“No.”
“What?” I stopped, three fingers inside him to the second knuckle.
“You can be rough. Mark me any way you can, from the inside out.”
Because we couldn’t mark one another the way we wanted to. As I fitted the head of my cock into him, still a squeeze, I sniffed back the tears that his words and my thoughts brought forward. Damn the whole shimmer leadership rules anyway. Who needed them? I needed this male.
I was not gentle.
And I knotted him. It wasn’t supposed to work that way with another alpha, but it did with him.
Hours later, as we prepared to leave, I grabbed him and hugged him as hard as I could. “This can’t be our last time.”
“It has to be,” he said, kissing me and easing me away. “There’s no way out.”
“I have an idea. Let’s take a trip. We can go somewhere nobody knows us, where we won’t have to hide. Just be us for a whole weekend before everything good ends.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know…San Diego? We do business there sometimes and I can make up an excuse if you can.”
“We’ll have to go separately,” he mused. “Now, why do I need to go there?”
Chapter Six
Indy
I wanted Seth. Bad. The passion between us was the same as when we’d grown up enough to recognize one another as mates. It never waned. Didn’t that mean anything?
We both knew it did, but we couldn’t follow that meaning into the future.
I couldn’t count the times I’d fantasized about whisking Seth off, protesting or not, to a faraway tropical island and never letting anyone know where we were. I’d sabotage the boat or plane that got us there so neither of us could ever leave. We’d gallop and graze through the rainforests like the mythical beasts we were, never going hungry, always together for the rest of our lives.
“More fairy-tale nonsense,” I’d always mumble to myself.
Fairy tale? Nonsense?Enigmatic as always, my beast would question me but never give me answers.
Duty and my heart were in conflict. I lived in a perpetual state of anxiety and indecision.
In the San Diego hotel room, I sat beside Seth on the couch and pulled him in for a kiss. He offered his mouth but then sat back a bit abruptly, focused on a website on his laptop.
I let out a whine of disappointment.
“Look at this.” He pointed to the screen.
“Seth. Don’t look at your computer. Look at me. This is our last weekend together.”
He glanced at me, eyes glimmering, then looked away. “I know that.”
“I’m sad.”
He leaned into me. I rubbed my face against his, sighing hard.
“We need to do something fun,” he said.
“I can think of a few things.” The bed was only a few feet away.
“Me, too.” He still wouldn’t look directly at me.
