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He sat on the edge of my bed and rested his elbows on his knees and rested his head in his hands. His voice was muffled as he told me about it. He said he felt out of control, that he hurt you. “She bled. I made her bleed.”

I said that happened sometimes. It was in all the romance novels.

He asked me if I did, if I bled the first time, and I shook my head, because I didn’t. But, I told him, that didn’t mean anything. Everyone was different.

“Probably my knot,” he said.

“You knotted her?” I said. “The first time?”

He told me he was concentrating so hard on not biting you that he couldn’t concentrate on anything else, and that it all felt too much, too intense, too good. He said you liked it, though, and he knew you did, and that bothered him more than anything, because he felt as if you shouldn’t have liked it, as if you were being overtaken by the scent match, nudged toward things you wouldn’t have wanted otherwise, and that he was taking advantage of you in some way. “It’s like the scent match helped me rape her, that’s how it feels.”

“No,” I said.

He looked at me, then, lifted his head up from his hands and gazed at me.

It was like before, a look that went on too long.

We looked at each other and something passed between us, or maybe only I felt it. I don’t know. You’d think, in all the years we had together, maybe I’d have talked to him about it, but you have to understand that you’re a forbidden subject under our roof. He does not want your name to ever cross my lips.

“If I didn’t have the scent match with her,” he said. “If she was like you… if she hadn’t come and you and I were…”

“Don’t,” was what I said.

He put his head back in his hands.

I thought about doing it again, in more detail this time. I thought that I would need to get him away from everyone while I was in heat, and that could be tricky, and I thought that I would need to get him into that out-of-control space he was talking about getting into, and I wasn’t sure if that was really because of the scent match or because he controlled himself so much of the rest of the time, he only wanted the thinnest of excuses to let loose.

I thought that maybe the reason he felt so guilty about the way he took your virginity was because he knew he didn’t have to lose control like that, but he’d indulged in losing control, and somewhere, deep down, he knew it had been a choice, at least partly.

I thought that I could make him make that choice for me if I did it right. He would always know, somewhere inside, that he’d made it, and that would mean that I would have him, really have him.

But I recoiled from all of it.

I didn’t want Damian, I told myself, and I would never do that to you, and he would never forgive me for doing that to him, and what sort of life did I think I would have?

But what kind of life was I going to have, anyway?

I had done my job too well, making myself into the kind of woman it would be challenging for any men in the pack to want to mate. Guys wanted to have sex with me, but no one wanted to settle down longterm with me.

It began to seem to me that I was simply doomed, that I couldn’t be happy anyway, no matter what I did.

But still, it wasn’t a plan.

I swear it to you.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I VERY DELIBERATELY closed the manuscript that Opal had left me, though I regretted it, because how was I going to find my place now when I wanted to keep reading?

I wanted to say that I was not going to keep reading it, but I knew, deep down, somewhere in the recesses of my soul, that I would not be able to stop reading it.

And maybe this was what I wanted to hear, anyway, that he had always wanted her, in some way. Maybe that made it easier, because then it made sense.

Hearing that he’d talked to Opal about our first time, though, it felt like a fresh betrayal, because our first time was a lot of things, and maybe it hurt and maybe it was intense and maybe it freaked us both out to a certain degree, but it also brought us together. Afterwards, we were us in a way we had not been before.

At least, I thought we were. I felt sure of him afterward.

Oh, what was I saying? I always felt sure of him. I always trusted him. Maybe it was some mystical thing between us, the scent match, I don’t know. Maybe I never should have trusted him. Maybe he was secretly wishing I was Opal all along.