encouragingly as he worked his fingers, rubbing her stiff clit with the pad of his thumb. She leaned into him, slipping her tongue past his lips. He ran his tongue along her, carefully guiding her fragile flesh away from his sharp canines.
Asch wanted to take her from the water and forget about everything outside of her bedroom. He wanted to toss her, wet and naked, onto the bed and bury himself inside of her where nothing else existed except the sounds of her pleasure and the feeling of their bodies moving together.
He pulled his hand from her, and after a gentle nip to her lip, pushed her back into the tub. She frowned at him, her shoulders slumping.
“Why’d you stop?” she asked, crestfallen.
Asch leaned in to press a kiss to her forehead. He let out a heavy sigh against her skin. “I have to go.”
“I don’t see why they need you to lead the hunt,” she groused.
He explained, “If Caim or I aren’t with them when they hunt, they won’t save anything. There’s more to being an alpha than just being large and strong. We have to always consider the welfare of the pack, and right now that means making sure there will be plenty of food in the den when winter comes.”
That was mostly true. Game was scarce in the area, and in order to get the types of meat they needed—deer and elk in particular—they would often have to leave the safety of the valley and hunt in more contested areas. It had been at least a year since they had even a minor skirmish with any other wolves, but there was a nearby tribe of cougars that frequently tried to scavenge their kills. Like most werecats, their tribe was very small—half a dozen members at last count. But while they were little threat to the pack as a whole, they could do serious damage to a leaderless hunting party.
These weren’ t things that Mila needed to concern herself with though. While the cats were a nuisance, they wouldn’t dare breach the valley, and if they did, he and Caim would be waiting for them.
She tilted her head back to stare at him. “I’ll miss you.”
He searched her brown eyes, finding them clear and guileless. Something deep inside of him seemed to settle into place then. In a voice thick with emotion, he told her, “I’ll miss you, too.”
~~~
Mila had spent the past three days longing for her luggage. Her bags had been left behind after Wayne Ramsey’s truck broke down on the way to Lazarus territory. Her initial outrage at having to leave them behind had quickly faded, overshadowed by the exhaustion of the grueling journey by foot and the gnawing anxiety that had plagued her the entire way.
Once she was safe in the den though, the first thing she had wanted was to have her possessions back. She still felt so out of place in the pack, and she thought that being surrounded by her belong ings would make her feel more at ease. Instead, all it had done was made her realize all over again, what a clueless idiot she had been.
They ranged from the impractical: f our pairs of stilettos, six sets of lingerie, and a manicure set; to the completely useless: a curling iron, a flat iron, a digital camera, a tablet, an iPod, and her personal favorite, thirty issues of Vogue. Seriously, what had she been thinking?
She just couldn’t put herself in that frame of mind anymore. Even though it had only been a few days, she felt like a different person, and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. At least then, she had known who she was. Hadn’t she?
She looked around at her possessi ons, half-unpacked and strewn about the room. Even when she’d lived in Terry Creek, she hadn’t missed New York this much. Even during the worst of times, she’s known that she could get out. She could retake her aptitude tests in the spring and then go back and finish her final year of undergrad study. That knowledge had kept her sane in the face of the squirrel-hunting, frog-eating, square-dancing denizens of Tye County.
But this was entirely different. It
Rebecca Hamilton, Conner Kressley