The Lycan's Wife, The Alpha's Wish

A man's hand covered my bare breast. My first thought was that I had fallen asleep with my phone playing something filthy. My second arrived when his thumb moved over my nipple and pleasure tightened through a body that could not possibly be mine. I went rigid.

The man behind me made a low, sleepy sound. His chest burned against my back, his thigh lay between mine, and an erection pressed into the curve of my ass. Cedar, iron, and amber clung to the sheets. None of it belonged in my apartment, where the loudest thing at night was the refrigerator trying to die with dignity.

Black velvet filled my vision when I opened my eyes. It draped a carved canopy high overhead, caught by silver clasps shaped into wolves' heads. Moonlight shone through gauze curtains. The phone I had dropped beside my pillow was gone. So were the pillow, my faded shirt, and every sensible explanation. His hand tightened.

My stomach clenched with a rush of heat. The response rose from someplace beneath thought, intimate and practiced. This body knew his weight, his smell, the rough scar crossing the knuckles against my skin. I knew that scar too. I had pictured it while reading, right before deciding the hero deserved to be beaten to death with his own tragic backstory.

Mathias Iglesias.

I pulled his hand off me and twisted toward the edge of the bed. A silver wolf ring scraped my ribs as his fingers closed around my wrist.

"Constance."

He sounded irritated rather than startled. His hair was dark from sleep, his jaw shadowed, his face offensively beautiful at close range. The novel had spent several paragraphs on the severe line of his mouth. It had neglected to mention the heat pouring off him or how completely his shoulders blocked the bed behind me.

"Let go."

His gaze dropped to my naked chest. Familiarity softened it for an instant, and the body I wore answered with another warm, humiliating pull. I yanked the sheet up between us.

Mathias released my wrist, though not because I had asked. He sat back against the pillows and watched me clutch the linen to my breasts. "If this is about Millicent, we settled it last night."

Last night, in another century, I had been reading in bed. Millicent Hurst had stood outside Constance's study with her sweet voice lowered, explaining to someone unnamed that a neglected wife was easy to ruin. First the household would believe her unstable. Then unfaithful. By the time Constance died, everyone would call it grief.

I had stopped reading there. Apparently the story had objected.

"We didn't settle anything," I said.

The words came out in a stranger's voice-soft, low, carefully trained. My hand rose to my throat. A pale wrist emerged from the sheet, smaller than mine, with a faint blue vein beneath skin that had never seen my chipped black nail polish.

Mathias's expression sharpened. "You agreed she would remain under my protection."

"Then I was cornered into saying yes."

Silence collected between us. A fire cracked beyond the bed curtains. Somewhere outside the room, metal wheels rattled over stone and faded into the keep.

"You speak as though you had no part in the decision."

Shit. I slid off the mattress before he could study me any closer. The sheet tangled around my knees, nearly pitching me onto a thick red carpet. I caught the bedpost and found a bare foot, then another. They were narrow, unmarked, and attached to legs longer than I expected. My balance followed a different set of rules now. So did gravity. So did the heavy fall of dark hair over my shoulder.

Across the chamber, a tall mirror reflected a woman wrapped in white linen.

Constance Hearth stared back at me.

I knew the face from the cover illustration: gray eyes, straight black hair, and a mouth drawn too gently for the woman the story intended to kill. The artist had given her sorrow because sorrow sold books. The real face looked stunned, furious, and very much alive.

Mathias left the bed. He made no effort to cover himself before pulling on a pair of dark trousers. Constance's body remembered that too-the shape of him, the easy movement, the old expectation that he might cross the room and draw her against his chest. Want gathered low in my belly before I could stop it.

The body's answer granted him nothing.

I backed toward a chair where a robe had been discarded. "Stay there."

He stopped. The pause lasted barely a heartbeat, but he stopped.

"You woke in my arms," he said. "Now you look at me as though I've broken into your chamber."

"Your new mate lives in our house, and you're surprised your wife isn't feeling sociable?"

Something flickered in his eyes. The novel had called them gold. Up close they were brown with a thin amber flare around the pupils, warmer than a man with his judgment had any right to possess.

"Millicent is under diplomatic protection. Her presence does not change this marriage."

"It changed the room she sleeps in. It changed who sits beside you at supper. It changed what your servants whisper when Constance passes." I shoved one arm into the robe, then the other. The sleeves dragged over my hands. "And last night she threatened to destroy your wife before killing her."

Mathias crossed the carpet. "Millicent spoke to you?"

"I heard enough."

"What, exactly?"

He reached for the loose front of the robe. I slapped his hand aside.

The sound was small. His stillness afterward was not.

"Do not touch me."

His nostrils flared. The pupils swallowed most of the amber in his eyes, and a faint point appeared at one canine. Whatever lived under his skin had noticed the command. He lowered his hand, but the heat of him remained close enough to seep through the robe.

"Jealousy has made you reckless," he said.

"You think this is jealousy because the alternative would require you to admit you brought danger into your wife's home."

"I know Millicent."

"You know what she lets you see."

He turned his head slightly, listening for something beyond the door, then brought his attention back to me. Control returned piece by piece: shoulders easing, jaw unclenching, the sharp edge withdrawing from his tooth. I hated that I noticed. I hated more that Constance's body noticed with me.

"You are frightened," he said.

"Yes." The truth surprised him. Good. "I woke with a man touching me in a room I don't recognize, and you expect me to accept every choice you made before I opened my eyes. Fear is the appropriate response."

His brow tightened. I had said too much, but retreating into Constance's old obedience would kill us both. If she still existed anywhere inside this skin, I owed her more than a convincing performance.

I tied the robe firmly and stepped past him. He shifted to block my path to the door. He did not grab me again. That restraint might have impressed me if he had not been using his body as a locked gate.

"Move."

"Not until you explain what happened to you."

"Fine. Your wife discovered she has limits. Here is the first." I met his stare despite the unfamiliar tremor in my legs. "Millicent leaves Courcy today. You exile her from this keep and from your protection."

His face closed. "No."

The answer hurt. Not me-not entirely. Grief moved under my ribs with such depth that my grip tightened on the robe. Six years of marriage lived in that pain. Six years of trusting him to hear Constance before any other woman, and he had refused without asking what Millicent had said.

I let the grief settle. It belonged to the woman whose face I wore, but it gave my anger weight.

"Then divorce me."

Mathias went very still. The fire snapped behind him, throwing copper light across the scar on his hand and the ring he had not removed. His gaze searched my face as if obedience might be hiding there.

When he spoke, his voice held the calm of a sentence already passed.

"You will have neither."