Page 65 of The Alpha's Fake Mate

And yet he had made promises. He had helped me. He had comforted me even if he didn’t know he was doing it.

I narrowed the distance between us and pressed my mouth to his. It was to be a quick kiss. A brush. A meeting of lips.

His hand pressed against my back.

I didn’t pull away and neither did he.

Seconds passed.

The room around us fled. Time and the world did not exist. Only this. Him. In front of me, the warmth of him, the safety. The caring.

My nose pushed against the side of his nose. Our chins bumped. Our foreheads brushed.

The tension inside me lifted to be replaced by a new tension simmering just under the skin. Yearning. The pressure like a hunger. A craving.

I had felt it that day by the pool at the farm when he’d walked up to the chain-link gate, when he’d spoken to me as if I were a normal person.

All Alphas since my attack reigned in my nightmares. But not him. Not Orion. My dreams of him had not been nightmares. And it made me angrier than ever.

But no longer was that anger directed toward him.

I lifted my hand between us and touched his chest. His heart was racing. His lungs heaved as he tried to catch his breath without pulling away from me.

My mouth opened to him just enough that I could take his breath to mine and mingle them.

Everything inside me surged up to a white hot core, like a sun trapped within. A star I’d thought had burned out.

My body tingled. My skin seemed to curl and coil. My cock—my damn cock got hard.

Finally, I had to pull back. My eyes were blurred. I saw only colors: brown hair, black shirt, the edges of the orange fire. My own arms clad in white.

“He can’t have me,” I whispered.

“He can’t have you,” Orion echoed. “I won’t let him.”

Was he as hard as I? Did he really want me, my broken soul?

Orion leaned toward the low table, letting my hand slide down his chest, and poured more whiskey into our two glasses. He took them both, handed me mine, and raised his to me.

I knew then we were going to spend the evening getting quietly drunk.

*

I woke in a patch of sun streaming in through a line where my curtains did not quite meet. The light rippled across the dark, shiny spread covering me.

I pushed it aside, seeing I was still dressed.

How had I gotten here?

Slowly, vague glimpses of memory returned. Orion. Square cut glasses. Whiskey and more whiskey.

And there had been a kiss, the most unbelievable kiss of two men drawn by different needs that merged into one need, one blazing ache.

I remembered getting up and moving around the mansion to different rooms, following Orion about, gasping at the hugeness, the openness of the house. And laughing. And draping myself over pinball machines in the game room as I tried to make the silver ball bearings go into the proper niches with my mind.

Damn, whiskey was good. Real good.

I remembered snatches of playing pool, and fucking it up so badly, tossing the balls into the pockets as if I were playing mini-basketball.