoever was inside wasn’t going to run out and chase me down. My legs twitched, ready to sprint away if that was the case, though I wasn’t much of a runner.

I hadn’t gone two steps before the front door swung slowly open, revealing an outline of the intruder. They stepped into the light, and I came to a halt, my feet riveted to the ground.

“ You ,” I hissed, my spine straight as cold anger flowed through me at his boldness. “What the hell are you doing in my grandmother’s house?”

He opened his mouth, but I cut him off with a sharp chop of my hand. “You know what, I don’t care. Leave. Now.”

There was a pause.

“No,” Lincoln replied slowly and calmly, standing at the top of the steps to the wraparound porch, folding his thickly muscled arms across his body.

My jaw dropped hard enough to make it pop. “I’m sorry,” I said, touching my ear as if to clear something from it. “Did I just hear you right? Did you just say you won’t leave?”

Another pause as he regarded me with casual confidence. “Yes.”

The arrogance grated against me, but it also highlighted that his mouth and his body were screaming two different things.

He was speaking so calmly and assuredly it bordered on arrogance, but his body, despite the crossed arms, was as stiff and tight as a steel beam.

He was fighting hard to be still, to keep from moving, perhaps pacing.

Only his immense willpower kept him still.

Wary of the situation and not wanting to do anything to surprise the man acting like a cornered cat, I stopped myself from storming up to him and jabbing a finger in his face like I wanted to.

“Why not?” I asked instead, gathering my words after his blunt refusal to leave. “It’s not your house. You don’t belong here.”

His icy blue eye twitched ever so slightly at those last words, but otherwise there was no reaction. An even longer pause settled between us.

“Because,” he said at last with teeth-grating slowness, staring right at me as he spoke, his two-toned gaze never wavering, “we need to talk.”

That was a most unexpected reply. Yet the admission was not enough to excuse him for what he’d done.

“If you want to talk, Lincoln, you need to do what normal people do these days. Send me a text message so I can read it and ignore it until I’m ready to reply. Now leave .”

Lincoln shook his head.

“Am I going to have to call the sheriff to get him to remove you from the property?” I threatened.

“You won’t do that.”

I raised a finger at him. “You better believe I will! You broke in to my grandmother’s house !” I was shouting at him now. “That’s a textbook reason to call!”

How dare he violate the property of a dead woman like that? That was bothering me the most, I realized. His desecration of her house. Of the only thing I had left of her. The lack of care, of respect, for the woman who had once lived here.

“You won’t call,” he rumbled as I pulled my phone from my purse.

“Try me,” I said, unlocking it.

“You won’t, because you want to know why I’m here. You want to know what I have to say. What we have to talk about.”

He paused, leveling a look at me that was hard enough to make my stomach tie itself into knots.

Nobody had ever looked at me that way. Certainly not my ex.

The absolute intensity directed straight at me from Lincoln had a force to it that I’d never experienced before.

A wildly powerful, barely contained carnal interest. In me.

“You want to know why I’m keeping my distance,” he continued after a moment, “but inviting you in. To talk.”

“Did you just invite me in. To my grandmother’s house, that you broke into?” The audacity …

Lincoln stepped back through the doorway. “Are you coming or not?” he called from inside, the only answer he was going to give.

It took me several long seconds to overcome my anger at him, but during it, I noticed something else. The prickly warning sensations that had plagued my spine were gone. At some point they had vanished. Now I looked at the house and thought about going in.

Nothing. It was safe.

Infuriated at Lincoln still but sensing no further danger, I went to the house and up the steps, pausing in the frame of the door to peer around inside. Just in case. But there seemed to be no setup.

“Close the door.”

The command came a moment after I crossed the threshold, cutting me off before I could unleash a fresh tirade of anger at the arrogance of his breaking in. The quickness of it shattered my carefully constructed argument, the pieces falling around me like wilting flower petals.

“No,” I said as I watched him. He was pacing back and forth, like a caged animal desperate to break free. With his size and muscles, the intensity could not be ignored. “Not until you calm down at least.”

Lincoln came to an abrupt halt, looking down at his clenched fists. Taking a deep breath in, he exhaled with a shudder, much of the tension leaving his shoulders as he did.

It should have worked. I should have felt more at ease around him. Instead, the ferocity of what he’d been keeping caged inside swept outward and washed over me. That should have been intimidating or outright scary. What it should not have been was alluring.

Drawing me in toward him, like I was the moth and he was the flame, was not part of the agreement. There was no containing something like him, no matter what a part of me was saying. No, screaming . I could not fix him. Could not make him better.

So why was I taking a step toward him, reaching blindly for the door to let it close behind me, which would trap me in the house with him?

Yet throughout it all, his stare never left me, never strayed. Lincoln had eyes for me, and me alone, and that was … unfathomable. Who was I to capture the attention of such a beast of a man as him?

Like a hunter, he watched my every move. Stalking me with his eyes. Waiting, wary, but fearless. Bold.

“What do you want with me?” I heard myself say into the silence. It wasn’t quite the angry answer-demanding riposte I’d intended. But it was what had come out.

“It’s not about what I want ,” Lincoln said, growling from somewhere deep in his chest at the final word, his eyes burning with a very clear-cut definition of what he meant.

Skin tightened everywhere across my body at the insinuation.

Meanwhile, in the center of my stomach, a roiling ball of heat to rival the sun exploded into being, threatening to flood every corner of my body with its mind-melting warmth.

If my danger sense was going off, it was overpowered by the roar of blood rushing through my veins, every nerve ending brought to life by one single word.

“We barely know each other’s names,” I whispered into the furnace that was once the foyer of my grandmother’s house. I didn’t trust myself to speak any louder.

“I know,” Lincoln replied, one hand clenching around the back of a nearby chair in the sitting room. The wood creaked under his grip. “Trust me. I know. Yet …”

The number of things contained in that “yet” slammed into me like a hurricane, giving life to the million different scenarios and fantasies locked away in a tightly guarded corner of my brain. They all sprang forward like a water main with a leak.

I’d kept them there because, as I’d just told him, I didn’t know a thing about him besides his first name. So it wasn’t helpful to think so intensely about someone. Now they came rushing over me in a swirling storm that I couldn’t dodge. Even if I’d wanted to.

My body tingled as he fixed both eyes on me—the blue icy and hard while the golden amber glowed with heat and power. They stood as a perfect definition of the dichotomy of Lincoln as I knew him.

“Lincoln,” I forced myself to say through the maelstrom in my mind and the full-body tingling his attention was eliciting. “Why. Are. You. Here?”

Each word had to be its own sentence, else I risk losing control of my mouth. Of saying something we both might regret.

He didn’t look away. He stared straight into the storm, facing it down without moving or even flinching.

“Because I want to be,” he ground out, his chest rising and falling with a heavy breath. “I need to be. I—”

He shook his head violently enough to send his long hair flying. “You were born here. In New Lockwood, I mean. Correct?”

There was no stopping my eyebrows from shooting up at the sudden change—not only in topic but in his body language. He was once again locked down, trembling in place as something inside him struggled to break free but was unable to escape the cage he was keeping about himself.

“Uh. Yes?”

“Then you left,” he pushed.

“Your ability to ferret out answers is nigh unmatched,” I replied, trying to pull together the pieces of my mind once more. Where was he going with this? What did it have to do with … with whatever had almost happened a moment ago?

“Tell me about that,” he said tightly.

Is that desperation in his voice? What in the name of heavens is going on?

I didn’t hide the skepticism. “That’s what you want to ask me about?”

The burning in his eyes betrayed the lie, but he nodded slowly anyway. “One of the things I want, yes. One of many.”

My mouth drained of all moisture as something slipped through his walls to punch me right between my breasts. A reminder of … of something unspoken.

“So will you tell me?”

“Lincoln, there is no way you came out here and broke into my grandmother’s house just to ask me this simple question. You could have knocked on the door and asked me when I answered. Like a normal person.”

He smiled, and my heart stopped for a pair of seconds. “Yet here I am,” he said. “Nor am I normal.”

“Okay, fine,” I said over the butterflies. “My parents moved away when I was ten. That’s it. That’s the entire story. Sorry to disappoint. Now will you leave my grandmother’s house?”

“That’s not it. I want you to tell me about it, Sylvie,” he growled.

I had to brace myself after hearing my name on his lips. The sound of it hit me like a fishing lure, snagging on my chest and pulling me in closer. I hated that feeling of weakness, of nearly succumbing to his inadvertent … whatever it was.

“Why should I?” I challenged, harnessing that frustration and using it.

“I don’t know you. You don’t know me. Other than your name, all I know about you is you’ve spied on me at my grandmother’s funeral, stalked me in the forest, and now you’re here, committing a little breaking and entering.

Why, I should be filing a restraining order against you, not authorizing you to write my biography! ”

Lincoln stood tall during my tirade. He never flinched, never even wavered. Just watched and listened silently. Accepting it all.

“I’m trying to get to know you now,” he said once I stopped speaking.

“That,” I said, sputtering, searching for more words. “That is the most convoluted, backward way of looking at this!”

Lincoln shrugged my criticism aside. “Would you prefer we do rapid-fire?”

“What?”

“Rapid-fire.” He cocked his head to the side ever so slightly. “Last name?”

“Wilson,” I said, frowning.

“Silkweaver,” he said, hooking a thumb at his chest. “Middle name?”

“Anne.”

“No middle name. Birthday?”

“January eighteenth.”

Lincoln nodded. “August seventeenth. Current job?”

“Finance. Investments.”

“Do you like it?”

“The job, yes. Company, no.”

“Best friend?”

“Petra Carliaco, but we’re not that close. I’m, um, a bit of a loner.”

Wow. Not sure you had to add that in there.

“Rome Jackson,” Lincoln said. “Pets?”

“No. No time.”

“Same,” he said with a grunt. “Husband?”

I shook my head.

“Fiancé?”

Eyeroll.

“Boyfriend?”

Glare.

“Favorite food you want for dinner tonight?”

My jaw, opened to begin telling him, slammed shut at the additional part to the question.

“What?” he asked coyly.

I peered at him suspiciously. “Did you just ask me on a dinner date?”

Lincoln opened his mouth wide, acting innocent. “I never said anything about you eating with me, or it being a date.”

“But … you …” I licked my lips, struggling to speak. “You said … I mean …”

Lincoln smiled broadly now. Not a grin but just a big smile, and it lit up the room, making my stomach do flips it was not remotely trained to be doing. I liked when he smiled, I was learning.

“Also, you never answered my question.”

“You want to go on a date?”

“Sure,” he said smoothly. Too smoothly. “We can definitely do that. But I was referring to why you left town, and what that was like.”

I stared, trying to figure out what the heck I was going to do. What I wanted to do.

Do I really want to go on a date already? So soon after Caidyn, a situation I’m still dealing with? It’s only been a few days.

Comparing Lincoln to Caidyn felt rude. Improper. The two were so completely and totally different. It didn’t matter what had happened before.

No. This is crazy. You need time. You need to process.

“Tacos. And it’s just dinner,” I said, crossing my arms to make the point clear. “And I have questions for you. Starting with what happened last night and why didn’t you come back?”

Lincoln grinned toothily. “I’ll see you at dinner then. For a not-date.”

He winked at me and walked out before I could get another word in, leaving me frustrated, flustered, definitely confused, and maddeningly enough, more than a little aroused.

This is a big mistake.