Page 6 of Captive Mate
I pointedly turned my back before I started rubbing soap lather on my ass. I could almost hear his teeth grinding.
It made me smile, but I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy pushing his buttons for long. It was getting more and more obvious that whatever I’d done to fuck up my spell was aseriousfuck-up. My knees were shaking, and I had to take deep breaths to keep the nausea under control.
So when Nate started to bitch at me for taking too long, I didn’t argue. I was clean, by most people’s standards, anyway, and surely Matthew had a shower in whatever room we’d be locked up in together. I could be more thorough later on.
And if I didn’t get to him soon, I was afraid I was going to pass out. The steam was making me lightheaded and my heart was beating too fast. What the fuck had I done wrong? I couldn’t remember making any mistakes when I assembled the components, and the casting had gone off without a hitch.
Without a word, Nate handed me a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that had to be his: they were almost the right size, only a little too big in the shoulders. Asshole.
I dressed, trying to hide how unsteady I was, and then Nate opened the bathroom door.
Time to face Matthew, and hope I could be manipulative enough to fend off a love-spelled alpha wolf who had every reason to be pissed at me. I gave myself fifty-fifty.
Chapter 3
Crazy for Loving You
The rest of the pack house was exactly what I would have expected from seeing the basement: infested with dust bunnies and poorly maintained. We passed through a large living room on our way up from the basement, where three younger werewolves were lounging on the couch, playing some kind of outdated video game. They all glanced up as Ian and Nate led me through, and they sneered, but they didn’t say anything. I could hear other voices in the house, though, maybe coming from what I thought had to be the kitchen around the corner. I could smell food from that direction. The smell turned my stomach and made me ache with hunger all at once.
The whole scene made me shudder. So many werewolves in one place…ugh. I wasn’t a pack animal, and the mingled scents and close quarters were justdisgusting.
We went up the stairs, along a gross mint-green hallway that looked like it belonged in a cut-rate mental institution, and right up to a closed door with peeling off-white paint and a rusty doorknob. Outside of it was an armchair holding one of the biggest guys I’d ever seen. Matthew’s guard, I presumed. He grunted at Ian.
Ian unlocked the door without bothering to knock. Not that a lock would’ve kept Matthew in if he really wanted to get out, but if that huge mountain of a wolf was sitting outside all the time…well, I wasn’t loving my own chances of breaking out of there. Nate opened the door, and Ian shoved me inside.
“He’s all yours,” Ian said, and slammed the door behind me.
The lock clicked.
Matthew stood up from where he’d been sitting on the bed.
He looked like shit, with dark bags under his eyes and a tension in his body that practically thrummed in the air.
Although as I watched, that tension started to evaporate. My own nausea was receding, and my headache faded away within moments.
Well, fuck.
“Are you all right?” Matthew demanded abruptly.
I blinked at him, not quite fluttering my eyelashes, but close. “I’m hungry,” I said simply. “And cramped from being chained up.” I threw in a little pout. “It was awful down there.”
Matthew’s hands twitched, like he was resisting reaching for me. “You look good. More than good,” he said, and then added, more coldly, “I’m sure you’ll survive. But they should have taken better care of — I know you’re just trying to get to me. Fuck!” he shouted, and spun around, his shoulders heaving and his hands rubbing through his hair.
I edged away, but then my back hit the wall. His own common sense, and probably a lot of evidence his brother would have shown him by now of my active involvement in trying to kill him and his whole pack, was obviously having a knock-down drag-out fight with my spell. The spell made him love me, but it couldn’t prevent that love from turning toxic, becoming so intermingled with a vengeful alpha’s possessive, aggressive rage that it was indistinguishable from hatred. So I’d been expecting either care and concern or anger and lust, but not all of it at once.
Oh, this was bad. He wouldn’t need to try to break out of the room when he went crazy, which looked like it was happening any second; I’d be conveniently right there, and he could just breakme.
And fuck, but this was ruining my half-formed plans. I’d had an idea of how to manage him if he was stuck in poor-Arik — well, poor-Jonah, since he still had my fake name — mode. I’d milk it for all it was worth. And if he was furious and finally convinced that he hated me but also wanted me, I’d have let him fuck me through the mattress, while appearing to resist, and then used either his remorse or his afterglow against him.
But now both of those ideas were out the window.
Speaking of. I eyed the two windows in the room, both of them regular old-fashioned sash windows just large enough for a full-grown man to climb in and out of. I’d have given a lot to be able to do that right about then.
But no, that could wait until I’d had a chance to lull Matthew a little bit — and then there was the problem of getting the cuffs off. I was short on allies outside of this house, not that I had any here, either.
And I had to work on that.
Change of tactics. I needed to reconcile his competing feelings, stat.
