Temptation (Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow) (15 page)

So, because I am a man of action and not really of feeling, I did the only thing I could think of and reached down, scooped her up and carried her down the hall to the bathroom, while she sniffled and cried in my arms.

When we got to the bathroom, I flicked on the light, set her on the floor and looked down at her.

She looked absolutely miserable.

Her face was pale, her mascara was running from crying and her eye makeup was all smudged down her face. It wasn’t just Aspen’s makeup smeared face that looked awful; it didn’t stop there. Her hair was no longer draped down her back in smooth strands but had reverted back to a damp, wild, curly mess. Except now there was with vomit laced throughout. Her shoes, jeans and top had fared no better. There was vomit on them too.

But she didn’t just look physically wrecked, there was a deep, dark sadness present in her eyes too. She saw my being away from her for so long as a some sort of unspoken promise between us promise.

I had hurt her.

I didn’t like that.

I hated it almost as much as I hated the slutty makeup, and that was a lot. Aspen was beautiful and alluring enough in her natural state, she didn’t need the artificial boost that makeup gave her. It made her look older and sexier and I didn’t want her to look like that for other men. Just the thought of other males looking at her drove me crazy with wild, possessive anger. I couldn’t help it, the need to protect my mate from other males was part of my Were genetic makeup.

“She really doesn’t take her liquor very well,
” I thought as I grabbed her around the waist, picked her up and plunked her in the bathtub.

“Take your jeans and top off in the bathtub and leave them there, they’re full of puke,” I said as I stood there and watched to make sure she didn’t fall down and knock herself out on the tub spout.

At least that’s why I told myself that I was still in the bathroom.

Carefully bending down with exaggerated slowness, Aspen gingerly took off her shoes and tossed them, where they landed with a clunk against the tub. Frankly, I was surprised she’d even managed to bend over without falling down in her current state.

Then she started unzipping her jeans.

“Umm, turn around before you start peeling your clothes off Aspen,” I said feeling a little rattled by the prospect of seeing her undress in front of me.

Me, the big, tough, male Were and Beta of my pack, rattled by a sixteen year old girl!

I mean, it’s not like I hadn’t seen Aspen in various states of undress before. Lord, the bikini she’d worn last summer was borderline scandalous with it’s hot pink, teeny tiny triangles that barely covered her breasts and ass. I’d nearly had a fit over that one, that is until Sorcha showed up at our house wearing the exact same bikini, only in teal.

My teenaged mate was going to be the death of me!

Aspen turned away from me and started to push her jeans all the way down her slim legs until they fell into a puddle at her feet. Kicking her jeans aside, she pulled her tiny, black lace shirt up over her head and then turned around and looked at me.

“What do I do now?” she asked. Seeing her half naked, exposed and vulnerable was working a number on my anger. It was genuinely difficult to stay angry when your dick was hard.

“Take a shower to wash the vomit out of your hair. But I’m only leaving you in here alone for a few minutes, so be careful that you don’t fall down, okay?” I said as I reached passed her to turn the tap on.

The water was warming up as Aspen stood there, shivering and half dressed, in the tub. She regarded me with her head cocked to the side, like she was thinking or attempting to calculate some feeble plan in a bid to get out of being grounded.

I could just imagine what wild excuses would come out of her mouth in her current state. I didn’t have to wait long though as she reached over and attempted to grab my wrist.

I could have backed away and stopped it, but I was curious to see what she was up to as her dainty fingers tried, and failed, to curl around my large wrist.

“I see you staring at me sometimes when you don’t think I’m looking. I think you like me, Roan,” Aspen declared quietly, “I like you too. You think I’m too young to make you happy. But I’m not, you know,” she said boldly, her eyes gauging my reaction like a hawk.

I stood immobile, my breath catching in my throat and stared at her, hard.

I wasn’t anticipating this conversation to take place right here, right now, with her half naked and drunk in the tub but that was a mistake on my part because based on her reactions to me lately, I should have been expecting it at some point in the very near future.

It was only the natural progression of our mating bond. Aspen was getting older and therefore she was experiencing a stronger physical and emotional attachment to me. It was only natural that she was finally starting to notice and express her feelings towards me.

Soon enough, I would blood bond with her and then she would be following me around like a love struck, female in heat. And then I wouldn’t have to worry about all the Justin Meyer’s of the world getting in the way. God, I looked forward to that day.

No male on earth would have a chance in hell against a blood bond.

I should have felt happy about Aspen’s drunken confession. After all, this was it, my chance to take what I so desperately desired.

I could go for it right now and claim her as my mate. She had admitted that she liked me; it would be so simple, just a matter of formality, to take her and make her mine.

Ten years was a long time to wait and no one in the pack would fault me for taking what she so willingly offered, even though she was still young. I wanted her so badly, I could taste desire filling my mouth and trickling down the back of my throat.

But I was stuck. Frozen.

And the seconds ticked by as we stood and stared at one another as the water ran from the tap in the background. It was time to stop torturing and berating myself and to just make a decision and stick with it. Either claim her as my mate or wait until she was older and truly ready and begging for me.

“Get over yourself, Aspen,” I said sharply, as I flicked on the shower nozzle and forcefully ripped the curtain across the tub. “And make sure you wash that makeup off, you look like a prostitute” I said as I stalked out the bathroom and slammed the door closed behind me.

                 ***

I
'd made my decision. I would continue to wait for Aspen until she was mature enough and genuinely ready to be my mate.

My heart was pounding heavily in my chest as I stood in the hall outside the bathroom. It had been so close. I had nearly given in and taken what she so innocently offered to me.

I wanted to run, to run as far as possible from Spruce Hollow and get away from Aspen for a while. Through no fault of her own, she was killing me and I was miserable inside.

I leaned with my back against the wall and frantically ran my hands through my hair. My mind was careening from Aspen’s admission that she’d had feelings for me. What had possessed her to say such a thing as she stood in front of me wearing only her bra and panties?

The alcohol swimming in her veins, that’s what. I couldn’t believe how brazen and unafraid she’d been as she’d looked me right in the eyes and let the words spill from her beautiful pouty lips. Ahh, alcohol, the great lowerer of inhibitions.

While I had no doubt that she did like me and had romantic feelings of some kind for me as she had followed me around constantly like a little, lost puppy dog, from the time she was six years old, she was still only a teenager and teenagers were notably unpredictable and flippant in their romantic affections for one another.

What had ultimately swayed my decision to walk out of the bathroom was the fact that if I did take her as my mate and bit her and turned her Were right now, she’d still be a sixteen year old Were with a Were metabolism and therefore would take even longer to age. So, I needed her to stay human for a little while longer yet.

Besides, when she was truly old enough and ready for me, she wouldn’t just be telling me that she “liked me”. She would be begging me to change her, to mate with her and to be mine in every sense of the word.

The sound of Aspen throwing up in the shower cleared my head and brought me back to the present.

“Roan?” she called out weakly. 

“What Aspen?” I said as I cracked open the door. 

“Can you help me, I need a towel and I don’t know if I can get out of the bathtub because the room is spinning,” she said.

I stalked back into the bathroom and pulled back a portion of the shower curtain to check on her. She was completely naked and plastered against the shower wall in an attempt to keep herself upright.

At least her hair smelled cleaner and the slutty makeup was completely gone.

“You’re completely plastered, aren’t you?” I said as I picked up a fluffy white towel from a wicker basket on the floor and proceeded to wrap it around her, while trying not to stare at her intimately or give her any indication that I was interested in her in any other way than the manner in which a patriarchal figurehead would for a young female under his care.

I stood back and looked at her once she was covered up. She didn’t look very good and her coloring was way off. She was normally pale and kind of pink cheeked but right now she was looking a little pasty and her blood still smelled strongly of alcohol but it was impossible to tell from smell alone whether it was at a dangerous level or not.

“Come here, little girl,” I said as I picked her up out of the bathtub. She put her arms around my waist as I stood her up and she laid her cheek gently against my chest. She seemed so tiny and fragile standing in such close proximity to me.

“I love you, Roan. You’re mine,” she murmured drunkenly. 

“Oh am I, am I? How can you tell?” I asked, curious to hear her answer, as humans tended to be more earnest when they were intoxicated. 

“Because, I feel it inside me, right down to my bones. I missed you when you were gone, Roan. I didn’t like it, I felt so lonely for you. Did you miss me too?” she asked hopefully as I half walked, half carried her to her bedroom down the hall. 

“Yes, Aspen, I missed you quite a bit. You’re much more important to me than you think you are,” I said softly.

I figured I’d be truthful with her for once, what the hell, it’s not like she was going to remember any of this tomorrow.

Her bedroom was a mess, like a tornado had blown through it while she was getting ready for the party. Every single piece of clothing she owned was either on the floor or on the bed, like she had tried it on, then decided it didn’t look right and threw it on the floor instead of putting it away and then taking out something else.

I pushed all the clothes off her bed and peeled back her pink covers with tiny yellow stars. She was wobbly on her feet and fell, rather than sat, on the bed, with her legs hanging over the edge. She turned her head towards me and in a small voice said “Roan, can you lay down with me and rub my back until I fall asleep? I don’t feel very good.”

She hadn’t asked me to do that in a very long time, probably since she was a little girl.

I used to babysit her all the time, as Valerie frequently had to go away on business trips for her job. As a child, Aspen tended to have a lot of anxiety due to her neglectful upbringing and one of her biggest fears was being left alone in the dark. She would pitifully beg me to stay in her room at bedtime so the monsters wouldn’t come and get her.

I’d long suspected that the monsters in Aspen’s imagination were largely due to the drug dealers, lack of stability in her formative years and most importantly, being confined with her dead mother for days before someone found her. I often wondered how long Aspen would have stayed there with her, had that social worker not come knocking on the door? She had been a pathetic, scrawny little thing with very deep emotional scars as a child, and as I looked down at her right now, passed out on the bed, it suddenly occurred to me that maybe not much had changed in ten years.

She was still small and skinny and she still had deep-seated anxiety and fear of abandonment. I wasn’t excusing what she had done tonight but my leaving her alone for almost a week had done nothing but cement those fears in her head.

Having said all that, I was still reluctant to rub her back and touch her any further tonight as we’d had more physical contact in the last hour than we’d had in the past six months in total.

Besides, I was conflicted. Part of me still wanted to penalize her for what she’d done tonight but then a bigger part of me wanted to curl her into my side like a fluffy little kitten and take care of her drunken ass.

I rifled through the clothes on the floor until I found the longest t-shirt I could find.

Why the hell were teenage girl clothes so freaking tiny and revealing? “Here, Aspen, sit up and put this t-shirt on. You can’t go to bed in a soaking wet towel,” I said as I sat her up. Her head gently flopped forward and she started snoring softly.

Oh great, she’d passed out. Could this night get any better? With my luck, she would throw up and choke to death on her own vomit in her sleep.

I pulled the t-shirt over her head and put her arms through the sleeves, then laid her down and went off to her drawers, in search of underwear. Rifling through her underwear drawer made me feel like a creep, so I picked out the first pair I found. They were pink, with the word “Beautiful” written across the ass in rainbow colors. I shook my head as I pulled them up her legs and over her little round butt. Touching her intimately like this was not very conducive to keeping an emotional and physical distance between us.

I’m not going to lie; I saw everything she had to offer. It was kind of hard to dress an unconscious naked person and not see their entire body. All I can say was that I was going to be a very happy man when she finally matured and filled out some and got some meat on her bones.

Once I dressed her, I stood back and watched her. What the heck was I going to do with her now? I knew before the thought even had time to fully form in my head.