Page 48 of Brutal Alpha

I reached across the space, needing to feel her pressed against me, to map the shape of her body with my fingers and my lips, to remind myself she was here and she was real and she was mine. Her breath hitched as my hand found her waist, and she allowed herself to be pulled in close against my chest. This close, her scent was maddening, and the soft skin of her neck was begging for attention. Like a magnet drawn to its opposing pole, my lips found the junction of her shoulder and neck, dropping one, two, three light kisses to the spot that I was itching to mark.

Next came teasing nips, and she tipped her head to give me better access. The give of her flesh beneath my teeth was beautiful, and I lavished attention on that spot before moving up to her neck, kissing and nibbling until I reached the sharp line of her jaw, where I sucked a mark beneath her ear. Julia gasped, her hands flying up to grip my biceps, and I pulled back just enough to look her in the eye, a hand on her chin, keeping her face turned up to mine.

Her pupil was blown wide, her mouth open, and her breath already coming in soft little pants. She truly was themost beautiful woman I had ever seen: sharp, arresting, and completely captivating. Absurdly, my heart felt as though it might beat out of my chest as I leaned down to brush my lips against hers. She tasted floral, like chamomile, and when I took her top lip into my mouth, she released the prettiest little whimper. I let her go, only to return for more, pressing my lips to hers again and again. She met me with desperation, trembling in my arms, and I tried my best to soothe her, slowing the pace of the kiss and stroking gently up and down her back.

Would she calm once I got her on my knot, I wondered. Did she need me as much as I needed her? I’d give her whatever she wanted, whatever she wanted for the rest of our lives. I slipped a knee between her legs, pulling her impossibly closer and groaning as I realized she wasn’t wearing underwear beneath my shirt. For a few glorious seconds, I could feel the wet heat of her pussy against my thigh as she ground down on the muscle there, shivering with pleasure in my arms.

I was ready to scoop her up and carry her to my room, to lie her back on my bed and take my time with her, to fuck her so well she couldn’t remember her own name by the time I sank my teeth into her shoulder and marked her as mine for everyone to see—then she stepped away. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips red and kiss-bitten, her breath coming fast, and I needed her back in my arms again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I meant what I said before. I really am tired.” She glanced behind her at the guest room’s twin bed, and when she turned to face me again, her eyes stayed firmly on the floor. “I should probably—probably just go to bed.”

I gaped at her for a moment, too drunk on lust to form a coherent thought.

“Right,” I said eventually. “Yeah. Yeah, sure.”

She stepped back again, her hand on the door, and it took everything I had not to follow her, not to gather her up in my arms and take her to bed with me anyway.

“Sleep well,” said Julia, as she closed the door on me.

I stood in the corridor, my dick tenting my sweatpants, wondering what the hell had just happened. Perhaps she really was just tired—we’d had a long day, after all. Maybe she needed a bit of space after the Lacey thing. I tried not to think about other options—that she’d grown bored of me, that she was punishing me for rejecting her before—as I forced myself to retreat back down the hallway to my own bedroom. I wasn’t owed an explanation from her right now.

In the morning, I could talk to her properly. A good night’s rest would help me organize my thoughts, and by morning, I would be able to say all the things I hadn’t been able to say. In the morning, everything would feel right. I would make sure of it.

Chapter 21 - Julia

I was still awake when the weak light of morning began to filter through the window. I had lain the whole night unsleeping, imagining that I could hear Ethan’s slow breathing through the wall. I could have heard it in reality, could have spent the night with my head pillowed on his strong chest, but that would only have made everything worse.

How could I have dragged myself from his bed and stolen away? I’d barely had the strength to pull myself out of his arms the previous evening. It had felt so right, and for more than a moment, I had lost myself in the softness of his touch and the insistence of his kisses. It had been almost impossible to remind myself that I was just another female he was willing to fuck, nothing more. He’d said as much to my face: there was no danger he would fall for me.

The unfortunate reality was that I had fallen for him. Sure, we were mates—no matter what he claimed, I was certain of that—but even if we weren’t, I’d still be in love with him. It was oddly freeing to admit it, even just to myself: I was in love with Ethan fucking Cain. I loved his weird dry sense of humor, his rigid moral code, and his chamomile tea. I wanted to be his mate and the mother of his children, and I was both of those things; yet everything was still awful.

He didn’t want a mate. He didn’t want a family and didn’t seek any more responsibility than he already had. As wonderful as he was with the people of his Pack, I could see how the burden of responsibility weighed on his shoulders. He didn’t need any more of that.

Still, I couldn’t say that my decision was entirely altruistic. I did not think only of relieving his burden, but of myown hard-won pride. I was not going to beg for his attention; I was not going to plead for his love; I was not going to hang around until he grew bored of me. I was not going to allow this child to grow up feeling like a burden. If he wasn’t going to accept me as his mate, if he wasn’t going to love me and my child as we deserved, then I was going to leave him behind.

It was better this way. No confessions and no goodbyes.

Stripping off Ethan’s shirt should have been the easiest part, and yet I found my eyes filling with tears as I was briefly engulfed in his familiar scent. Folding it carefully, I left it on the bed and fled the room before I could do something ridiculous and sentimental like take it with me. Naked, I crept down the stairs, grateful that Ethan’s door was on my blind side, and I wouldn’t be tempted to glance in its direction. A few more steps, and I would be out the door, shifted, and on my way home.

As much as the thought hurt, there was relief in it as well. I might not be able to tell Caleb the whole truth, at least not yet, but I would tell Alyssa. We would sit on my couch, have a glass of wine, and she would stroke my hair, allowing me to cry as much as I wanted. I would have my family with me, and no matter how hard things became, I wouldn’t go through it alone.

Ethan would be alone when he woke, but I reminded myself that he preferred it that way. Still, it would be cruel to leave him with nothing—I’d disappeared on him once before, and while he might not return my feelings, I knew he cared for me enough to worry. Snatching Ethan’s to-do list pad off the table by the door—his neat little lists were so endearing, there was something wrong with me—I scrawled a quick note, sticking it to the back of the door before I slipped out into the morning.

It was warm enough that I barely felt chilled, despite my nakedness. For a moment, I simply stood on Ethan’s porch,enjoying the dawn’s quiet. The gentle pink and yellow light made the town look idyllic, and I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to wake up to such a sight every day. I shook the thought away; that wasn’t the version of my life I got to live. In this version, I was going home to Lapine to be with my family and a Pack that tolerated me.

Unable to endure my racing thoughts any longer, I shifted. My thoughts as a wolf were simpler, more instinctual, which was both a blessing and a curse. I might have stopped imagining a hundred different realities where I could be happy, but now that my wolf had control, it was much harder to leave. She wanted to stay with her mate and didn’t understand why I would abandon him when he had been touching and kissing me just a few hours earlier. She wanted to go back inside and crawl into bed with him, and she was not pleased to find out that this wasn’t an option.

I tried to concentrate on things I knew she liked: on being close to Caleb and Alyssa and the twins, on my soft, familiar bed, on the paths she’d worn through Lapine’s forests with her running. Taking the first step away from Ethan’s home wasn’t easy, but I was nothing if not stubborn. My wolf could fight me every step of the way, but I was going home.

It was only once I’d muscled her out of town and onto the long, straight road that led to the Lapine Bridge that she broke out into a proper run. If there was one thing she and I always agreed on, it was the sheer joy of running flat out through an open field. Soon enough, we wouldn’t be able to do this; once my baby was showing, my wolf would refuse to surface, and I’d be stuck as a human until the birth. For now, I would take all the chances I got to run until I was breathless.

Would my baby feel the same? Once they reached the shifting age, would they itch to run the same way I did? Wouldthey possess magic like I did? Perhaps they would be more like their father, stoic and disciplined. My wolf loved the thought of that, of proudly displaying a pup just like his sire. However, my feelings were more complicated. In my mind’s eye, I could see a little boy, brown-haired and grey-eyed, sitting silently at my kitchen table, studiously completing his schoolwork while I needled him to put it down and join me for a run outside. On one hand, I longed for the reminder that my mate had once desired me, enough to plant his child in my womb; on the other, seeing the face of the man who had broken my heart staring back at me every day would be its own kind of torture.

I wasn’t getting answers to that question any time soon, though, so I focused on more immediate problems as the Lapine Bridge came into view. What was I going to tell Caleb when I started to show? He’d come down hard on any shifter who knocked up a female and then abandoned her—never mind that technically I was the one doing the abandoning—and I didn’t think he’d buy that I’d had a fling at the Solstice with some shifter whose name I didn’t know.

I was considering the viability of just refusing to say anything on the subject when a dark shape emerged from beneath the bridge, followed by another, and another, and another. For a moment, I feared that I was about to be caught out by the Ferris patrols and marched back to Ethan with my tail between my legs, but then I caught their scent on the breeze, and I realized I was in far deeper trouble.

Smoke and booze and tobacco, undercut by that woodsy, earthy scent I had hoped I’d never smell again. In all my angst about Ethan, I’d forgotten the reason why we were in this situation to begin with: Arbor wasn’t done with us. They weren’t done with me.

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