She nods and pulls me down to her, and I feel her breathe in deeply, taking in my scent.
“I’ll never leave you,” I whisper. “I’ll never turn my back on you.”
“I’ll never betray you,” she answers.
And then we’re kissing, with the same passion as we shared last night. All my worries are flying away because the only thing in the world is Emlyn—her body on mine, her warm, small hands, that lemon-fresh smell all around me.
“Emmy,” I gasp, and she curls closer into me somehow.
I feel her start to come a second before I lose control of myself. We cling to each other in the night as our bodies come apart, mouths pressed together to muffle our cries.
When it’s over, though, she rolls away from me and presses her hands to her face.
It’s heartbreaking.
I pull her against me, running my hand up and down her side. “What can I do?”
She shakes her head. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry. I’m being awful.”
“You’re really not,” I say. “I hate what he did too. I wanted it to be the three of us too. It’s natural that you’re cut up about it.”
“It doesn’t mean anything about how I feel about you,” she says.
“I know it doesn’t,” I tell her. “I never thought it did. Please don’t worry about that.”
“I just thought—I thought he liked me. I thought we were starting to really have something.”
She sighs and rolls onto her back, and I’m relieved to see that her eyes are dry. “I guess it’s silly, isn’t it? I hardly knew him.”
“Mate bonds form fast,” I say.
“We’re not mated.”
“Are you sure? Maybe you were.”
“No,” she says. “We couldn’t have been. I was mated to someone else. I had my alpha mating ceremony, and my alpha assigned me to someone.”
“But you’re not with that person now.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Maybe when you left your pack, the alpha bond dissolved,” I suggest.
“No, it definitely didn’t,” she says. “I can still feel it. I feel it all the time. It’s with me wherever I go.”
“Okay,” I say. “But I think something was tying you to Nate too. You’re not just heartbroken over a crush here. There was a real connection between the two of you, and you’re feeling that.”
“Do you think so?” she asks.
“I sensed something the first time I met you,” I say. “I knew there was something between the two of you, something I wasn’t a part of and could never be a part of. That’s why I was so hesitant the first time we had sex.”
“Except that youwerepart of it,” she says. “You were. You felt that too, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did,” I say. “I didn’t think it would be like that, being part of a harem, but it was.”
“Not a harem,” she says. “He was never with us. It was always a lie.”
“You and I aren’t a lie, though,” I tell her. “Can you believe that?”