I continue down the stairs, but just as I reach the second to last step, he appears in front of me, bouncing his eyes back and forth between mine.
“Are you drunk?”
“What? No,” I say, squeezing between him and the railing. Before I get fully past him, he grabs a hold of my waist, spinning me around to look at him. “What’s your problem?”
“You are!”
“And you’re mine!” I fire back. “So it looks like we’re even. Now, can we go get this night over with?”
“You’re insufferable,” he grunts, taking the lead to the east wing.
“Right back at you,” I add flatly.
When we finally make it to his room, I head straight for the bed and toss the covers over my head.
“That’s it? You’re just going to sleep?”
I throw the covers back and sit up. “What did you think I was going to do? Braid your hair and have a pillow fight?”
“No!” Thane snarls, glaring at me like I’m the sole cause of his suffering. “But you simply sleeping several feet away from me isn’t going to satiate thisneedI have to be close to you.”
He says it like he’s in physical pain, and something about that makes me feel hot all over.
“Well, you’re not sleeping next to me.”
“And I don’t want to!” he spits back with enough disdain to make my heart sink.
“Then what do you want?” I ask, slapping my hands down on the mattress.
He tosses his head back, scrubbing a hand down his face. “What Iwantis to not think about you every second of every day! What I want is to not feel like there’s a hand clutching my heart to the point I can barely breathe!” He shoots over, grabbing my face in his hand. “And what I want is to forget you ever existed.”
Rage flares in me, and I knock his hand away, jumping up to stand on the bed so that he can’t tower over me anymore.
“And whatIwant is to stop thinking about how good your hands feel on me. What I want is for your scent to stop making me want to melt into you. And what I want is to wipe every moment I’ve ever spent with you from my memory!”
Thane suddenly sweeps my legs around him, making me fall back onto the bed with him towering over me once again. His fangs snap out, and he nuzzles his face into my hair.
“Tell me not to bite you,” he breathes into the curve of my neck. My legs pull him closer to me as my will weakens every second he’s in my orbit. “You have three seconds to stop me, Grey. Three, two…”
Before he gets to one, I push him back. “No, don’t.”
Thane backs away from the bed with a wild look in his eyes. His fists are balled at his sides, and his breathing is ragged like he’s fighting to control himself. All of a sudden, he rips through his clothes, shifting into his black wolf.
My heart lunges when he takes off, breaking through his double doors as he bounds down the hall, releasing a guttural howl as the beast in him breaks free. I’m still lying on the bed, in shock, when Kole appears, fear burning behind his white eyes.
“What happened? What did he do?” He assesses my body, and I quickly push on my silk nightgown that had bunched up when Thane pinned me to the bed.
“I told him not to bite me and he… I don’t know. He just lost it.”
Kole lets out a breath of relief and reaches out to pull me up from the bed. He runs his fingers through my hair as his thumb strokes my cheek.
“And he didn’t hurt you?”
“No,” I reassure. “I’m fine.”
“He’s going to have to bite you at some point. It’s the only way—”
“I know,” I say, cutting him off. “But if he… it just wasn’t the right time.”
