An impossible question to answer.
“Short. Gorgeous golden blonde hair. The sweetest, biggest brown eyes you’ve ever seen. Her smile is…” I haven’t picked up a camera in years, but I wanted to take a thousand pictures of her. I recall her self-deprecating sense of humor and her dry confession about escaping crushed toes. Her willingness to use the only weapon at her disposal, her stilettos, to fight back. Her ridiculous names. “Funny. So damn sweet and funny, and she’s ours.”
Tonight, every smile has looked fake. Every conversation mechanical, as if it had been rehearsed five times. Not with June.Talking with her, it felt like the most genuine conversation I’ve had all night. Maybe ever.
Callum and Archer look like they’re in agony. Maybe they are. I’m tormenting them with the memory of our scent match, and I just told them I can’t find her.
“So where the fuck is she?” Archer demands.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“What else happened with June?” Callum asks, watching me closely.
We’ve been friends since we were six. He was always going to be the one to know when I’m hiding things, and I’m definitely leaving something out.
I give them a quick rundown of what happened in the library, aware that we can’t stay in this side room all night. Then I move on to the part of the story I was leaving out. Not because I regret what I did, but how I did it. “As of tonight, she’s no longer a virgin.”
They stare at me.
“She was a virgin, and youfuckedher in the library?” Archer bites out, clenching his jaw.
As if I wasn’t already feeling guilty as fuck about it. I wince, avoiding his gaze. “She said she’d never been knotted before. I didn’t think that also meant she was a virgin.”
I had gotten ridiculously hard when she admitted she’d never been knotted before. Maybe it’s being an alpha or being her scent match and wanting to be the first to knot her that had nearly made me do it. Then she’d rocked against me, I’d felt just how wet she was under her dress, and all reason fled my mind.
“I can’t believe you just let her leave.” Callum furrows his brow in disapproval.
“Sheinsisted,” I snap. “And it seemed a more reasonable response than just grabbing her and running.” June had beenthinking about the consequences of leaving that room together and being seen. I had not been thinking.
Amusement flickers across Callum’s face. “Grab her and run, huh?”
In the hallway, a door slams, followed by the sound of male and female laughter. We fall silent until the noises fade, and then another door closes, even farther away.
I shake my head as we return to our conversation. “Laugh all you want, but you’d have been fighting those same urges.”
Archer pulls up the sleeve of his suit jacket and glances at his watch. “The dancing is still going on for another two hours, so we have time to look for her. We’ll split up and search the building, then the campus if she’s not here.”
“They have security here,” Callum warns. “They won’t appreciate us wandering around.”
“We’ll just have to be discreet,” I say.
Archer studies me with a furrowed brow. “What are the chances a teacher figured out what you’d been up to, and that’s why you’re hitting a brick wall when you ask anyone where she is?”
I frown. June hadn’t looked disheveled when she slipped out of the library. Maybe her pink lipstick had been a little smeared, but her hair had looked perfect. She had been a little unsteady as she crossed the room to the door. Maybe she’d still been unsteady in the hall?
When my mind drifts back to how good she’d felt climaxing around my cock, I pull it back to the present. Now is not the time to be thinking about how tight she was and how I need to be inside her again.
I curse. One sniff and they’d know she’d been up and close—likely too close—with an alpha, especially if that teacher June had been so wary of, saw her slipping out of the library.
“Maybe the teachers have a different alpha in mind for June.” I didn’t even tell her my pack name. If she runs and comes looking for me, all she’d have is just a first name to go on.
“We’ll find her,” Callum says, his back stiffening as he turns to open the door. “The mate bonding ceremony doesn’t happen until tomorrow night. We have time.”
Archer nods, his expression determined. “Juniper Harrington isn’t mating with any other alphas but us. She’s ours.”
Chapter 4
June
