Chapter 10: Last Thing You Expect

Kellan drove me down the mountain without a word.

The sun was fully up, and the road was bright and empty.

I held the folded release in my lap and watched it shake.

"I'm scared," I said.

He didn't take his eyes off the road, but his hand came across and covered mine.

"Of what?"

"Not of them." I turned my hand over under his. "I watched Dane fail, and I felt nothing, and that's not what scares me."

"What does?"

"I've known you three days, and I want you so badly I can't think."

His knuckles went white on the wheel.

He pulled onto the gravel in front of my mother's cabin and cut the engine.

Neither of us moved.

"Tell me to go," he said. "Right now. I'll go."

The old dog was already on the porch, watching us through the windshield.

"Shut the door, Kellan," I said.

He shut it behind us, and the dog sighed on the other side.

I didn't make it to the bed.

I got my back against the wall by the stove, and he came to me and braced his hands on either side of my head.

"Careful, Alpha," I said, very low. "Somebody might see you being kind."

"There's nobody here."

"There's me."

"Then you're about to see something else."

He kissed me.

It was nothing like the near thing by the creek.

It was a hard open mouth and a hand fisted in my hair, and my whole body lit up.

I dragged his shirt over his head.

His chest was warm and scarred and hard under my palms, and he made a sound into my mouth that I felt in my knees.

"Last thing you expect," he said against my throat, and slid down the wall onto his knees.

I stopped breathing.

He put his hands on my hips and looked up at me, grey-eyed, with his scarred eyebrow lifted.