Page 28 of The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate
The hunger I have been swallowing since the day I first laid eyes on her rises up and nearly drowns me.
I want…
I want to step out of these trees, cross that little pebbled beach, and put my hands on her. I want to bury my face in her hair and breathe her in until my brain stops working. I want to trace every inch of skin she has ever hidden from me, first with my fingers and then with my mouth. I want to feel her shiver when I kiss the back of her neck. I want to find out what sounds she makes when I finally, finally touch her the way she deserves to be touched.
I want to press her back against one of these birches and let her wrap those long legs around me. Find out if kissing her feels as devastating the second time as it did the first.
My fingers dig into the bark of the tree I’m crouched next to.
Stop. Stop. Stop.
She doesn’t know I’m here. She thinks she’s alone. Whatever I do with my eyes right now is a violation, and I know better. I should turn around.
I watch her wade into the water instead.
She gasps at the cold, and then laughs gleefully before pushing off, slicing cleanly into the lake. A few strokes carry her out past the shallow rim, and then she tips onto her back and floats, arms spread wide, dark hair fanning around her head.
She is so unselfconscious.
So alive.
She kicks a spray of water into the air and laughs again when it rains back down on her face. She dives under and comes up shaking her head like a wet puppy, water arcing in silver beads around her. She flips onto her stomach and swims, then flips onto her back and floats, the morning sun catching the droplets on her skin and making her glow.
She is playing. Just…playing.
My chest tightens. I have not done that in my life.
I try to think of a time I’ve ever been in a body of water for anything other than training or cleanup. Anything I have ever done without purpose, without an agenda, without something to prove or protect or prepare for. I come up empty.
“The alpha carries the pack,” my father’s voice says in my head, as clearly as if he were standing beside me in these ferns. His hand, heavy on my small shoulder, pressing me into the floor of his office when I was only six years old. “You don’t get to rest. You don’t get to be careless. Every hour you waste is an hour your people are unprotected.”
I was a child, and I believed him.
I was fifteen, and he said it again, more harshly, when he caught me out in the woods with my friends.
I was twenty, and he said it again when I mentioned, once, that I needed a break, away from the pack.
I was twenty-four, and he died, but the words didn’t stop. They just moved into my own voice.
Discipline. Duty. Control.
I don’t float in lakes.
I don’t laugh for no reason.
I don’t possess whatever it is that lets Sienna be so carefree with the whole world watching. Or even alone.
And seeing her like this now is doing something to me that I don’t know how to name. I want to go out there. I want to drop everything I have ever carried, walk into that water, and let her teach me how to be a person who knows how to play.
I stand up, and my feet move forward an inch before I catch myself.
I can’t, of course.
I can never.
So, I stand among the trees and the ferns with my hands curled into fists, watching her float and telling myself this is enough. This is more than I should have. This is already too much.
The wind shifts.
