Page 26 of To Hunt A Wolf
“Too late,” Tripp reminds me.
“Well, I’m going to find out who sent him.”
I toss the covers aside and kick a leg over the edge of the bed. I haven’t even pressed my foot to the floor before Tripp is shoving me back again.
“Tripp, get the hell off me,” I warn.
When he doesn’t back off, my fight or flight instincts kick in, and my wolf rears up, losing her shit faster than I can control her. My hands shove out, pushing hard against my friend’s shoulders, and Tripp flies backward, crashing into the desk chair.
The noise brings Levi running. I’m still not even on my feet before he basically tackles me back to the mattress again.
“Get … off me,” I say, breathless and furiously struggling against his vise-like grip.
This close, his scent hits me hard, and my wolf goes ape shit for an entirely different reason. I force myself to keep fighting him, but in reality, all I want to do is hold him down so he can’t let me go until I’m done with his ass.
Actually, it’s not his ass I’m focused on just now. It’s his rock-hard arousal currently pressing into my thigh. I stop struggling and, in a completely humiliating move, press myself into him, arching my back slightly to increase the pressure.
Levi stills and then removes himself from me, standing over me with a dark look that says he’ll knock me out if he has to.
Honestly, it might be best.
My cheeks flame hot at what a fool I’ve just made of myself.
“Let me go,” I say with not nearly enough conviction.
“You’re weak,” he says, and it feels like an insult rather than a medical fact. “If you get up now, you’ll kill yourself from exertion.”
“What do you care?”
His eyes narrow. “I’ve just wasted half a day babysitting your ass and this is how you want to thank me? By dying?”
“Thank you for what? Killing the only lead I had for who ordered a hit on me?”
“I saved your fucking life, Mac.”
He sounds angry now too. Good.
“You also endangered it by letting me take the fall for Crigger’s murder, and don’t think this makes us even for that.”
“This is bull shit.” He cuts a look toward Tripp. “Talk some sense into her.”
“Me? What am I supposed to say to her?”
But Levi just heads for the door.
His ability to walk away from me only enrages me further, and I lose all sense of self-control or filter.
“Seriously,” I say, working myself into a nice little tantrum now. “Why bother saving me when my being alive so clearly inconveniences you? I mean, if not for me, you’d get away with what you did to Crigger, and you wouldn’t have the whole salty, rejected female thing to deal with. Seems like an easy out to me.”
He stops, his hand on the knob. His shoulders are stiff, his spine straight. But there’s something like defeat in his eyes when he turns back to me.
“You’re the only thing that makes it worthwhile, Mac. You’ll never believe it, but that doesn’t make it any less true.”
His words silence me. Not because I believe him but because I can’t think of a comeback that doesn’t sound stupid and heartsick. Because I want him to mean it so damn badly.
He looks at Tripp. “Take care of her. Then meet me at Jade’s.”
Jade’s?
