Her sex was creamy and swollen and ripe, ready for whatever he wanted to give her. Fingers. Tongue. Cock. She was aching and desperate for every part of him, same as she’d been every night that she’d dreamed of him since he’d left her. Even years before then, when she’d wanted nothing more than for him to make her his, always waiting...and waiting. But he was fighting it. She could tell. Resisting with everything that he had, and it frightened her to think of why. Why she wasn’t enough for him. Why he’d always struggled against their connection with such ferocity.
Fight back! Resist! Damn it, she should be tossing the rejection she could feel coming right back in his face, but she...she couldn’t. As he touched her between her legs, his rough fingers stroking through those slick, plump folds with such perfect skill, making her gasp...arch...shiver, the only thing she was willing to fight for was more.
But as with everything else when it came to this man, she was destined to lose.
One moment his fingers were buried deep, bringing her to the cusp of a shattering orgasm, and in the next she was empty, his palm pressed tight against her sex, cupping her, holding her...and she could feel the smooth, hot slide of his fangs against her vulnerable throat. Ohmygod! Did he want to bite her? What on earth was going on with him?
His body was pressed so rigidly against hers, and she sensed his...pain. A visceral, devastating, burning agony. He cursed hoarsely, and she felt the first tremor that rocked through him, followed quickly by a second, until he was shaking so hard in her arms it made her teeth chatter.
“E-Eli?” she stammered through lips that were salty with her tears.
He quickly set her on her feet and pushed away from her with a choked roar, his eyes hooded and bright as he clenched his teeth. His dark brows were drawn with an emotion she could have sworn was anguish. Something had stopped him, but the bond was too weak and his emotions were too intense for her to read him clearly. Which was perhaps a good thing. Whatever had caused him to pull away from her, she had a feeling she wasn’t going to like it.
“What the hell, Eli? Are you—”
“Don’t! Don’t touch me!” he snarled, stumbling back from her when she started to reach for him. His gaze darted from side to side, reminding her of a trapped wolf desperate for escape.
She crossed her arms over her middle, determined to hold herself together. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he scraped out, sounding as if a brutal set of hands was crushing his throat. “Just...just go to bed, Carla. It’s late.”
“No. I want to know—”
“Just get in the damn bed!” he barked, brushing her aside so he could rip the door open. “And lock this damn thing behind me!”
He slammed out of the room then, and she reached out and slid the lock into place with a shaking hand, her thoughts reeling, and her body... Oh, God. Her body was vibrating...awakened. Misery crashed over her like a cold rain, and she shivered even harder, somehow making it to the bed. For the second night in a row, she crawled onto a lumpy mattress and curled into a ball, trying to block out everything until she was nothing more than molecules of air. Weightless. Floating. No pain or fear or emotions.
Carla tried to reach that feeling of nothingness with every ounce of her will, but it never came. As she lay there in the cold, depressing room, she just kept wanting and longing and aching...for things she would never have.
Her life since setting off in search of Eli Drake had been the worst kind of hell, and Carla had never been so eager to return to the Alley as she was now.
She’d skipped breakfast that morning because, well, rejection apparently killed her appetite. Exhaustion weighed heavily on her shoulders, and while she knew it was unforgivably stupid to have let her body do the thinking instead of her head, she was simply too tired to beat herself up over what had happened with Eli. Learn, regroup, and move on. That needed to be her motto, because if it wasn’t, she’d still be curled up in that crappy motel room bed, wishing for things that were useless. And oh so obviously bad for her.
As far as wake up calls went, the way Eli had walked out on her again had been a bruiser. But she was tough. She could take the hit and keep on going.
What she couldn’t do was let him get too close to her again. Work together? Fine, so long as she wasn’t alone with him. But kissing? Touching? Losing her head over him because her body craved him like he was freaking manna from heaven? Uh, no. That was not a part of her game plan. She would give herself last night as a freak moment of insanity after missing him as badly as she had, but no more. That’d been her last freebie. There wouldn’t be any others.
When they’d climbed into the truck that morning, both of them taking the backseat again, Eli had turned to her and asked, “Are you okay?” At her questioning look, he’d stiffly explained his concern. “I wasn’t thinking about the bullet graze last night. Did I hurt you?”
“My side is fine,” she’d murmured. He’d caused her pain, just not physically.
As if he’d read her mind, he’d said, “I wasn’t rejecting you, Rey. I was—”
“It doesn’t matter,” she’d cut in, watching the clouds through her window as the wind blew them across the sky like puffs of dandelion seeds. “I don’t care.”
“That’s a damn lie. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be hurt. And I’m sorry as hell that it happened, because I didn’t mean to hurt you. Not last night, and not before. That was the last thing that I... Damn it, I was trying to pro—”
Her head had whipped to the side so quickly her hair smacked her in the face. “If you say you were trying to protect me, I will get out of this truck and I won’t get back in it. Understood?”
“We need to talk about this,” he’d argued.
“No, we don’t need to do anything, because the time for talking was last night. Now you can just forget that anything ever happened.”
He’d muttered something under his breath that she didn’t catch, but didn’t say anything more when Kyle and Lev hopped in the front, the blond merc taking the first stint behind the wheel. She’d balled up a sweatshirt Kyle offered her, using it as a pillow, and slept.
Then, when they’d stopped for lunch a little while ago, she made sure to catch Eli alone before they entered the restaurant, and told him, “I don’t know what your problem is, and I don’t care. I just want you to know that what happened last night—that’s it, Eli. It doesn’t happen again. You don’t get to keep making me feel like a fool.”
She hadn’t waited around to get his reaction, heading inside to join the others. He’d come in a few minutes later, and passed on ordering anything, which had garnered some interested looks from his friends. Lev had lifted his brows at her, as if to say What’d you do to him? She’d shrugged in a I have no idea what his problem is kind of way, but the merc didn’t buy it, his sea-colored gaze filled with curiosity. Too drained to worry about any of it, she’d sucked down a few spoonfuls of soup and resumed her nap once they were all back on the road.
Or at least she’d tried to. Unfortunately, sleep eluded her for the second part of the day, and it wasn’t just Eli’s brooding presence that had her feeling so restless. It was the entire situation.
After so many days like this, cooped up in a vehicle, Carla was thankful her mother had never been the family