Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 36039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 180(@200wpm)___ 144(@250wpm)___ 120(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 36039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 180(@200wpm)___ 144(@250wpm)___ 120(@300wpm)
He went to open his mouth but she held her finger up to stop him.
“Don’t even think of answering that with a smart-ass answer. I get it. You think … ugh, you think this is easy for me. Do you have any idea what it’s been like these past five years?”
She hated how her voiced wavered. She wasn’t going to cry. She refused to allow those tears to fall. It wasn’t fucking fair. He was so strong. He’d left town, multiple times. He’d gotten on his bike and ridden off into the sunset like it was nothing. All the time she had to focus on his cutting words of rejection. She had to live with being the first woman and wolf to have been rejected.
“Do you know you ruined one of the best days of my life? I was riding high from my transition. Not only had I graduated high school, I’d gotten through my transition. I was a wolf, finally. I had my place in the pack. The beer tasted rancid, but from everything that happened, I felt sick.”
“A wolf’s first time is hard,” Phoenix said.
“So I left. I … I think I felt you before you were cruel to me. Before you said what you did. Before you rejected me. I felt you, and then, what were you going to do?” she asked. “Strangle me? Get rid of the evidence that you had a fucking fat mate?”
Phoenix frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t do that,” she said.
“I’m not doing anything. I never once told you, you were fat.”
“You better have enjoyed that because that is all you’re getting. I don’t want a fucking mate, and especially not someone like you. You keep this to yourself. You tell anyone and I’ll fucking kill you and your whole family, do you hear me.” She didn’t say it in his voice, but even as she spoke his words, exactly as he said them to her, she heard his gruff, rough voice. They had played in her mind on repeat for so long. She couldn’t not remember them. He’d been so angry.
“Fucking hell,” Phoenix said.
“I know you’re disappointed in who you were given. I’m not pretty. I’m not slender. I’m a failure to you as a mate.”
He grabbed her face. “Shut the fuck up. None of that is what I fucking meant.” He growled the words in her face, but she didn’t want to hear them.
“I know what I heard.”
“I’m not denying that you heard them. I know what I said, but it had nothing to do with how you looked or your fucking weight!”
He was so close. Even his touch came with torture.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying to you. I’m telling you how it is.” His thumb stroked across her lip. “You can choose to believe me or not, but what I meant by those fucking words was that you were way too young for me. You were eighteen. I was forty years old. I’d been on the open road most of my life. I’d never had a pack to call my own. Being an alpha of a pack is not something I’m used to, but you, Ashley, you’re so young. You have grown up in the loving embrace of a pack. They adore you.”
Tears filled her eyes. “I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to believe me. The truth is exactly that. You think I hate your body. It’s the memory of your body, of you, that has kept me going all these years. Thinking about that juicy ass of yours. Imagining your thick thighs wrapped around my waist as I drive inside of you. Not to mention your full tits. Your body is a fucking dream and you have appeared all the time. You have a starring role. What I didn’t like was your age, and I’m not going to lie, even five years older, it bothers me. I’m forty-five years old. I’ve seen the world. I’ve killed people. I’ve not been a good man for a long time. Nothing is going to change who I am.” He sighed. “And I know deep down you deserve a man with the light shining bright in his fucking eyes. I’m not going to say his name, because we both know who deserves you, but I can’t let him have you. You’re mine, Ashley. I’m not going anywhere. That house is the start. I won’t let you go. You belong to me, and I’m not giving you up, not for anyone or anything.”
She stared at him a little taken aback. All this time, she had thought it was because he didn’t like the way she looked.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
Wolves didn’t care about age. They turned at eighteen so any mates would always be legal. Finding their soulmate came in the transition. No one turned before that time. Age didn’t matter. They aged slowly as well. She had seen men and women with the same age gap as her and Phoenix, grow old together in pictures. Her own grandparents had been the same.