Page 22 of The Alpha Experiment
He did much, much worse: he chewed on his lip, gazing at me consideringly. Colin didn’t think things through all that often; he preferred to do something impulsive and work out the details later.
When he really put his mind to something, he was way too smart.
I stared him down with all the psychic force I could muster.
Go get lunch. Just back down, and go get lunch, dammit.
“You’re not researching female alphas for Fiona.” A simple statement, not a question. His voice lowered to an impossibly deeper register, and he leaned in, until there couldn’t have been more than an inch between our faces. “What the fuck are you really doing, Newt? No, I’m not waiting for the weekend. No, I’m not buying any more bullshit. You’re going to sit down and tell me what the hell is going on.”
“I don’t need to answer to you for—”
“Sit. Down!”
I stumbled back and fell into the desk chair like he’d cut my strings, the chair rattling and screeching under me. Colin shoved the door shut and stalked me a lot more effectively than I’d stalked him, pinning me where I sat with the force of his…well, it wasn’t a glare. I’d have expected a glare, but this was something different. Something a lot harder to categorize and a lot harder to deal with, because as I blinked up at him, my fingers flexing nervously on the arms of the chair, he simply—looked at me. Expectantly. Like he didn’t need more than a look to make me do whatever he wanted.
Alphas didn’t affect me like that, though. I’d grown up surrounded by alpha weres, in trouble often enough with my dad and the pack leader that I’d gotten immune to alpha disapproval, even though it made most people want to tuck their metaphorical (in my case) tails and roll over.
Except that today, apparently they did affect me like that.
Or Colin did.
And apparently he meant to make the most of it, because he leaned down, pushing me back in my chair with the force of his presence. He seemed to take up every bit of space and oxygen in the tiny room, especially with the door closed. I tried to suck in a deep lungful of air, but it wouldn’t go all the way down.
Colin’s face filled my vision, all dark eyes and hard planes and angles, and I couldn’t get another breath, I was going to start babbling the truth, or maybe just babbling—or maybe begging, I didn’t even know for what.
And then he set his hands on the arms of my chair, his fingers just brushing mine, and crouched down. Colin tipped his head and looked up at me, still with that expectant gaze, but—asking, instead of demanding. Telling me that I ought to tell him the truth not because he was an alpha and I had to do what he wanted or else, but because he cared about me. Because he was my friend, and I trusted him.
And, subtext, because he was an alpha and ought to know what the hell was going on so he knew what to kill.
But that I could live with. Alphas were gonna alpha, and there wasn’t any way around it.
“Newt, please. Look, I know you’re hiding something, and dude—you called me before you even called your folks about the creepy-ass stalker and the threatening emails. You told me about all of that, but you won’t tell me what the fuck is going on now? Do you have any idea how much that freaks me out, that you might be hiding something evenworse?”
He drew a deep breath and leaned in a little. His fingertips grazed mine again, and I felt those little points of warm connection all the way through me.
“I’m this close to tossing you in the trunk of my car and taking you back to my pack where I know you’ll be safe, and I know I can’t do that because you’d hate me for it.” His lips quirked a little. “And that’s the last thing I’d ever want, next to something happening to you. So fucking talk. Please.”
I wanted to move my hand so that it lay over his. I wanted to pull away. I resisted doing either, and the effort of holding perfectly still while feeling that weird connection had me almost vibrating.
Crouching down in front of me, making himself as nonthreatening as possible, Colin had never seemed quite as big as he did. Bigger than me. Something I rarely noticed when we stood next to each other, since our equal height balanced it out. With all his mass compressed like that, all coiled strength, it was the only thing I could notice.
That, and I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. Not when he saidpleaselike that.
But I also couldn’t quite work myself up to telling him, especially since I now realized I’d allowed him to be terrified on my behalf when I could’ve at least put his mind at ease about my immediate safety.
“You’re going to be pissed.” My tongue felt too thick in my mouth. I’d already finished the bottle of water I’d stashed in my bag that morning. “You’re going to be seriously, seriously pissed-off, Col.”
“No, I won’t.” He shook his head. “Okay, maybe I will. But tell me anyway. It’s not like I can stay mad at you for long.”
I swallowed hard, my throat as dry as my mouth. “I called Greenwald yesterday while you were out.”
The arms of the chair creaked ominously as his hands tightened. “You what.”
“I called him. I thought if I confronted him, found out what he wanted, I could talk him out of—whatever he had in mind. And I hoped I could get him to say something incriminating so that I could take the recording to the police and get rid of him that way.”
Except that it hadn’t worked, and I didn’t even need to say so. If I’d dealt with the problem while Colin had been at the grocery store, I’d have been crowing about it the second he got home, waving my phone around and telling him how awesome I was.
His brows drew lower, and the arms of the chair started to make little cracking noises.
