Silence rang in my ears. “You want to become Alpha more than you want anything else, Liam, so yes, I think youcouldkill me.”
He dropped down on the foot of my bed and let out a gravelly sigh. “It’s true. I used to want it more than anything else. For my father, for the elders, there was no doubt I would be the next leader. It was what I was reared for.”
I tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. My fingers shook. “And you’ll make a great Alpha, Liam,” I admitted softly. “I didn’t use to think so. I assumed you were like Heath, and sometimes, you do remind me of him, but you also remind me of your mother, and she was a good woman who always cared for others more than she cared for herself. At least, that’s what my mother told me. I don’t remember her very well.”
He snorted. “You don’t have to be nice to me. I’m not going to kill you.”
I released the chair and went to sit next to him on the bed. “I mean everything I just said.” I twined my fingers together in my lap and marveled at how quickly my fingernails had grown back, how strong they’d become, almost as hard as my wolf claws. “I entered this contest to spite you but stayed in it because I’m proud and hated to be considered lower than low because I’m a girl. I wanted to prove to you, to the pack, and to myself that I was worth something, but I wasn’t planning on even trying to win the last contest. That’s why I picked you and not Lucas. Because…because I wanted youto win.”
“Ness-”
“Let me finish.” I squeezed my fingers together. “I don’t want this, Liam. I don’t want a pack that doesn’t want me. And certainly not at the cost of a life.”
I’d killed once.
Never again.
Never again.
“I’ll leave Boulder and never come back. They can’t make you kill me if I’m gone, right?” I turned my head to look at Liam, who was staring back, eyes wide.
“No.”
“It won’t work?”
He shifted, and one of his knees knocked into mine, creating a spot of heat on my cool skin. “You shouldn’t have to leave your home because of me.”
“My home?” I let out a soft snort. “I don’t have a home here, Liam.” I lifted my eyes to the untainted ceiling. “I live in a hotel. With an aunt who, for some reason, really despises me and an uncle who doesn’t think very highly of me. My only friend was my cousin, but he up and left me. And my newest friend is a girl I keep being warned not to be friends with because she’s the enemy. The only other person who was nice to me is off fighting in the Middle East. I might have a roof over my head, and a woman who cares about me like I was her own granddaughter, but I don’t have a home.”
One of Liam’s hands came up to my face, his fingers cradling my chin, angling it toward him.
“You can’t leave,” he said, his voice a husky whisper.
“Why not?”
His warm breath rushed over my face. “Because then I’d spend my days tracking you down instead of focusing on the pack. What sort of Alpha would that make me?”
I lowered my lashes. “You think they’d make you track me down?”
“No one would make me do it.”
The room was so quiet I heard him swallow.
“Do you…feelanything for me…besides contempt?” His lips worked on a smile but tumbled nervously back into a straight line.
“Would it change anything if I did?”
Emotion flared over his face, fast and bright like lightning. “It would change everything.” He spoke the last word so slowly goose bumps erupted over my bare legs and arms, over the slice of bare stomach peeking between my sleep shorts and tank top. “Do you?”
The goose bumps breached my skin and skittered over my ribs. “What do you think?”
“I don’t want to think; I want to know. Do you?” Even though his grip on my chin was gentle, his fingers were not. They dipped into my skin as though trying to leave marks.
“Yes,” I whispered.
Before my next heartbeat, he’d splayed both his hands on my hips, lifted me, and propped me onto his lap. I bent my knees around his thighs. And then one of his hands was in my hair, his other on the base of my spine. And his lips…his lips were on mine, hard and soft, punishing and kind.
A series of explosions went off in me.
I was kissing Liam Kolane.
Liam Kolane was kissing me.
When his tongue swept over the seam of my mouth, my entire body rocked with a shiver. My hands, which had been resting lightly on his biceps, reached up to grip his shoulders. I burrowed my fingertips into his t-shirt, afraid that if I loosened my grip, I would tumble off him.
I parted my lips and took his tongue in. He growled into my mouth, his hands pressing harder into my skin. In his bruising grip, he scooped me up and stood. I locked my legs around him, locked my mouth on his. He walked to one side of the bed, knelt on the mattress, then lowered my body beneath his. Slowly I untangled my legs from around his waist and stretched them out underneath him. He braced himself on his forearms and pressed his lips against mine, tangling his tongue with mine.
Kissing Liam Kolane felt like running through a starlit field in my wolf form-the purest form of power and sensation there existed in this vast, dark world.
I ran my fingers over the runnel of his spine, then dipped my hands beneath the fabric of his black t-shirt to touch the warm, tanned skin I’d barely ever dared glimpse. His muscles roiled underneath my exploring hands; tendons pinched, flesh tensed.
He broke the kiss.
“Not fair,” he whispered hoarsely.
I arched an eyebrow.
He rolled me over so that I was on top, so that his big hands could slip underneath my tank top.
“I’ve been dying to touch you, Ness. Every fucking inch of you. My turn.”
His hands stroked my spine, the sides of my body, the indents of my waist before traveling upward, his thumbs trailing over my stomach, my ribcage, the underside of my breasts, stilling on my nipples. His touch sent so many tremors through my bent arms that I almost collapsed over him. He drew a line of kisses from the edge of my jaw all the way down to the hollow of my collarbone.
I moaned. Embarrassingly loud. And not just once.
He fit his mouth back over mine and swallowed the rest of my sounds, then slid his thumbs back down.
“You are so fucking perfect,” he murmured against my lips.
Those words were my undoing. And not in any romantic way.
I began to cry, hundreds of tears.
If he knew what I’d done to his father, he wouldn’t think me very perfect.
He wouldn’t want to kiss me.
He wouldn’t want to touch me.