Chapter 12: Thoughtful

Chapter 12

Thoughtful

When I woke up hours later, the sun pouring through the cracks in the blinds and casting streamers of sparkling dust motes in its wake, I had strong arms wrapped around me, a hard chest against my back…and an even harder cock nudging between my thighs.

Even though he’d come a lot the day before, and he’d knotted at least once. Had he fucked me early that morning after I went back to sleep? I tried to catalog my sensations, but of course I didn’t have much to go on. My ass and thighs felt damp and sticky.

Gross.

But Drew hadn’t left me alone in the bed and gone out in the woods. I could only consider that an improvement, no matter how sticky I might be.

A few birds twittered outside the window and broke the near-complete silence. Under that, I heard Drew’s breaths, slow and even. He hadn’t moved, either. But I knew he was awake. He breathed differently while he slept, a little rougher.

“Drew?”

“Yeah?” His breath brushed my ear.

“I need to get up?” Needing to piss felt very, very strange these days, but at least I could recognize it. The alternative would’ve been unthinkable.

Drew’s arm tightened a little. “Right now?” Had his cock gotten even harder?

“I’ll come back in a minute,” I promised him, and after a moment he let me go, his hand lingering on my waist and his cock definitely lingering in the crease of my ass.

Crawling out of bed under Drew’s watchful eyes had to be one of the more embarrassing moments of my life—well, that I could remember, anyway, although I thought it might’ve ranked high even if I’d had my no-doubt many past embarrassments to compare it to. The tingle in my exposed skin had to be psychosomatic, the effect of knowing he had his eyes glued to my ass. Or it might be drying semen.

I could go either way on that.

Shutting the bathroom door allowed me a moment to take a breath, anyway.

Should I shower? Would there be any point? I had to be so disgusting, but would he even care? He had been staring at my ass, I was sure of it. On the other hand, a conveniently-sized hole in a tree had probably started looking pretty good to him, the way he’d been the last couple of weeks.

God. I pissed, washed my hands, and brushed my teeth, even though kissing wouldn’t be on the menu.

My face—well, I looked like someone who’d gotten thoroughly fucked, with the tangled hair and too-bright eyes and swollen lips, the last lingering from that blowjob, to prove it. And then I’d slept on a wrinkled pillowcase, so that I could have weird creases along my cheek in addition.

Lovely.

No more stalling. Drew hadn’t moved when I opened the bedroom door, and he lay on his side, dark eyes gleaming. The up-and-down inspection he gave me reassured me. It didn’t suggest disgust, anyway, even if it made me blush fiery-hot.

I slipped back into bed, hesitating before turning over and putting my back to him again. He clearly wanted to fuck me that way, and I’d already decided he’d be calling the shots.

With a sigh, Drew wrapped his arm heavily over my waist again, tugging me close and pushing his hips against my ass, his cock finding its unerring way back between my cheeks.

“I didn’t really fuck you again last night,” he said quietly. He didn’t start opening me, didn’t thrust; he seemed content to simply stay there. “I had to—move a little. Enough to get off, so I could get my knot out of you eventually. But I didn’t—fuck, Ash.” A beat passed. “I really fucking wanted to,” he growled in my ear.

I noticed my breath coming a little faster, my muscles tensing. Could you experience arousal without, you know, being aroused? Because that shiver down my spine and the way I felt like I wanted to be closer to him…I didn’t know how else to explain it except as desire.

Too bad I couldn’t really enjoy it. But his enjoyment…I flashed back to the night before when I’d lain under him, the passive recipient of his hard thrusts and groans of pleasure and the grip of those powerful hands.

And had an additional flash of what we must have looked like after I’d fallen asleep: Drew braced over my unconscious body, biceps bulging with the strain of holding himself back from pounding into me again. Rocking his hips, gasping, gazing down at me with glowing alpha eyes…

I shuddered, squeezing my eyes closed against the impact of it.

It had to be a contact high.

And it took me a second to remember what he’d said.

“Why didn’t you, then?” It came out a breathy moan.

Drew nuzzled me behind my ear, tongue darting out to flick at my neck. “Gods, you taste good,” he rumbled. And then sighed. “I don’t want to be an alpha like my family thinks an alpha should be,” he said in a rush, like he couldn’t quite get his thoughts, or his words, in order. “Jesus, that sounds stupid. I mean always taking what I want. Thinking I’m entitled to take what I want. Like the world owes me something for being on the top of the food chain. I’ve always tried to be thoughtful. With lovers.”

He stopped abruptly, and I held my breath for a second, waiting for the punchline.

It didn’t come.

“Thoughtful how?” I prompted him. He didn’t seem thoughtless to me. He’d been so careful with me. Although his characterization of the way he’d fucked me as “brutalizing me” made me think he usually held himself to a much more stringent standard.

A shift of Drew’s hips reminded me of the unflagging erection still pressing against me, getting closer to pushing inside with every minute motion of his body. The head of it rubbed gently over my hole, now, so close to penetrating me.

Screw it. I pushed back, wriggling my hips until the head pressed harder.

And then in, sliding past that tight little muscle easily enough.

“Fuck,” Drew gasped. “Fuck, that feels…you’re still wet.”

With a low groan and a quick thrust, he buried a few more inches inside me. He didn’t move for a moment.

“Thoughtful,” he said breathlessly, his hand splaying over my collarbones and pinning me in place as he went a little deeper. “Like not fucking someone while he’s asleep. Or fucking you like this, even though you can’t enjoy it. Because I want you. Because you’re here and you’re not saying no.”

“I’m not only not saying no, I’m saying yes.” Another thrust knocked the air out of me, and I panted for a second before I could manage, “I’m saying permanently yes. You can always take what you want. It’s okay.”

“Okay isn’t enough! Fuck,” he groaned, and shoved his cock all the way in, his hipbones digging into the cheeks of my ass. “It’s not enough to be okay. You don’t get it.” Another thrust, harder this time, like he’d started to lose control. The arm around me had clamped down almost too hard, making it difficult to get a full breath.

I laid my hand on his forearm and petted him, the corded muscles and the soft hair and the heat of him.

“Knot me again, Drew,” I whispered. “Come on.”

With a deep groan and without any hesitation at all, Drew rolled me onto my belly, arm still clamped around my chest, shoving me face-first into the pillows. I gasped for air as he pounded into me without mercy, like I’d stripped away the last of his ability to hold himself back.

It didn’t last long, but I still felt like I’d been taken by a hard, irresistible whirlwind, my head spinning and my pliant body helplessly shoved up the bed and down into the mattress.

The rush of heat inside me and the unrelenting pressure of his knot forcing its way in didn’t take me by surprise this time, and I canted my hips up as much as I could to make room for him. With one last thrust, Drew lowered himself down, surrounding me completely.

I closed my eyes and melted into the bed.

Even if hurt had been on the menu for me, nothing could have done it right then. Not with Drew all around me and filling me like that.

I could’ve stayed like that forever. Those birds who’d been messing around outside the window earlier were back, cheeping and squeaking and rustling. Drew’s head rested next to mine on the pillow, his breath ruffling my hair. His arm still pressed into my chest, cradling me to his. A wind-blown branch knocked gently against the side of the house, hypnotic and soothing. Mmm. I could sleep again.

From a few feet away, some pop star started screaming about her ex-boyfriend, accompanied by a heavy beat and something that sounded like an air-raid siren. I yelped at a higher pitch than the singer, startling enough to jostle Drew and tug on his knot, making him grunt and me yelp again at the sensation.

“Fuck,” Drew said, and pushed up on his arms. “That’s Alyssa’s ringtone. She programmed it into my phone, not me,” he added a little defensively.

“Turn it off,” I moaned, trying to get my arms up so I could wrap the pillow around my head. “It hurts.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Drew leaned over, holding himself up with one arm while he tugged the other out from under me to fish around by the bed. “Shit. I can’t quite reach it.”

“It doesn’t physically hurt. It hurts my soul,” I muttered, and buried my face in the pillow again.

At last it cut off.

And then started again.

Drew cursed and lunged precariously off the bed, dragging me with him by his knot, and I screeched and flailed. “Sorry, fuck, sorry,” he gasped, caught himself barely in time, and landed on top of me again, phone in hand and ringing right in my ear.

I let out a sigh of relief as the ringing—and the pulling—finally stopped, cut off by Drew’s gruff, “What the hell?”

A second later, I went as stiff as a board, horror tingling down my spine, as it dawned on me that Drew had answered the phone.

While he had his cock and his knot stuffed inside me and we were tied together inextricably.

Oh, yeah, and he was talking to his sister.

The astronauts on the International Space Station could’ve seen me blushing, and the blood pounded in my ears.

It took a second for me to realize I could hear her side of the conversation too, since Drew had propped himself only a few inches above me. Tinny and faint, but audible.

“…have a problem,” she was saying. “Uncle Boyd invited them weeks ago, pretty much as soon as we found you, but he didn’t tell anyone until this morning. I don’t know what the hell he’s thinking. Maybe he wants to force you into breaking your mate bond, but—”

I lifted my head off the pillow, staring open-mouthed at the headboard in shock.

Force Drew to break the mate bond…that didn’t exist in the first place. And the people who’d been invited, they must be the woman Drew’s uncle wanted him to mate with and presumably her family.

I’d lost the thread of the conversation again, their words fading in and out like a poorly tuned radio.

“…isn’t fucking happening,” Drew barked. “Not a fucking chance! I don’t fucking care what he thinks he can force me to do, but—”

“Stop cursing at me, you’re such a fucking asshole,” Alyssa snapped, a little hypocritically in my opinion, but no one had asked me. About any of this, come to think of it. “This isn’t my fault, and I’m the only one who’s bothering to give you a heads-up, so you’re fucking welcome!”

“Look, I’m sorry this is so inconvenient for you,” he said with heavy sarcasm, “but I told Mom we needed a month. It hasn’t even been three weeks! So she’s going to have to deal with it without me. I’m not making nice with them, and that’s fucking final.”

My head dropped back down again as black spots swam in my vision. Yeah, that was going to fly.

“No,” Alyssa said flatly. “You know damn well you’re not getting out of this. You know what would happen, Drew! We’ll tell them you’re mated, but if you don’t even show to shake hands and apologize and try to backpedal? This could be a pack war. You bit some random little insignificant human when they were starting to write up contracts already. This isn’t just about what Uncle Boyd wants. All of us are caught up in this. I didn’t think you’d forget that.”

Random little insignificant human? I bit my lip hard, letting up when I realized I’d probably punctured it. Tell me how you really feel, Alyssa. There was something else there, something she’d said, teasing at the edge of my brain. But it fled when Drew started shouting.

“Then he shouldn’t have fucking invited them! And pack war my ass, they’ll try to do a hostile takeover of one of Boyd’s companies. It’ll be a war between law firms, not a real one!” I cringed, my ears ringing. “Fuck, sorry, I didn’t mean to yell in your ear,” he added, at a much lower volume.

“You should apolo—”

“I was talking to Ash, not you.”

The long silence down the line had a deadly, “face about to be ripped off with red-manicured claws” kind of quality to it.

“Ash is listening to this conversation,” she said at last.

“I’m about two inches from him, so yeah, he is.”

“You really are an asshole.” Her tone could’ve shredded Drew’s face on its own, no claws required. “Especially because they’re going to need to see him, too. And you could’ve maybe told me so I didn’t say…shit. You should’ve broken this gently. Too late for that. Get him a tux, Drew. They’ll be here in three days, and you’re not getting out of this.”

“I’ve already told you that’s not—fuck!” He flung the phone halfway across the room, the bed jolting with the force of his movement, and it landed with a crack against the hardwood floor. “Fuck. She hung up.”

No answer to that sprang immediately to mind.

I mean, what did you say to any of that? I’d already known they all wished I was dead.

Get him a tux. They’re going to need to see him, too.

“You’re shaking,” Drew said worriedly, leaning down and nuzzling the side of my head, his arm snaking under me again to hold me tight. It didn’t comfort me at all, and it didn’t stop the shakes, either. I just vibrated in a more compressed way, my lungs laboring.

“Let me go.”

Drew froze. “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding horribly tense and formal. His arm withdrew, and he propped himself up again. “Excuse me. My knot’s going down. It’ll be a minute, I’m sorry.”

“You were making it hard for me to breathe,” I whispered into the pillow. Moisture gathered at the corners of my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Drew repeated, this time a lot more softly. “I guess the last thing you want is me trying to—we’ll figure this out. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. I’ll get my uncle off my back. And if I can’t, we’ll leave.”

Maybe I didn’t know much about how werewolf packs worked, but my ignorance didn’t make me an idiot.

“No, we won’t. Because it sounded like there’re really good reasons why you can’t, even though…” And then the thought that’d flown away half-formed while they were on the phone spun back around and smacked me upside the head like a boomerang. Drew wouldn’t sit around letting his uncle manipulate him out of inertia, or because he couldn’t stand up for himself. All of us are caught up in this. Which meant… “Even though you haven’t told me. Damn it, Drew! You said you’d told me everything!”

He went rigid, as stiff as the cock still buried in me, and the long breath he blew out made me shiver as it cooled the sweat on the back of my neck.

“I didn’t want to—”

“If you tell me one more time that you didn’t want to worry me, or it’s not my problem, I’m going to take you up on that baseball bat you offered me to beat you with that one time,” I gritted out through clenched teeth.

“Fine,” Drew said, his tone as strained as mine. “Fine. My father works for my uncle, and he’s a gambler. Blew three years’ salary on a horse race once. He owes my uncle his fucking soul, my mom’s addicted to shopping, and then Alyssa.” He stopped abruptly, his chest heaving against my back. “Alyssa won’t leave Mom,” he added at last, low and grim. “Says she owes her for when Uncle Boyd wanted to mate her off and Mom took Alyssa’s—and I know it’s more because Alyssa’s afraid to make her own way in the world than anything. Fuck my family,” he growled. “Fuck them all. Except Alyssa. And fuck her too for not having the balls to walk away. If she did, I could too.”

Jesus. I digested that for a minute. If I had a family—well, I might, but the less I dwelled on that the better—would I buckle under to demands like Drew’s uncle’s to take care of them? Even when it sounded like they’d brought all their problems on themselves, essentially?

I could tell Drew that I thought he should run after all, reverse my previous stance. Which hadn’t been based on much anyway except my desire to support him. Even though I hadn’t known what I’d been supporting…my head would’ve hurt if it could’ve.

But obviously that wouldn’t be happening, no matter how many times he tried to protest, to himself more than anyone, that it could or would.

And even if I could convince him, I couldn’t convince myself that it’d work out any better for him than staying in this mare’s nest of a family.

If he left them, his uncle would tell all his clients to ditch him. His company would fold, and his parents wouldn’t ever speak to him again, with his sister left to deal with the fallout. Not only would it hurt me—in the soul-deep way, not the physical injury kind of way—to say all that out loud to him, knowing how guilty and conflicted and torn he already felt…well, I could hardly even bring myself to think the very last part, let alone say it.

The end result of it.

What would he have left if we picked up and scurried off like rats abandoning a sinking, dysfunctional ship?

Me. He’d have me, and nothing else.

A random little insignificant human with amnesia and magical damage, with no money or friends or family to help us. And not even his mate, for that matter. A fake mate with a fake mating scar.

Nothing to him.

I buried my face in the pillow again, hoping it’d soak up any stray tears.

Drew sighed, clearly as unable as I was to think of anything worth saying aloud, and carefully pulled back from me, his knot slipping out at last. Would I ever get used to his come slicking my thighs as he withdrew?

Would I have the chance?

Drew flopped next to me on his back, blowing out a long breath. I turned my head to face him, peeking at him with one eye from behind a lump of pillow. While he stared up at the ceiling, I could look my fill. The straight nose and the strong jaw covered in dark stubble, the waves of his hair falling on his temple and forehead.

His mouth had set in a flat, bleak line.

God. We were so fucked.