Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 69734 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69734 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 232(@300wpm)
Not that I want her, either.
This new information adds to my misgiving about the tears she cried while I was fucking her. Maybe they weren’t just about finding out her mate is one of her students. Or about getting nailed by a guy who hates her. Maybe they were a release from letting her wolf out.
Or–a prickle travels across my skin–maybe they were spawned from grief that she lost the battle with her wolf.
“That’s fucked up,” I mutter, throwing my legs out of bed long before dawn again.
I slip out of the townhouse and climb onto my Ducati. When I turned sixteen, I couldn’t afford to buy a car, but Greg Lane, the owner of Wolf Ridge Body Shop, cut me a smoking deal on this baby. I bought it with money from working weekends for Mrs. Angelson at Sweet Treats.
I ride to the Circle K where Cole and Casey Muchmore’s dad works. It’s a twenty-four hour gas station and convenience store at the edge of town. The only place open in the middle of the night. I buy bread, milk, eggs, bacon and sandwich meat with the money I have from the last packet of cash my dad mailed me.
My mate needs protein. She needs sustenance. That primitive impulse to protect and provide for her won’t be ignored until I’m sure she’s been fed. I drive back home and jog up the wash to her place, respecting her rules about no one seeing me coming or going.
Hell, I don’t want anyone to see us, either. The last thing I need is for her uppity parents to find out that the pack pariah has been touching their precious daughter. Fate knows her mom would falsify evidence of some new, heinous crime to get me permanently kicked out of Wolf Ridge.
I don’t know why I try the door handle.
I’m disturbed to find it unlocked. Even more disturbed when my beautiful mate doesn’t stir. I only hear the deep, even breath of heavy slumber from her. Either her wolf instincts for danger are dead, or she hasn’t recovered her energy and stamina yet from the shift.
All the more reason for me to be here. I walk softly to her refrigerator and open the door. The light doesn’t make her stir, either. I put the groceries inside and close it.
I should get back home and see if I can sleep another hour before school. Or head to the bakery to help my mom and Mrs. Angelson. Instead, I find myself standing over Lotta’s bed, looking down at the lovely curve of her cheek. The curl of her dark lashes against her cheek.
I’m unnerved by a desire to crawl into bed with her. Hold her.
Fuck that. Boning her hard from behind is one thing. Cuddling is something I will never let happen. She doesn’t deserve that from me. She’s not someone I can trust.
Still, my fingers reach to caress her cheek the way I did yesterday in the school bathroom when she slapped my hand away. I stop myself before I actually touch her.
Why doesn’t she wake up? She should know that someone’s broken into her house and is standing over her.
But then I realize–her wolf knows I’m safe.
Lotta the teacher may hate my guts. Lotta the artist. Lotta my neighbor. But her wolf isn’t ever going to stop me. Her wolf knows I belong here.
That she belongs to me.
Our futures are woven together so tightly neither of us will ever be free.
Lotta
I sleep like the dead. Like I did the night of the full moon.
I guess that’s what sex with my mate does to me. I have to sleep off the intensity. The extreme pleasure.
Fortunately, I don’t sleep through my alarm, but I wake up with drool on my pillow and lines on my face from the pillowcase. I stumble to the bathroom and flick on the light.
The white shower curtain is standing up, disheveled from last night. I stoop to pick up a crumb from the grilled cheese sandwiches and remember how it felt to be cared for. Asher may act like a dick, but he’s my mate. Taking care of me is what he’s wired to do.
It’s just biology, I tell myself fiercely when a warm flush spreads through my chest. He hates you. There will be no claiming.
I’d be foolish to believe he did anything last night out of caring for me.
No one cares for me–not truly. Not even my parents. I learned that the hard way when I didn’t do what they wanted me to do. I made it just fine on my own at college. I had my art. Art is something that has never betrayed me. It’s the friend I will always have.
Besides, even if Asher wasn’t my student and the relationship completely forbidden, I don’t want to be claimed. I don’t want a relationship with Asher. I need to earn enough money to get back to Chicago, or if I can swing it–New York or Los Angeles. I need to be around other artists. Get my work out there and try to make it.