Wolf and Prejudice (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 2) (24 page)

This was a bold move on her part, she knew, hinting that he was partly at fault for their current situation, when everyone from her mother to Chloe had told her she needed to focus on convincing him to forgive her. But she hated this, hated being forced to hold her tongue, to speak to Rafe so carefully, like she was one of his subjects as opposed to his mate.

On the other side of the table, he drew himself up, like a king who had been crossed. “There are a lot of things we both need to work on after we’re married.”

They fell silent then. Rafe, a blank wall of emotion and Alisha, letting her emotions hang out, not really caring if he could sense how nervous and awkward she was feeling.

“I read what you wrote about Chloe. I found your journals in the duffle bag you brought back.”

He got her with that announcement. And she imagined her alarm and fear gave him some sense of satisfaction. But something else popped up in her emotional mix. “And what did you think?” she asked him, her voice nervous like Chloe’s got when she was presenting her longhouse family with a dish she was unsure of.

“It sounds like Chloe was a good queen. Like she ended up exactly where she was supposed to be. I’m… I’m glad she’s happy.”

Alisha nodded excitedly. It was so nice to finally be able to talk with someone else about her extremely immersive research. “She
was
happy. And you’re right, she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be. There were quite a few things from the last year that I wasn’t able to add to the overall text. Fenris finally converted to Christianity, as did a lot of the other Vikings. She was also in the beginning stages of setting up a foster system similar to ours for Norway and I think it might spread. It could be why kings are held responsible for orphaned and abandoned wolves to this day.”

This new information seemed to give Rafe pause. “So my family might not have taken in Chloe if she hadn’t gone back in time? She influenced her early life with what she did in her later life.”

Alisha snapped her fingers and pointed at him, “Exactly right, which brings up even more questions about how time is laid out. Is it really as fluid as we think, do we really have choices, or are we subjects of a story that’s already been told?” She shook her head, and smiled at him. “It’s some pretty heady stuff. I’m just happy to finally have someone to talk with about all of this.”

“You’re not afraid I’ll burn your journals to keep the story of Chloe from getting out?”

Well, that question put a damper on her enthusiasm. She inclined her head to the side, her eyes sad and curious when she asked, “You would do that?”

“You think I shouldn’t?” he asked. “You take something from me. I take something from you.”

Her heart went hollow, thinking of everything she’d written over the last few years literally going up in flames. “I hope you wouldn’t see it that way. Like I said, when I traveled to the Viking Age, I didn’t understand what I was taking from you, but I hope you would understand what you would be taking from me if you burned my journals.”

She didn’t speak to him about how hard it had been to keep those journals. If he'd read them, he already knew about her constant fight to do her work with malfunctioning pens, limited light source, and how difficult it had been for her to find the time to write as a mother of three who was also expected to perform several duties around the kingdom longhouse.

She realized there was an ugly and lethal component to him. The part of him that had taken on all challengers for his Colorado throne, and killed those two Vikings in the most vicious way possible without blinking an eye. That part of him would definitely take the journals she’d been painstakingly working on for years, build a fire in Chloe’s fireplace, and throw them in with her watching. Revenge served cold
and
hot.

However, there was another part of him, too. The part of him that considered reading a pleasure, the part of him that let their boys see her because they asked, the part of him that had brought her dinner. That was the part she was counting on, the one she hoped would prevail and prevent him from doing something as unforgivable as burning her journals.

“Was it worth it?” he asked her now. “Everything you witnessed and wrote about, was it worth it?”

“No.” The answer slipped past Alisha’s lips without thought, without consideration for how it would make her appear. She had lain awake so many nights pondering the same question that the answer had become simple, like an irrefutable fact one couldn’t possibly argue against without coming off like a fool.

She lowered her eyes and admitted, “For the first few years my anger kept me going. And my work. I missed central heat and junk food for sure, but I had all that help with childcare, and I was learning so much about the Viking Age. Not many historians ever get the chance to actually live history, and for the first year it was thrilling… but then the pregnancy hormones wore off. And I discovered the mating bond wasn’t just an ephemeral term made up by modern wolves.”

She sighed, remembering how she’d come to accept the irrefutable truth of their bond. “No matter how angry I was about your many deceits, the fact remained that we were mated, and I couldn’t physically get away from that. If I so much as thought about you, or our mating time, my arousal scent went off, which made things… difficult for me. If I didn’t want to risk unwanted attention from other males, I had to, um… touch myself and think of you. I stayed angry with you. As angry as I could, because that was the only way I could get through those years without you and not go mad. But nearly every morning, I went to the local hot springs by myself and thought about our heatship. I allowed myself to miss you and wish it was your hands touching my breasts, your fingers inside me, making me climax. I felt so stupid for leaving you, yet having the nerve to want you more and more as the years passed. Every single day I thought of you and I masturbated, and it was the only way I made it through. That’s the sad truth. The whole truth.”

24

A
lisha stopped talking, waiting for Rafe to say something about her shocking confession. She dared to peek up at him, although part of her didn’t want to see the possible disgust he was feeling toward her after her X-rated confession. But he remained quiet, his emotions walled off, like an impenetrable fortress posing as a man.

And then, as if she wasn’t already embarrassed enough, her arousal scent hit the air, like it had been called forward by her spoken memories of what she’d done to mask it.

His emotions hit her first, an unleashed longing that pierced her heart as if it were her own, followed by a fierce sexual need so hungry and raw… it seemed to grab ahold of Rafe, using him like a puppet. He knocked over the small table that stood between them, his eyes bright with the same all-consuming lust she could feel within herself. And before all the plates and glasses had finished crashing to the ground in a noisy cacophony, his hands were on her, pulling her out of her seat and ripping her dress apart. He pushed the ruined dress off over her shoulders and let it drop to the ground. Then he stood there, staring at her in the lace-and-mesh teddy.

Alisha could feel the rolls of desire coming off of him, as if they were her own. But he didn’t make a move.

Did he want her to…? She took a tentative step toward him.

But he stopped her with two hands on her waist and a harsh shake of his head. “Stay there,” he said, breathing hard, like he was struggling to get his wolf under control. “Let me look at you.”

Yet he squeezed his eyes shut, and kept them that way, his hands like steel bands on her waist, allowing her to neither move forward nor away from him. Eventually the intense lust faded until she could feel nothing coming off of him, and only then did he open his eyes. As if having given himself silent permission, he ran his hands up her sides, and when he reached her heavy breasts, he palmed them through the fabric but didn’t them take out.

Instead, he played with them—with her—like this for several minutes, watching her reaction to his touch from behind the icy depths of his newly cooled eyes.

Her wolf could barely stand it. “Rafe,” she whimpered.

“I’ve been thinking about you in this teddy all day.” His voice lacked both emotion and heat. But his words… “Do you know how hard it was for me to keep my hands off of you this morning? Even with the boys there?”

He let one hand descend to the crotch of her teddy, and rubbed the sheer material that covered her there. Hard enough that she could feel the pressure of his fingers on her clit, but not hard enough for it to even begin to satisfy her wolf.

This was torture, the worst kind because what she craved was so close but so far. And it was making her wolf crazy. “Rafe, my wolf…”

“I know,” he said, his voice still a block of ice. “I can feel her. She wants me to ride you hard, and she doesn’t want me to stop until you come all over my cock.”

He turned her around and gently pushed her forward, so Alisha was forced to catch herself on the nearby counter.

His hands settled right above her hips, his rigid member poised near her opening so he could push into her at any time. But his pants were still on, and he made no move to unzip them. She didn’t know what to do. What did he want? An invitation from her human?

“Yes, Rafe,” she assured him just in case. “I want you to ride me hard, too. Just like my wolf. We’re in total agreement”

But Rafe said in her ear, “Not yet, Alisha, I’m still angry at you. Your wolf’s angry at you, too. You knew how much she liked me—liked my cock inside of her. How could you make her go so long without it?”

His voice was hard in her ear as he told her, “I jacked myself off, too, all those nights you were gone from me. Couldn’t get to sleep without doing it. You have no idea how hard it was to hate you when I wanted you and only you so bad, even looking at another she-wolf made me sick to my stomach. I wish I could have killed those Vikings twice. Killed every wolf in that village who thought he could claim what was mine— Oh, no you don’t, Alisha.”

He broke off his speech and caught her by the wrist, just as her hand began a slow descent to her crotch, in an attempt to bring her throbbing clit some relief. “I think you’ve masturbated enough for one lifetime. I don’t want you touching yourself like that anymore. From now on, if you have needs you to come to me.”

She let out a mewl off frustration. Her need to be with him, with her mate, had become so bad, she could feel her core palpitating, like it had its own heartbeat. “I’m with you right now,” she pointed out desperately.

“Exactly where you should be,” he said, letting her feel the full, long length of him against her. “But your wolf and I still have one more thing to figure out before we can let your human have what she wants. Maybe you can help us. Do you want me to spank you here?”

He reached around her body and swatted her hard on her pussy. Alisha gasped, the air hiccupping out of her mouth as the resulting pain sent incongruous ripples of pleasure through her core, all the way up to her breasts.

“Or here?”

His hand landed hard on her rear. And she bit her lip to keep from crying out. It was unexpected and painful, but in the state she was in, it was also nearly unbearably erotic and she could feel liquid desire leaking from between her thighs as the red hot heat of his slap radiated across her butt cheeks.

But Rafe’s voice remained cool, like an accountant as he considered his options. “Well, I don’t think I can spank you in front without putting my fingers in that wet pussy, so…”

His hand landed hard on her ass again.

“Oh, God!” Alisha gasped out. And her clit, which he’d yet to touch, throbbed, begging for the release she was no longer allowed to give it.

“This isn’t the best position for this,” he said behind her.

He turned her around, and gave her teddy one more appreciative look before ripping the top half of it apart. Her breasts came spilling out, and she could sense his pleasure at seeing her exposed like this, even if he was still keeping his emotions walled off from her.

He captured one nipple between his lips, sucking in her areola like he would take the whole breast in his mouth if he could. But then he broke off just as suddenly as he had begun. “No, I’m not going to let you get me off track. Get on the couch and lie down.”

She did as he said, and he was right. This position was much better. She appreciated the way the couch’s material felt against the hot furnace between her legs, and she liked having a surface beneath her breasts. It almost felt like a touch and she didn’t realize she was rubbing her body against the couch until Rafe said, “You’re in major violation of my no-masturbating rule. Hold still. ”

She held still, not sure how much more of this she could take, but curious about how far he’d take his erotic “punishment.”

There came another hard thwack against her ass and then another. And by the time his hand landed for a fifth time on her buttocks, it wasn’t that she didn’t want to obey his edict to hold still. It was that she couldn’t. Her back arched and her pussy quivered against the couch, and she couldn’t keep herself from writhing uncontrollably, aflame from both pleasure and pain.

Above her she felt rather than saw Rafe work hard to get himself under control. A wild fire of flaming lust burst over his emotional wall and crackled inside her for a few ticks before it was ruthlessly suppressed under a whole lot of numb.

A few more beats as if to make sure his force field was holding, then he climbed on top of her, covering her prone body with his like a blanket, the hood of his cock positioned at the back of her sweet center. She hadn’t even known it was possible to have sex lying down on your stomach until he was all the way inside her, the fit impossibly tight, his heavy body moving like a relentless animal on top of her.

This no longer felt like a punishment, but like a reward. For what? She didn’t know, but she took it. She took it over and over again, crying out his name and thanking him for the privilege of his large dick inside her tight pussy, making her feel things even better than what she’d imagined during those frigid mornings in Old Norway.