Page 45 of Alpha's Embrace
I told myself my fantasies were getting away from me. That was all.
But it was more than fantasy.
I had the beginnings of a bond with this man. It was Mase all over again. An untouchable. A man who was unattainable, not an option. Yet again, I would have a prospective mate taken away from me.
I took my hand away from his and stood. “I need to go.” It hurt to say those words.
“I don’t want you to go,” Misha said. “But I know you have to.”
“I’m sorry.”
I turned away. I heard him call my name once. I didn’t look back.
Chapter Thirteen
Misha
“Geo!” I said.
But he didn’t respond. He never looked back.
To watch him walk away hurt so much. More than the bruises and sprains. More than all the years of loneliness and isolation I had endured.
My arousal flared. There was nothing I could do about it.
I tugged at the restraints on my wrists. My sprained wrist in its splint shot pain up my arm.
I gritted my teeth and held my breath until the discomfort receded.
Lying back in my bed, I closed my eyes, willing myself to sleep. For a long time I lay awake, eyes closed, humbled by the emotional pain inside me that would never be comforted because I could never take a mate.
I didn’t think about justice or fairness, but a few times, I’ll admit, I lamented the fact that I was ever born. My upbeat personality rarely allowed me time for self-pity, but today I basked in it.
*
“Thank you,” I said to the Omega who brought my dinner tray. He set it on the small table beside my bed, turned and shut my door behind him.
I heard the guards rattle the door knob as they used their key to lock it.
I had been out of the colony hospital for nine days, after spending two hooked up to an I.V. My neck and wrist were still sore, but I’d healed well.
I had not seen Geo since the second day in the hospital. Ten full days.
Tracy had thumped against my left wall all afternoon. Cedric moaned, calling out for me often, but I did not answer him. I stayed away from the hole between our rooms. If he peered in at me, I didn’t know or care.
I leaned against the dusty windowsill and stared out at the green sea, and the wild meadows of my realm. I was a lost prince again under a terrible curse. My wealth was in the lands around me, in all that I could see, but could not help me.
I touched myself often, always in reverence and tribute to Geo. Did he know? Could he somehow feel me?
I tried to feel him in my mind. I knew there was something real there between us, the most sacred of connections. But he wouldn’t admit it. And it would never be recognized by outside laws.
When I closed my eyes and focused, as I had done for the last few days, I saw Geo smiling, Geo leaning over me in the bath and running his soapy fingers down my thigh, Geo’s dark green gaze running up and down my body heating not only my skin, which was always hot, always fevered, but the depths of my core, a place inside me that had been so hollow, so empty. Now a spark licked the void. Now a new and different warmth suffused my being from the inside out, and it didn’t crave simple orgasms. It wanted a closeness of being, touch and talk, comfort and security. It wanted things I could barely describe but were emotional in content, the way wind and rain combined to make a force called a storm. The way imagination and play combined to make a story. I wanted. A thing. A feeling. A being. Though I was ignorant of such states, I instinctively knew to call it love.
I had time to think a lot. I wondered what would happen to all these feelings if Geo never came back. If he went into the Burn, would I know? Would I be drawn to him until I clawed at my own skin? Would I go crazier to not be with him?
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, my fears became more amplified and I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t self-soothe with masturbation. I could only lie in the dark and shiver at a misery that felt more far-reaching than any I had known in my sorry state of being a Sylph.
I would talk to the dark. “Geo, where are you?”
