Page 28 of Wishes in the Moonlight (Rocky Mountain Wolves #4)

~Troy~

Amanda couldn’t have looked any more inviting, sitting on the bed in the small underground bunker, her cheeks still a little pinker than usual thanks to the orgasm I’d given her.

Did Savannah really buy Amanda’s excuse that the scent of our mutual pleasure still lingering in the air came from our dinner instead?

Based on everything I knew about the Beta so far, she didn’t seem that naive, but she might honestly believe that Amanda disliked me so much, anything would be more likely than the fact that I’d had my face buried between her legs mere minutes earlier.

I still had a hard time believing it myself, even with her delicious taste lingering on my tongue.

And as much as I wanted to do it again, as much as I wanted to spend every moment of the time we had locked away from the world exploring and enjoying every inch of her, there was something I needed even more.

“You’re not going to ask me to reject you again, are you?”

The question flew from my mouth like an arrow, and I could see the exact moment it reached my mate. She swayed slightly to the side, absorbing its weight, and the desire I’d seen building in her eyes dimmed.

Fuck. “I mean, I don’t expect you to fully accept me either, not tonight, but I need to know if what we just did meant something to you.”

Her eyebrows rose, not as far as they could go, but enough that I knew those words hadn’t landed right either. She said so much with the smallest movements. “Because I regularly have meaningless sex? Is that what you mean?”

Hunter growled in my head, not at her but at me for my clumsy phrasing. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just… I’ve been waiting for that moment for seven years. For a chance to please you. But I know that your feelings towards me over that same time have been… considerably more mixed.”

One corner of her mouth quirked in acknowledgement, so I carried on.

“You have my heart, Amanda. You have my loyalty and my commitment and my body too. All of it is yours, whenever you say the word, and I’ll do whatever it takes to prove that to you.

I know it’ll take time. I’m not going to assume that just because you gave me access to your body, your incredible body… ”

My breath stuttered as my eyes drank her in from head to toe, my mind mingling what it saw with the memories we’d just created together. On the one hand, that memory was good enough to last me a lifetime, but on the other, I wanted so much more.

“...I know it doesn’t mean that you’re ready to give me the rest yet. What I’m trying to ask, very badly, is how you’re feeling about what just happened?”

Amanda humphed out a sigh, but the tension in her face relaxed as she leaned back. “Then just say that next time.”

“I’ll try.” I offered her a smile as I sat back down on the bed too, keeping a bit of space between us. “You make me nervous. I’m doing my best.”

The admission took her by surprise, a startled laugh my reward for my honesty. “How do I make you nervous?”

“Are you kidding?” It was my turn to give her an incredulous look, my eyebrows raising in disbelief. When she just stared back at me, curious and clueless, I shook my head. Apparently, it wasn’t a joke, so I laid it out for her. “The first time I saw you, I thought you were an angel. Literally.”

Her eyebrows scrunched together. “The night of my birthday?”

She was so lost, I had to smile. “No. I’m talking about the very first time I saw you.

It was a big pack celebration, one of the few my aunt let me attend.

There were games and competitions, and because I was bigger than most kids my age, I won a bunch of ribbons.

I was 12 years old, so you would have been around 8, I think?

At one point, the Alpha came out on the balcony of the pack house, where we could all see him, and you walked out to join him wearing a shiny white dress that sparkled in the sunshine. ”

Recognition warmed her beautiful brown eyes. “I remember that day, and that dress. I hated it because I couldn’t play any of the games in it. I’d been listening to the staff talk about all the fun things they were planning all week, and when the day arrived, I just had to stand there and wave.”

“I waved back at you,” I admitted, feeling rather foolish admitting it since I knew even then that she hadn’t noticed me. Why would she have? “And I asked my aunt if she saw the angel too. I didn’t know that someone so beautiful could be real.”

Her lips parted in a way that made it almost impossible not to lean over and kiss her, but I forced myself to continue the story instead.

“My aunt slapped the back of my head and told me not to be so stupid. You were the Alpha’s daughter, and that was the closest someone like me would ever get to someone like you.”

She winced at the words, just as I had done on that day.

“After that, any time there was an event where you might be there, I found a way to go. I never got too close, just hung out in the back so no one noticed me. But any glimpse of you I could get always made me feel better for a long time afterwards. It reminded me that beauty existed, even when things got rough.”

Her brow lined with concern at the last part, but I didn’t want to talk about my childhood right now. I’d much rather focus on her.

“For years, I lived off those glimpses, admiring you like a piece of art, something to be appreciated from a distance, completely out of reach, but then came the year of the canoe races.”

Amanda groaned, her eyes closing in dismay. “That was so embarrassing.”

I wouldn’t have used that word. Eye-opening, certainly, at least on my end, but she had no reason to be embarrassed.

The pack’s top warriors and ranked members raced across the lake in canoes while the rest of us watched from shore and cheered.

As Lota, 17-year-old Amanda had the job of presenting the winner with his trophy.

She wore a beautiful, pale-yellow sundress, shining as brightly as the sun itself in my view.

Her hair was beautifully styled, her makeup perfectly done.

But when she went to step back after presenting the prize at the end of the dock, she accidentally caught the edge of the platform and went tumbling into the water.

I could still feel the way my heart had crawled into my throat, every second until she resurfaced like an eternity. I even stepped forward to run into the lake myself from my spot on shore, but my fellow recruits in the training program held me back.

When she broke the surface again, the men on the dock pulled her back up, everyone breaking into relieved applause to see the Lota still safe and sound, but I found it even harder to breathe than before.

Her once-flowing yellow dress, now damp, clung to every new curve of her body, the fabric almost see-through and revealing the clear outline of the lacy garments she wore beneath it.

With her hair slicked back and the powder on her face gone, she looked somehow even more beautiful.

Up until that moment, I’d still only seen her as the angel I first imagined her to be, but in that moment, she became real to me.

“My father was furious,” she added, her eyes casting downwards. “He said I’d made a spectacle of myself.”

“You did,” I agreed and when her eyes snapped back up in indignation, I smiled softly at her. “The most beautiful spectacle I’d ever seen. And you didn’t look embarrassed, if that helps. You handled it so well, it didn’t seem awkward at all.”

She’d made a joke I’d been too far away to hear, but from the way the men on the dock all laughed and relaxed, I could tell she’d said something to set them all at ease. It was a skill I’d seen her use many more times since then, but that was the first time I saw the diplomat she would become.

“After that, I stopped going to pack events to see you,” I confessed.

“Not because I admired you any less, but because once I saw you as an actual person, not some kind of demi-god, I realized my aunt had been right all those years before. We might live in the same pack, but I would never really know you, and it hurt less when I didn’t think about it.

I didn’t see you for months after that, not until the night of your birthday. ”

“When we found out we were mates,” she whispered, and I nodded solemnly, hoping she could understand, even just a little, why that moment had been so momentous for me.

It wasn’t just finding my mate, it was that she was my mate, the woman I’d watched growing up from afar and never dared to dream would ever look my way. She was mine.

Until she wasn’t.

Until I had to let her go.

And that was why, even after the intimacy we’d just shared, I needed to hear her say the words. I needed her to tell me that there was still some hope that someday, we might share more than that.

That she would claim me as hers, since I always had been.