“Were you really not going to tell me?” My voice doesn’t sound like mine.
He lifts his head. “I wasn’t.”
There is a flat anger in him I haven’t heard before. It isn’t aimed at me but at something I can’t see.
“Excuse me?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you, Miranda.” His jaw works. “We were going to get married. I was going to give you everything I had. And I was never, ever going to give you the mating mark.”
“Why?”
“Because the Council has to approve any human mating, and they don’t always approve. They approved my brother’s, and then his mate died in an accident on an empty street four weeks later. Coach can call it a coincidence. I don’t. I am not putting your life in danger.”
His voice is hard, and I realize this is one of the rare times I’ve seen him pissed. I sit there for one breath, then a second. Then I reach across the gap between our chairs and smack him on the back of the head.
He yelps. His head jerks up. “What was that for?”
“That,” I tell him through my teeth, “is for lying to me.”
“I was trying to protect you!”
“Don’t ever protect me by lying to me!” My voice climbs, and I drag it back down. “I don’t like being lied to. Grayson, if you and I are together, then you stand by my side, not in front of me. I don’t need to be protected like this. I’m not going to leave yourside no matter what your Council says. So at least be honest with me.”
His eyes find mine, and the wolf is right behind them now, very close to the surface.
“If the Council says no, I take you and Ethan and I run. We go somewhere far enough that they will never find us. I disappear from hockey, from this pack, from all of it. I’ll do it tomorrow if I have to.”
I stare at him.
“Fine,” I say. “Then there’s no problem.”
He blinks once, slowly.
Then he sinks back into the chair and starts laughing, a tired and helpless sound, his head tipped against the wooden slats, one hand coming up over his eyes.
“What’s funny?”
“You.” His shoulders shake. “I cannot keep up with you, Miranda Carver. When you wanted nothing to do with me, you had a reason for every minute of every day. The second you decide you want me, you won’t let me give you an out for love or money.”
“No, I won’t.”
He drops his hand from his eyes and looks at me, and the laugh has softened into something else, his amber eyes warm and steady on my face. He reaches across the small space between us slowly, giving me time to pull away. His fingers curl behind my neck. He tugs me toward him until my forehead presses against his.
“Come here.”
“I am here.”
“I need you closer than that.”
I let him close the rest of the distance.
He kisses me slowly. Not the heat of the lake, not the heat of last night, something quieter. His thumb moves once againstthe corner of my jaw. The breath he lets out against my mouth is shaky in a way I have never heard from him.
I have my own breath to worry about because mine has gone uneven.
How am I supposed to walk away from a man who looks at me like that?
How am I supposed to be apart from him and Ethan, after everything?
