Alpha Omega 02 - Hunting Ground

“Sometimes it’s overwhelming and I wish it would shut down, even though it hurts when it does. And when it is narrower, I miss the intimacy of knowing what you’re feeling.”
    â€œYes,” Charles agreed. “I’m not used to sharing with anyone but Brother Wolf.” His mate, he thought. She’d had a rough time, and she needed everything he could give her. So he used the words that he didn’t trust himself with to tell her what he could. “I don’t care what Brother Wolf thinks of me. You . . . I care. It’s . . . difficult.”
    She moved until her breath touched the back of his neck. Very quietly she said, “Do you ever wish it hadn’t happened?”
    At that he sat up and turned to her, examining her face for hints of just how she’d meant the question. His sudden move made her flinch, and if the bed hadn’t been so big, she’d have fallen off in her scramble to get away from him.
    He closed his eyes and controlled himself. There were no enemies here to slay. “Never,” he told her with utter sincerity he hoped she heard. “I will never regret it. If you could have seen my life before you came into it, you would not ask that question.”
    He felt her warmth, smelled her closeness before she touched him. “I cause you a lot of trouble. I’ll probably cause you more before we’re done.”
    Charles opened his eyes and let himself drown in her scent, in her presence, and kissed a freckle that graced Anna’s cheek. Then the one on the side of her nose and another just above her lip. “For a long time, my brother Samuel has been telling me that I needed something to shake me up.”
    She kissed him—a rare enough occurrence that he held perfectly still and savored it for the gift of trust it was. She’d been tortured by monsters, and sometimes they still held sway over her.
    Anna pulled herself away. “If this keeps up, there won’t be any talk.”
    Good, he thought. But he knew there were things she still needed to discuss, so he lay back down and pillowed his head on his hands though there were at least three layers of pillows on the bed.
    â€œI keep feeling like we’re doing it wrong,” she said. “That this bond between us is meant to be much more than we’re allowing it to be.”
    â€œThere is no wrong between us,” he told her.
    She made a frustrated noise, so he supposed that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. Charles tried again. “We have time, love. As long as we are careful to set our feet on the path we want to follow, we have a very long time to get it right.”
    He could feel her focus her attention on him. “Okay,” she said finally. “I can live with that. Does that mean I get to tell you when I think you’re walking in the wrong direction?”
    He grinned. “Could you help yourself?”
    â€œThere is no wrong between us,” she repeated his words with more satisfaction. “That means yes, right?”
    He looked at her again, “That means yes. Right.”
    â€œAnd you are as confused about this as I am?”
    It seemed important to her that they were on equal ground. But he could not lie to her. “No. Differently confused, I think. And possibly more confused. You haven’t had the better part of two hundred years to decide who you are and who you aren’t. When that all changes . . .” Charles shrugged.
    He wasn’t used to all of this emotion. He’d taken the feelings and desires of his human half and stuffed them somewhere so they wouldn’t interfere with the things he had to do. And now they were all back, and he had no tools to deal with them—and he wasn’t stupid enough to think that they would ever allow themselves to be stuffed away again.
    â€œDifferently confused,” she said. “Okay. That’s okay.”
    She reached out and touched his arm, drawing a finger down. “When I touched you today . . . it feels as though you have two souls in one body. Is that how I am?”
    â€œAnna,” he told her. “You are how you are. Brother Wolf and I . . . You know I was born werewolf and not Changed. That has left some differences, I think. To function, most werewolves have to make their wolf obedient if not completely subservient. After a while, the wolf spirit is reduced to a part of the man’s spirit. An unthinking, violent part