Chapter 5
1502 Words
His thumb kept moving.
Slow circles on the inside of my knee. Steady. Patient. Like he had all the time in the world and my leg was exactly where his hand was supposed to be. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking straight ahead through the windshield, his jaw set, his profile carved from the passing headlights.
I stared at his hand. Long fingers. Wide palm. The knuckles were scarred, faint white lines crosshatched over tanned skin. These were not the hands of a man who sat behind a desk. These were hands that had done things. Built things. Broken things.
And right now they were on my knee and I couldn’t think straight.
“What am I to you?” The question fell out of my mouth before I could stop it.
He didn’t look at me. “Mine.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you need.”
Frustration spiked through me hot enough to override the haze his touch was creating. “No, it’s not. You just uprooted my entire life. Told me I belong to you. Put me in the back of a car headed to a country I’ve never been to. The least you could do is tell me what’s waiting for me when we get there.”
His thumb stopped circling.
For a long beat, the only sound was the hum of tires on asphalt. Then his hand slid higher. Not much. An inch, maybe two, until his palm rested on my lower thigh. His fingers curled around the outside of my leg like he was measuring it. Testing how much of me fit in his grip.
“What’s waiting for you,” he said slowly, his voice low enough that it vibrated through the leather seat, “is my territory. My castle. My pack. You’ll have a room. Clothes. Food. Protection. Everything you need.”
“And what do you get?”
His head turned. Those blue eyes found mine in the dark and held them with an intensity that made my stomach clench. “You.”
The single syllable hung between us. I waited for him to elaborate. To explain. To give me something more than possessive one-word answers that told me nothing and made me feel everything.
He didn’t.
He turned back to the window and his hand stayed on my thigh.
“Did you feel it?” I tried again. Quieter this time. “In the hall. When you walked in and looked at me. Did you feel something?”
His fingers tightened on my leg. A reflex. Fast and involuntary before he controlled it.
“Don’t ask me questions you’re not ready to hear the answers to.”
“How do you know what I’m ready for?”
“Because you’re pressed against that door like you’re about to jump out of a moving car.” He glanced at me. The ghost of something that wasn’t quite a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “You want answers but you’re terrified of what they might be. So you’re stuck somewhere between running toward me and running away.”
I hated that he was right. I hated that he could read me that easily. That I was that transparent.
“You don’t know me well enough to read me.”
“I know enough.” His thumb resumed its slow circuit, higher now, on the bare skin just above my knee where my dress had ridden up. “I know your heart rate has been over a hundred since you got in this car. I know your scent changed the second I touched you.”
Oh God.
“I know,” he continued, his voice dropping to something rough and intimate that had no business existing in a shared backseat, “that you’re wet right now. And you have been since I put my hand on your knee.”
Heat flooded my face so fast I felt dizzy. I tried to close my thighs but his hand was between them and the movement only pressed my legs tighter around his fingers.
“That’s not fair,” I whispered.
“What’s not fair?”
“You can smell everything I feel. Hear my heartbeat. I have no idea what’s going on inside your head.”
He leaned toward me. Close enough that his breath ghosted over my ear. Close enough that I could feel the heat rolling off his body.
“Don’t be embarrassed.” His lips were so close to my skin that if I turned my head even slightly they’d make contact. “Your body knows what your mind hasn’t caught up to yet.”
His fingers slid higher. Past the hem of my dress. Onto bare thigh. My breath stuttered and my hips shifted on the seat before I could stop them.
His hand stopped moving. Right there, high on my inner thigh, his fingertips resting against the heated skin, so close to where I was aching that I could feel the proximity like a pulse.
One touch. If he moved his fingers half an inch they’d brush against the damp cotton between my legs and he would know exactly how much he affected me. Not just from scent. From touch. Physical, undeniable proof.
He held position for three agonizing seconds.
Then his fingers trailed lightly, barely there, across the seam of my underwear.
One stroke. Featherlight. Over cotton that was already soaked through.
I made a sound. Small, involuntary, somewhere between a gasp and a whimper.
Luca pulled his hand back.
He settled into his seat, turned his face toward the window, and crossed his arms over his chest like nothing had happened. Like he hadn’t just put his hand between my legs in the back of a moving car. Like I wasn’t sitting here trembling with my thighs pressed together and my underwear ruined.
I stared at him. My pulse was pounding in my throat, between my legs, behind my eyes. My whole body felt like a live wire stripped of its insulation.
He didn’t look at me.
We drove in silence for another five minutes before I trusted my voice.
“What the hell was that?”
“A preview.” He still wasn’t looking at me. But I caught his reflection in the window and his jaw was clenched tight enough to crack teeth. He wasn’t as unaffected as he was pretending to be.
“Of what?”
Now he looked at me. His blue eyes had gone dark, the pupils blown wide in the low light. “Of what happens when you stop pressing yourself against that door.”
I should have had a comeback. Should have said something sharp and self-possessed. Something that proved I wasn’t a twenty-two-year-old in over her head with a man who had been commanding rooms since before she was born.
Instead I pressed my forehead against the cold window and tried to remember how to breathe.
Twenty minutes later, the car turned into a private airfield. A white jet sat on the tarmac, its stairs already lowered, interior lights glowing through the oval windows.
Luca stepped out first and came around to open my door. He offered his hand. I looked at it. Those scarred knuckles. Those long fingers that had just been between my legs.
I took his hand.
The contact jolted up my arm and settled in my chest like an ember. He felt it too. I saw his grip tighten for a fraction of a second before he released me.
A pilot in a crisp uniform greeted us at the base of the stairs. “Alpha Luca. We’re ready for departure.”
“Good.” Luca’s hand found the small of my back, steering me toward the stairs. The touch was different now. Not teasing. Guiding. Possessive. A hand on a back that said this one is mine.
I climbed the stairs ahead of him, feeling his eyes on me the entire way up. The cabin was cream leather, polished wood, soft lighting. Through a doorway at the back, I caught a glimpse of a bedroom. A real bed with actual sheets.
Eleven hours. I was about to spend eleven hours locked in a flying metal tube with a man who had just touched me like he owned me and then withdrawn like I was something to be rationed.
I chose a seat and buckled myself in with hands that barely cooperated.
Luca dropped into the seat across the aisle. Not beside me. Across. He stretched his long legs out, rolled his sleeves higher, and pulled a leather folder from the seat pocket.
He opened it. Started reading. Like I wasn’t even there.
The engines hummed. The plane began to taxi.
I sat in my seat, thighs still pressed together, pulse still hammering, and watched Alpha Luca calmly flip through documents while my entire body screamed for him to finish what he’d started.
He didn’t look up once.
- Writer
