"What happened?" she demanded.
He stepped away from her leaving her cold, just standing there feeling stupid. Like she'd failed some sort of test. "I happened."
"You?"
"Yes." He looked away from her. At first she thought he was looking out of the window, but no, he was again looking at the pictures on the wall.
Repressing a frustrated huff, she marched around him while he stared, scooped her knife off the floor, and planted herself back in the guest chair, arms crossed with a loud huff. "I'm not leaving until I get a better explanation."
"It's complicated."
"No, it isn't. It shouldn't be." Was this stubbornness a male thing or a wolf thing? "I don't do things like this."
He circled around her, careful not to brush past her as he reseated himself in his chair behind the desk. The way he adjusted himself made her want to jump him again because she knew he was still hard with wanting her.
He'd had me, damn it. She doubled down on her determination.
"Like what?" he asked.
"Throw myself at my boss. Or a near stranger. Or a wolf shifter, for that matter." Brief flashes of her mother telling her about the birds and the bees flitted through her memory. Her mother always said to be careful, but wolf shifters were the stuff of the fairy tales she'd read to her daughter at night. Little did she know how much of her advice Samara had taken to heart. Still, there had been times like this when her mother's advice sounded oh so far away. "That's not who I am. It's not how I...get what I want."
"I never thought you were."
He did that head tilt thing again, making him look like the world's most adorable puppy. "Then what were you thinking when you stopped?"
"I was thinking of your safety." He rocked forward, placing his elbows on the desk. "If your wolf isn't dead..."
"Are we back to that again?"
Oh, the look he gave her would have set the whole forest ablaze. "Yes, we are and that's where we'll stay." He didn't turn away from her this time, his stare returning to its hard and cold look. "If your wolf isn't dead, then having sex with you while your wolf is unconscious is...inappropriate."
What the hell did that mean? "You're worried about date raping my wolf? I don't even believe it's still around."
"Like I said, my wolf wants yours, and wolves may not be as discriminating as humans or careful when they court, but I am. If you were to shift while we're together, I can't imagine how it could end without one of us or both of us getting hurt."
She could hear the layers of restrained emotion behind his words. "You don't just mean physically, do you?"
"No, I mean mentally and emotionally." He paused. "Stephen, Leo, and I are all omegas. We were assassins for our individual packs. For an entire decade we stalked each other, trying to fulfill our alphas' orders to kill one another."
Holy mother of God. "A whole decade?”
"That's how good we were. We are. All that time wasted trying to spill each other's blood."
"What stopped you?"
Kellen looked back up at the pictures on the wall. His eyes turned soft with wonder, but when he looked at the picture of the woman and the boy, a sadness rolled over his features.
"We were tired. Tired of the constant vigilance. Tired of the pain. Tired of not fulfilling orders we didn't understand. An alpha's orders are law, and in our three packs there were no exceptions. We were omegas and we blindly obeyed as expected."
"Wait, Leo and Stephen are from different packs? The three of you walked away from it all? Away from your alphas?"
Kellen nodded, turning away from the pictures, to focus on the top of his desk, but Samara kept looking at them.
Something bothered her, tickling the back of her mind. She was missing something, the clue was right in front of her, but she couldn't see it. "So, what's the other reason why we can't have sex? Aside from me shifting at an inappropriate time."
"We don't know if your wolf is an alpha, beta, or omega."
"What difference does that make?"
