He got a lot closer and the delicious intoxicating scent of musk and woodsy male seemed to hit me dead in the heart.
“What is there to remember?”
“Where have you been? Don’t play coy. I know it's you. You’re the girl from all those years ago.”
I racked my brain and stopped at one memory that I’d grown to think was made up. A dream that had manifested just to get through the long nights.
“I’ve met you before?”
I couldn’t miss the veins popping out of his neck and down his shoulders. More popped out down his biceps. His hands flexed. I should be fine with nudity. It was a shifter thing, but I wasn’t allowed to shift. I wasn’t allowed to be free to let my wolf out, and I’d never been around many others that were free to shift either.
Would it have mattered? The thought occurred to me, no. My attraction to him was a whole new level of something I couldn’t explain.
There’d only been one time I’d successfully gotten close to escape. And one time we watched a ceremony of the pack’s alpha heir. None of them had looked as impressive as this guy. I swallowed passed the dry desert of my throat.
He started to pace, and it tore my gaze away from his massive length between his legs. Where would that even fit? I tried to stifle a giggle, but I wasn’t stealthy. Never had been and maybe that’s how I’d avoided too many of the stares of the pack I served. I wasn’t submissive enough even drugged to be an ideal mistress or whatever it is they wanted.
“What are you laughing at?” he growled at me.
I shrugged. “Just trying to figure you out. You seem like such a teddy bear and all. How could I have forgotten you?”
I blinked and in that time he was towering over me, his hand gripping my throat just this side of uncomfortable.
“I am no teddy bear female and you better remember that. Kiara.”
My name rolling off his tongue might have been alarming enough to send tingles down my spine, but it was the swirling in his eyes. They were the same as the guy in my dream. He was younger when I saw him. Not nearly as big in my dreams, but still. His eyes were the only thing that made him seem so real. But I’d made him up to pass the nights. To pass the loneliness and to pass the time until I could earn my freedom and run far away from shifter politics.
“Devon?” I asked on a whisper. “You’re real?”
His hand loosened, and the green and gold warred in his eyes.
The hard set of his mouth hid whatever he was thinking. I couldn’t read his face anymore than I could guess what was happening in his mind.
“Of course I’m fucking real. What does that even mean? I was real all those years ago when I swore I’d find you. You didn’t even stay for my first shift.”
He was real. There was no thought behind my movements, I just wanted to touch him and make sure this was the same guy. He looked more mature. Bigger, but then that all made sense. It had been so long since that night. The night my father had made the deal with the asshole alpha to pay for his sins as a poor alpha.
Of course it was that night. The wolfsbane had been the only way they got me to stop fighting as they pulled me away. I’d never made it back to my pack, not that it mattered. The problem was that the whole night seemed like one big nightmare after another, and then there was him. The dream I’d made up to make it all better.
“I thought I made you up.”
He glared at me, and as I ran my fingers over his hot skin, he flinched and pulled away.
“I’m sorry, did I hurt you somehow?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Answer me. Where did you go?”
I tried to recount that night and tried to separate what was real from what were the horrible nightmares. The nightmares that came with whatever they drugged me with. The nightmares about being dumped in a cold damp hole in the ground for days.
“I didn’t go anywhere. I was sold and taken away.”
He glared at me or was it something else? I didn’t know much about him. Everything I thought I knew had been made up, except that night.
“You’re sure you’re real and this isn’t another one of my dreams right? I have a really good imagination. I sort of needed that to make it through.”
“Sold?” He was repeating the word over and over and over. “What the fuck. Your father said you were dead?”
I couldn’t stop the laughter that replaced the tears I wanted to cry.