Page 30 of The Alpha Experiment
I took his hand, letting the warmth of his body seep into my skin, savoring that one little point of contact with something not cold, muddy, windy, and depressing. Letting go took an effort, even though I didn’t have any possible excuse for keeping his hand in mine. I didn’t think hand-holding stood much of a chance of setting off my latent werewolf instincts, for one thing.
For another…weird.
But I still felt cold and lonely and tired when I let go, hunching in on myself to keep what warmth I could inside my thin jacket.
Colin set off down the trail, with me dragging along a step behind him.
He fell back into step with me and slung his arm over my shoulders, squeezing me close just like he used to when we were kids. It didn’t feel weird at all, and he kept his arm there the whole way down to the car, without comment.
Okay, so he was clearly the wrong person to try to be afraid of on purpose, and his sense of humorsucked.
But he was the right person for everything else. And I was so damn lucky to have him.
Even if he had…ideas.
But that could wait for tomorrow.
Chapter 10
Consequences
My hangover had mostly faded by the time we got to the location we’d chosen for our second experiment.
I still hated Colin a little bit for being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (figuratively…I hadn’t asked him to shift so I could check) the minute we woke up, but he’d bought me a triple mocha with extra whipped cream on the way, so he’d earned my forgiveness for metabolizing bourbon so much faster than I could.
This time, we’d chosen to go somewhere that wasn’t even officially a hiking trail, just a chunk of wilderness that could only be accessed by parking along the side of a mostly-abandoned highway.
We took a minute propped against the hood of the car to finish our coffee and make sure we had a solid plan.
His plan, anyway. Solid was up for debate, but I had to admit it sounded more likely to work than yesterday’s fiasco.
Either way, it was definitely a better day for feeling creeped out than it had been the previous afternoon. The sun had disappeared behind gloomy overcast, and the temperature had dropped about fifteen degrees.
“So I was thinking about it some more while you got yourself human this morning,” Colin said abruptly.
“I’m always human, isn’t that kind of the point?” I slurped the last of my mocha, making it obnoxiously loud on purpose.
Colin shot me a narrow-eyed glare. “Ha fucking ha. I meant while you were stumbling around in the shower like a zombie.Anyway. Yeah, not having a time limit on when I come after you is going to help, and being somewhere without a marked path will help, but I think the real problem was, there weren’t any consequences if I caught you. It was just hide and seek. Or tag, maybe.”
Consequences. My stomach gave a weird, clenching flip. Was it my imagination, or had his tone sounded a little suggestive? Definitely my imagination. Right?
“Like?” I asked cautiously.
He shrugged. “Not sure. You have to buy dinner? No,” he said, before I could answer. “Not enough. It has to be something you’re actually afraid of, yeah? Or…like, nervous about. You want adrenaline pumping, don’t you?”
“I can’t think of anything right off.”
I could think of a lot of things right off, actually. I just didn’t want to say any of them out loud. My mouth felt dry as hell, and I wished I hadn’t finished my coffee already. In the context of mating—albeit simulated and fake—and being at the mercy of an alpha, there were way, way too many things that could make me nervous. Would Colin actually do any of them?
Hehmmm’d and tucked his hands in his pockets, staring up at the gray sky.
I did the same, until the glare made my hangover threaten to come rushing back.
Finally, Colin let out another littlehmmm, this one the kind he made when he’d come to a decision. “You know what?” he said, sounding way too chipper. “I think it’ll work best if it’s dealer’s choice.”
“Dealer’s choice. Are you—what the hell does that mean?”
“It means I decide what the consequences are, and you don’t get to know in advance.”
