Alpha Betrayed: A Dark Shifter

Ford

Tonight’ssafe house is on a hill overlooking a wide valley, with a silvery glimpse of the sea beyond, glittering in the moonlight. The cottage with the tin roof and covered front porch is even smaller than the farmhouse. But even if it were the size of Hammer’s summer mansion, I’d still be feeling restless.

We’re so close to the next step.

So close to being beyond Hammer’s reach.

I keep tossing and turning in bed, certain the other shoe is about to drop, that an assassin or Hammer himself is going to show up and mow us all down before our fresh start can become a reality.

“Can’t sleep, either?” I settle onto the wide porch swing next to Juliet, who’s dressed in a borrowed pair of Natalie’s fancy silk pajamas with a towel wrapped around her hair.

“I haven’t tried yet,” she says softly, gaze still fixed on the horizon. “My thoughts are racing too fast.”

“Same. Feels like there’s a swarm of locusts trapped in my chest.”

Her lips twitch. “You really are a poet.”

I give her bent knee a playful push. “Don’t make fun of me. We’re on the same side now, remember?”

“I wasn’t making fun. I was making an observation. But let me know if you need help with your papers. My freshman lit course was pretty gnarly. I only swung an A minus.”

“You were at a tough school,” I remind her.

“So? Lost Moon is supposed to be academically rigorous. At least if the message boards on the dark web are to be believed. I came across several students trying to buy answer keys for tests and papers on the fall of the Russian empire. They seemed concerned about flunking out.”

I grunt. “You wouldn’t think the school would allow access to the dark web from their servers.”

“You wouldn’t think, but…” She shifts to face me. “Should we make a backup plan? A way to stay in touch if I fail the trials and get sent away? Maybe a PO Box or a shared email address or something? We wouldn’t have to send the emails or risk them being traced. We could communicate in drafts or something.”

“You’re going to pass,” I say, not wanting to think about failure right now.

“We don’t know that. Natalie’s obnoxiously optimistic and even she said there’s a chance I won’t. She’s worried. I can tell. Her left eye was twitching while she cut my hair.”

“What?” I glance up at the towel, my throat tightening. “You cut it?”

“And stripped the brown dye out. I wanted to look more like me again. I thought it might help.”

“How much did you cut?”

She smirks. “Why? Got a thing for long hair? Don’t worry, Natalie’s is still long and glossy and gorgeous.”

I cringe. “Gross. Natalie slept with Hammer. I don’t share women with my stepfather.”

“So? It was just a work thing with them. With the two of you, it would be special and beautiful. A tender meeting of two sexy bodies destined to give each other pleasure.”

I give her knee a rougher shove this time. “You suck. You really do.”

She laughs, and my heart instantly feels lighter. “Sorry. Couldn’t resist. For what it’s worth, I think she likes you. She was asking what you were like when we were younger. Were you always a ‘rough around the edges knight in shining armor,’ was how she put it.”

I exhale, stretching my arms across the back of the swing. “And what did you tell her? That I was an a*****e who bullied his little stepsister?”

“No, I told her you tried really hard to be the man Hammer wanted you to be,” she says. “But that it didn’t take because you aren’t that kind of man. You’re actually a good guy. A shameless horndog who thinks way too highly of his own d**k, but…a good guy.”

I nod, chest tight all over again. “Thanks. Hearing you say that, and knowing you believe it…” I clear my throat. “It means a lot.”

She pokes my knee with her bare toe. “Yeah, yeah, don’t get sappy on me. We still have serious things to discuss before the first day of school.”

“Such as?” I grab her foot before she can tuck it back beneath her and wrap my hands around it, shivering on her behalf. “Shit, woman, your dogs are freezing. Give me the other one, I’ll warm them up.”

She rolls her eyes. “My dogs?”

“Your feet. Your cute little dogs and all ten freezing piggies, they need body heat before they turn to footsicles and fall off.”

She begrudgingly shifts to put both her feet in my lap. I curl my fingers around them and will my warmth into her skin. She snorts.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing. I just…” She snort-huffs again. “I don’t think anyone has ever touched my feet before.”

My brows lift. “Really? Chase too posh to give his girl a foot rub?”

“No, we just…” She shrugs. “It never came up, I guess. He rubbed my shoulders once, after I’d been studying all night for a big test. Seems like eons ago. I hope he wasn’t too sad when I disappeared.”

“Maybe you can let him know you’re okay, someday,” I say, even though I’d be happy if she never talked to Chase or any of her other exes ever again. It’s ridiculous, but I’m f*****g possessive when it comes to Juliet. The thought of another man so much as rubbing her feet makes me want to rip throats out first and ask questions never.

I’m probably not the “good guy” she thinks I am.

But I’m trying, I really am.

“Maybe,” Juliet echoes after a moment. “But starting tomorrow morning, I’m going to try not to think about Chase or our life before or anything that happened at the circus. I know myself. I’m not good at lying. If don’t buy into the cover story, at least a little, no one else is going to believe it, either.”

I nod. “That’s smart. And makes it less likely we’ll slip up and say something we shouldn’t.”

“But I don’t want to totally forget, either. That might make me crazy,” she says, before adding in a smaller voice. “My head isn’t in a great place right now, Ford.”

I smile. “No shit, Sherlock.”

Her focus jerks to my face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means it would be psychotic if your head were in a good place after everything you’ve been through. It’s normal to be f****d up right now, Juliet. It would be f****d up if you weren’t f****d up.”

The tension eases from her legs and I resume rubbing her still chilly toes. “You’re right.”

“I usually am.”

She exhales and rolls her eyes again, this time so hard I’m a little worried they’re going to get stuck back there. “You’re impossible. You make it so hard to be nice to you.”

“Then be mean to me,” I say, tipping my head closer to hers. “That can be fun, too.”

“Impossible,” she repeats, her breath warm on my lips. She swallows but doesn’t pull back. “All I was trying to say is that I think it would be nice if we had one night a week, a night when we don’t have any classes or obligations with our new clans, to just…be us. The real us. We could find somewhere private, where we wouldn’t be overhead, and talk for a while before we go back to being Juliet Laurent and Bradford Titsworth.”

I wince at the sound of my new last name, but agree, “Yeah. That sounds good. Like a weekly date night.”

“A weekly partners-in-taking-down-Hammer night,” she corrects, her breath still sweet and warm on my lips, smelling of the lemonade she had with dinner. “Or weekly friend night, I guess.”

“Your cranky acceptance of my friendship is hot as f**k,” I whisper, angling my head to one side.

“You have to stop flirting with me.”

“I don’t,” I say. “And I won’t. Because you keep flirting back.”

“I do not,” she says, leaning in until the curve of her breast presses against my arm and the tip of her nose teases against mine.

“Liar, liar, pajama pants on fire,” I whisper. I want to k**s her again, want it even more than I did that day in the woods. In just a few days, she’s gotten so deep under my skin that even the thought of hanging out with her as buddies once a week sounds like a good time.

But I want more than just friendship. I want nights like this, with her feet in my lap and her company and the incomparable high of feeling that I’m getting closer to a person who understands me like no other. It’s not just that we were raised in the same pack or betrayed by the same man. It’s something deeper. It’s in the way she looks at the world, the way she’s always thinking ten steps ahead and planning to protect us both. It’s in her deadpan humor and her rusty laugh and the way she trusts her tiny self into my keeping.

I could break her with my bare hands, but she isn’t afraid. Not even close.

She lives to bust my balls and put me in my place and the weird thing is…I kind of love that, too, love that she’s making me work for it.

But I refuse to make the first move again. The next time we k**s it’s going to be because Juliet can’t help herself, because she wants me too badly to listen to all the voices in her head telling her we don’t have a chance.

“I had something else I wanted to talk about,” she says, her breath coming faster as I move my hands slowly up her legs, squeezing the muscles as I go.

“Okay talk.” The torture of being so close to her but our lips still remaining a whisper apart is making my c**k throb. If she looks down, she’ll see the tent in my sweatpants, but I don’t care.

Let her see what she does to me, how much I want her.

“I can’t remember what it was,” she says with a soft growl. “You distracted me with this crap again.”

I grin and bump her nose with mine again, playfully this time. “You mean my burning hot s*x vibe? The one that gets to you no matter how hard you fight it? Don’t even try to deny it, Growly. I can smell how much you want it.”

“At least I’m not sporting an e******n big enough to club small animals to death,” she shoots back.

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” I murmur. “But I’m not into hurting small animals. I’m into making horny little shifters whimper and m**n and cry out my name as they feel my c**k fill them to the brim for the first time.” I curl my hand around her inner thigh, inches away from the intoxicating heat between her legs. “We could do it right here. You straddle me on the swing, and I’ll play with your nipples while you take your time sinking down, nice and slow. We’ll get you so wet, it won’t hurt at all, no matter how tight you are. I’ll make sure you’re dripping for me, Jules. I’ll make you feel so f*****g good, my d**k will be your new favorite toy.”

She makes a slightly tortured, entirely turned-on sound and my c**k practically bursts through the cotton fabric of my sweats in excitement. I’m ready to shove my pants down and give her full control of her new plaything when the door swings open behind us.