CHAPTER TEN
“RAFE,” she whispered, going very still. “Put the axe down. Please.”
He looked down at the menacing tool as if just now noticing it. “I’m not going to hurt you with this. I’m giving it back to you. Remember, I borrowed it from you last month.” His eyes came back up to glare at her. “But I’m glad your opinion of me is so low now that you think I’d hurt a defenseless woman. Even one who betrayed me like you have.”
“I’m sorry, Rafe,” she said, clutching the basket of eggs to her chest. “It’s been really crazy, and I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”
He leaned the axe against the tree stump she used to split logs. “Yeah well, you wouldn’t have seen me at all if you hadn’t decided to come out to your hen house at the same time I decided to return your axe.”
She looked down at her eggs. “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have come out to the hen house if somebody had left us some food. The age-old tradition of helping your fellow wolf seems to have fallen by the way side since last night’s moon.”
His gaze went angry and cold. “Maybe they’re too embarrassed for you. Everybody heard you screaming last night, and this morning, and then again a couple of hours ago. You could barely bring yourself to kiss me, but apparently all you want to do with him is fuck.” He sneered. “If I’d known you had that in you, I might have taken you up on your offer to fuck me before your heat night. You know, the one you made less than forty-eight hours ago?”
Shame curdled her insides. “I’m sorry, Rafe. I don’t have the words to tell you how sorry I am.” She took a step toward him. “As cliché as this sounds, I never meant to hurt you. And I was telling the truth when I said you were my best friend. If he hadn’t been there when I went into heat—”
He cut her off with a rough shake of his head. “I don’t want to hear what happened or any of your excuses. I don’t give a damn anymore, Chloe. We are definitely no longer friends. In fact, my new number one goal in life is to try to forget I was ever stupid enough to fall in love with you.”
He looked so hurt that Chloe felt torn between begging him to forgive her and comforting him as she always did when he got angry. In the end, she reached out and took him into her arms, hugging him as tightly as she could. “I’m sorry. I’d give anything not to have hurt you this way.”
For a moment his arms wrapped around her, too, and he hugged her back, just as tight. But then he said, “I can smell your heat—and his fucking scent all over you.” Rafe’s voice cracked, and that broke her, too.
She cried into his shoulder for what they’d lost, for what they could have been if Rafe had been there when she went into heat and not the Viking.
But he only let the embrace go on for a little while before pulling away from her. “I’m leaving town for a few weeks. I’m going to spend spring with my family in Alaska.”
By “family in Alaska,” he meant the king of Alaska. His father’s best friend was the alpha of Alaska. And though Rafe wasn’t actually related by blood to the king or his three daughters, they’d spent so many summers in each other homes that they referred to each other as family.
She almost told him to say hi to Alisha, her favorite of the Alaska alpha’s three daughters, but then she remembered what Rafe had said about them no longer being friends. Said and probably meant.
As if reading her thoughts, he said, “I want you both gone when I get back. Especially him. If he’s still here, I swear to God, I will ghost him, I don’t care what it fucking takes.”
Her eyes widened in alarm. “First of all, you’re not the alpha yet, and even if you were, you couldn’t just banish me. Second of all, where am I supposed to go if I don’t live in Wolf Springs? This is my home, the only one I’ve ever known.”
“Actually, it’s my home. I own the mortgage, and I never charged you rent. So you have no rights when it comes to this place,” he reminded her. “You can either move to another wolf town or go back to wherever the Viking came from. I don’t care what you do. I never want to see you again.”
“Rafe—”
He turned around and began walking away from her without another word.
“Rafe,” she called after him again.
But he just left without ever once looking back at her. She knew he didn’t, because she watched him walk away, until he disappeared into the distance.
FENRIS WOKE UP HUNGRY AND COLD and slightly sore from having passed much time in a bathing tub. Yet, his body immediately craved his fated mate again. More than food, more than warmth, more than any comfort that sleeping on top of a true bed might afford him.
As a wolf of twenty and seven winters, he had seen many of his fellow pack members go into a mating frenzy with a she-wolf in heat, but of course he had never experienced it for himself.
Though the scent of a female’s heat arousal had intrigued him, it had never sent him over the edge as it did with some wolves, causing good friends to turn on each other and attack the other with battle axes, if it meant claiming the she-wolf they desired.
But the lot of a fated mate seemed to be even worse. He had been more than ready to kill the man who dared to kiss his dark beauty even before they mated. Now the mere thought of that other wolf touching what was his made him want to learn one of his aunt’s darker spells so he might run the man through with his sword, bring him back to life, then so end him again. Morbid thoughts, indeed. And not ones befitting a Fenris.
Fenris alphas did not get into fights over she-wolves. They were Fenris alphas, which meant such was never necessary. Any she-wolf in heat living on his lands would gladly have him as her mate if he would claim her. Indeed, another alpha king in his position would have simply chosen the most beautiful maiden in his village, spoken her name as his for her heat night, and put a pup in her belly.
But Fenris had been too occupied with the setting right of his kingdom in the wake of his father’s rule that he had not cared to bother with such things. There had been alliances to re-forge, enemies to push back, hurt egos to soothe with riches, which he had been pressed to seek out himself since his father had done little to replenish their coffers during his last days as king.
In truth, the travails of rebuilding their kingdom had made the thought of mating, especially a fated mating, distasteful to Fenris. If he had been left to his own devices, he might not have bothered with the matter for another five to ten winters.