Page 34 of The Alpha Experiment
And all at once, I felt safe again.
He stood there with his hands on his hips, one eyebrow up like I’d known it would be, his eyes full of affection.
“I’m bruised, I’m confused, and I’m pissed,” I admitted. “And you have a lot of ’splaining to do, Lucy.”
“Yeah.” He rubbed at the back of his neck, a flush rising on his cheeks. “Yeah, I don’t—I don’t think the experiment was supposed to work onme. I got a little carried away,” he said, trailing off into an embarrassed mumble.
Okay,what? But Jesus, later. I needed a beer, and a shower, and then another beer. Maybe a beer in the shower.
Oh, gods, yes.
“Come on, let’s get back to the car. Please tell me it’s not like ten miles away. I have no idea how far I went.”
His face lit with a flash of a grin, there and then gone again. “Actually, you went in circles. We’re maybe half a mile from the car.”
My mouth dropped open. “You—fucking—you’re kidding me. You’re—godsdamnit, Colin.” I started off, stomping away from him, until the noisy, pointed sound of a throat clearing stopped me. “I’m going the wrong way, aren’t I.”
“Yep.” He cleared his throat again. “Listen, I’m going to shift back. Easier to move around out here that way, since I don’t have any clothes. Just follow me, okay?”
I turned in time to see him melt back into the form of a huge, hulking wolf with a sleek yellowish coat darkening to brown around the forehead and ears. He grinned at me, a big goofy canine smile, turned, and loped off in the opposite direction.
I couldn’t help thinking he’d shifted not so much to spare his human skin the scratches and bruises of pushing through branches but so that we didn’t have to talk. It hurt a little, even if I was more relieved than anything.
That hurt more, in a different way.
Sighing, I slung the backpack on and followed him down the hill.
The car had come in sight through the trees, a glint of ugly, faded steel-blue, before it occurred to me to wonder if nuzzling me like that had been his idea of a ‘consequence’ for catching me…or if that’d just been the prelude.
Chapter 11
We Need to Push This Experiment to the Next Level
We were halfway home before I’d settled down enough to think straight.
Thinking about what had happened was the last thing I wanted to do, but I didn’t have much choice; every time I closed my eyes, I saw Colin, naked and half-shifted and erect, poised over me like he meant to…I couldn’t go there.
So instead of thinking like Newton, I pulled out the notebook and pen I’d stashed in my backpack and tried to think like Dr. McEwen, geneticist and logical man of science.
“Jesus, dude,” Colin said. “Seriously? If I tried to write in the car I’d be puking all over the place.”
“Less talking, more driving,” I muttered, and turned to a new page.
Colin huffed a laugh and shut up, thank the gods. We’d only exchanged a couple of words since we got in the car, mostly me offering him a granola bar and him refusing, and I wanted to keep that streak going. I needed a little space to order my thoughts.
And stop thinking about his cock.
I had one of my own, and I’d seen other guys’—both in person, thank you Camp Uranus and various locker rooms over the years, and in porn—and while I wasn’t into looking at them, I’d noticed. All guys noticed. If nothing else, a quick comparison was unavoidable.
But this had been different.
Something else. I had to focus on something else.
Mental Effects, I wrote at the top of the page. Well, that one was easy. I ran down the list of all the ways I’d panicked, and then moved on toPhysical Effects.
Still fairly simple. Heart rate, breathing, the tingling in my fingers, the whole-body sensation—all of those easily attributable to adrenaline.
And then I got to the itching in my gums. Or my teeth? Could teeth itch? That probably ought to fall more underMental Effects, honestly, because it sounded a little insane.
