Alpha Betrayed: A Dark Shifter

JULIET

This is a mistake.

It’s even more of a mistake than it was this morning. Now I know that what I’m feeling is more than chemistry or being attracted to the only man I can trust right now.

Something deep in my bones demands Ford.

It isn’t howling for him or longing for him or crossing its fingers that things will work out—it’s demanding that I chain this man to my bed and have my way with him for oh, say…the rest of my life.

That’s enough to scare the shit out of me, even if it was just my cross to bear. But I already know that Ford feels it, too. If it were just my body’s demands, I could ignore them, suppress them, manage them in some way that wouldn’t derail everything I have planned. But Ford has no interest in ignoring our connection. This is what Ford has wanted all along, or at least since he learned I wasn’t the one who sold him into slavery.

He wants love and s*x and happily ever after and probably babies, too.

“Do you have a condom?” I murmur against his lips as he lays me on one of the lounge chairs at the edge of the roof, stretches out beside me, and continues doing things between my legs that make it almost impossible to think straight.

But I can’t get pregnant right now. I’m not sure I want to bring children into this f****d up world at any point, but especially not now.

If Ford doesn’t have protection, maybe that will be enough to give me the strength to walk away from all the things his fingers gliding in and out of my body make me feel.

“We won’t need it,” he says, kissing his way up my throat to the curve of my jaw. “My pants are staying on. This is all about you.”

His words make me shiver, and I’m not sure in a good way. “I’m not a charity case,” I snap.

“No, you’re a stress case who needs to come,” he says, rubbing one knuckle against my clit as his fingers continue to stoke the fire building within me. “And you took care of me this morning. Let me return the favor.”

I bite my l*p, my eyes squeezing closed with a hiss of pleasure as Ford bites my nipple through my dress. Everything he’s doing feels so good, so f*****g good, but also terrible.

No, not terrible.

Scary. Wild. Out of control.

There’s nothing more out of control than having an o****m, especially in front of another person. I’ve only done that a few times and that was in another life, when I was a happy college coed making out with my boyfriend, a guy I liked but already knew wasn’t the one for me. Some people might assume knowing Chase wasn’t my forever man would make things less intense between us, but I found it so freeing. When I was with him, I didn’t have to worry about the future. I knew we’d eventually go our separate ways, but until then I was free to enjoy his touch without wondering if we’d be able to make it work long-term.

But Ford is going to be in my life for a long time.

Even if I manage to convince him to back off and let me take the throne alone without a fight, he’s still part of my pack and one of my people. And I don’t see that changing. For all his hatred of Hammer, Ford is desperate to go home. He didn’t come to Zion until he was older, but he smells like one of us, thinks like one of us. He craves the sea in the summer and the mountain snow in the winter like a wolf who was born and raised in our little piece of paradise. As pack Alpha, I’ll have the power to banish anyone for any reason I see fit, but I could never deny Ford a place in a pack where he so clearly belongs.

Belonging is important, especially for wolves, and we’ve both had enough loneliness and isolation to last a lifetime.

Which means there will be no escape from him. From his touch or his scent or all the out-of-control things he makes me feel. Every moment I share with him like this is ammunition he can use against me later, a link in the chain he’s building with every sigh he wrenches from my throat against my will.

“I can’t do this.” I try to sit up, but Ford pulls his hand from between my legs and presses it gently to my chest.

“Yes you can,” he says. “You’re not broken.”

“I didn’t mean that. I’m fully capable of having an o****m, I just—”

“I didn’t mean that, either,” he cuts in, guiding the strap of my dress off my left shoulder. “I meant that you can get out of your head. You can stop worrying that letting me make you feel good is a trap or a cage.”

I press my lips together, not liking how easily he seems to be reading my mind.

“I’m not here to trap you.” He pulls the strap lower, until the top of my dress draws away from my skin, exposing my breast to the cool evening air.

I knew I should have worn a bra, but I couldn’t find one that didn’t show behind the thin strap. Now, Ford has one less obstacle on the path to dismantling my defenses.

His fingers skim around the edge of my nipple, making the emptiness between my legs feel even more unbearable as he adds, “This is a gift. No strings, no demands.” He bends his head, flicking his tongue over my tightly puckered skin. “After, we can pretend it never happened if you want.”

My fingers are in his hair again, clinging to him as he continues to lick and tease, making me even wetter.

And weaker, a fact I prove as I confess, “I don’t know if I can forget. It’s never felt like this.”

“Like what?” His hand is back between my legs again, gliding down the front of my panties as he drags his teeth over my nipple.

I gasp and spread my thighs wider, begging for him to fill me again, a silent plea he answers by driving two thick fingers into where I ache. My head falls back even as my fingers dig into his scalp, holding him to my nipple as he sucks it deep into the wet heat of his mouth and stars dance behind my eyes.

“Like what, Juliet?” he asks again, but I can’t remember what he’s talking about. The past and the future are both falling away as he f***s me with long, easy strokes of his brilliant fingers.

“Don’t know,” I breathe, my h**s lifting into his touch with increasing urgency. “God, I don’t know, Ford. Just please, don’t stop. Don’t ever stop.”

“Never,” he promises. Then he drags the other side of my dress down with his teeth and sets to work tormenting my other nipple and I’m reduced to a panting, trembling, moaning mess. I writhe beneath him, whimpering and gasping as he brings me to the brink and keeps me there for what feels like forever, teetering on the edge, but not letting me go.

“Please, oh please,” I beg, my nails now digging into his shoulders through his shirt. He has one of my legs trapped beneath his thick thigh, pinning me on the lounge as he penetrates me with harder thrusts of his hand, but it isn’t enough.

I want more. I want to disintegrate. I want oblivion and peace and bliss, and I sense I’m only going to find that with him inside me.

I reach down, dragging my nails over the rock-hard bulge beneath his jeans. “F**k me, Ford. I want your c**k in me.”

He brings his lips to mine, kissing me as he says, “I told you. My pants stay on.”

“No,” I say, popping the button on his jeans and dragging the zipper down. “They’re coming off and you’re coming inside me.”

He g****s into my mouth. “Don’t say shit like that, Juliet. You have no idea what it does to me.”

“I didn’t mean come inside me.” The small scrap of common sense still functional in my brain hurries to add, “I meant I want you to be my first. We can use a condom.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Then you can pull out,” I say, my breath rushing out with relief now that I’ve managed to get my hand down his boxers and wrapped around his e******n. “Just pull out and come on my stomach, but I need to feel you inside me first. Please, Ford. I need it. I need you.”

“And I need to feel you come on my c**k,” he says, his thumb rubbing my clit again as his fingers thrust faster inside me. “And then I need to keep f*****g you, riding you, marking you with my scent until I can’t take it anymore and I come buried so f*****g deep in your p***y, Juliet. If I f**k you right now, I’m not pulling out. I’m going to shoot every drop inside you.”

I m**n and buck harder into his touch, torn between being horrified by what he’s saying and so turned on I can’t bear it.

“I’d try to f**k a baby into you,” he continues, building the twin flames of horror and hunger. “Because I can’t think of anything hotter than you pregnant with my child, showing the whole world what I do to you behind closed doors. That I make you spread your legs and beg me to come in you bare because that’s how you need it. How you need my c**k. You need just you and me and nothing between us.”

I come with a cry that Ford muffles with his lips on mine. His tongue drives into my mouth as he coaxes out my release with his fingers. He makes my wrenching, almost-too-intense-to-bear o****m last for so long that by the time it’s over I’m too weak to fight him when he pulls back and quickly closes his pants.

“No, don’t,” I whisper in a pleasure-drunk voice.

He glances down at me, the heat in his eyes making my nipples tingle all over again. “Yes. My pants stay zipped. Or I mean it. I’ll do something stupid.”

“We can’t have a baby right now, Ford,” I say, leaving the “or ever” part unspoken, not wanting to upset him after the incredible thing he just did to my body.

“I know that, believe me,” he says, dragging a hand through his short hair. “But my d**k doesn’t.”

“So, is that your kink? Imagining getting your lover knocked-up?” I ask, wondering if it might be mine, as well. Before tonight, if you’d asked me if I found the thought of being impregnated without my express, previous consent was hot, I would have vomited on your shoes.

But damn…even now, after having my hunger thoroughly sated, the thought of him guiding the tip of his bare c**k to my entrance and pushing inside makes me tremble.

It’s insane, but also very exciting.

“No,” he says, his throat working as his gaze rakes down my body. “Not with anyone else, anyway. But with you…” He winces, almost like he’s in pain. “F**k, you look so beautiful like this. Half-naked and pink all over from me making you come.” He frowns. “Really pink…”

I glance down, seeing that he’s right. And that I can see much better in the near darkness than I did before, when the implant was still blocking parts of my abilities. Either that or I’m…

“Am I glowing?” I ask, fear creeping in to banish some of the warm, happy feelings pulsing through my body. A beat later the pink fades a little.

“I think you are,” Ford says. “Or you were,” he adds, as my embarrassment intensifies and the pink aura hovering around my skin continues to dissipate. He grins. “I literally gave you an afterglow.”

“Stop it,” I say, tugging my straps up and flipping my skirt down. “This isn’t something to be proud of. It’s weird.”

“How do you know? Could be a normal phoenix thing. Maybe you all turn pink after you come.”

“Maybe,” I mutter, hoping Catherine finds a phoenix journal in the library’s collection. And that the person isn’t shy about sharing all the intimate details about what it means to be our kind of shapeshifter. “Guess I won’t have the option of faking it anymore. Unless I’m wearing the implant locket.”

The thought of putting that thing on, however, even just to sleep safely, sounds increasingly awful. Yes, all the new information flooding my senses is intense, but now that I’ve relaxed a little, it doesn’t feel as scary. It feels…honest, real, like a piece of myself I didn’t realize was missing is clicking into place, making me whole in a way I’ve never been before.

“Why do girls fake it?” Ford asks, sounding offended. “I don’t get it. Why make your guy think he’s doing something right when he’s not?”

“Sometimes you’re just too tired or in your head or whatever,” I say, sitting up and swinging my legs over the side of the lounge. “And you want to stop trying without hurting your guy’s feelings. Or wounding his fragile male ego. Chase was so sweet, but even he got weird about that kind of stuff. If I couldn’t get there, it became all about him and his need to dominate my v****a with pleasure or something, even though I promised I was happy to stop when we did with no hard feelings.”

Ford grunts. “It should never be all about him.”

“Agreed.”

“And you’re not going to have to fake it ever again,” he adds. “I know exactly how to get you there. I can feel what your body needs.”

“So, you kept me on the edge for so long on purpose?” I ask as I rise to my feet and turn to face him across the chair.

His gaze locks with mine, sending another sizzle tingling across my skin. “I wanted to make it last. In case it was the only time you let me in.”

“I don’t like being out of control. I never did, even before, but now…”

“It feels scary,” he finishes. “I get it.”

“It feels like death,” I correct. “Doesn’t it feel that way to you? After years of having no control over anything, doesn’t giving it up feel terrifying? Like annihilation?”

He seems to consider that for a moment, but eventually shakes his head. “No.”

I frown. “Why?”

“I guess I feel safe with you,” he says. “Though I probably shouldn’t.”

His words hurt a little. I don’t want to be his wife, but I care for him. “I don’t mean you any harm, Ford. And even if I did, I wouldn’t come after you while your pants were down around your ankles. I’m not that kind of person.”

“I know you’re not,” he says, a wry smiling crooking his lips. “I wasn’t thinking about that kind of safety, Jules. I was talking about what you’re going to do to my heart.”

I bristle. “I’m not going to do anything to it. I’m not interested in your heart.”

“Exactly,” he says, his grin still in place but sadder at the edges than it was before. “But that’s okay. I have hope you might come around.”

I sigh, not wanting to crush him, but not feeling like I have a choice. I can’t let him labor under delusions that this whatever it is between us will ever be more than physical. “I don’t think so,” I finally say, as gently as I can. “I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in that kind of future. With anyone. It’s not personal.”

“But you can feel it,” he says, his eyes burning into mine. “You feel what I feel. That we were meant to be together, that it’s f*****g inevitable and right and good. That’s why you were so angry before.”

“I feel something,” I admit. “A connection, a…possibility I didn’t realize was there before. But nothing’s inevitable. We both have free will, Ford.”

“And you’re stubborn as hell,” he says with a humorless laugh.

“I know what I want and I’m not going to let anything divert me from my course,” I counter. “That’s not stubbornness, that’s determination. And commitment.”

“It might also be cutting off your nose to spite your face. To spite both our faces.”

“This is why we shouldn’t have done this,” I say, crossing to the table where the locket still rests on the towel. “And why we shouldn’t do it again. We have enough to worry about without adding unnecessary drama onto our plates.”

I turn my back to him, but before I can put the locket on, he’s suddenly behind me with his arm around my waist.

“All right,” he says, tugging me sharply back against him, until my a*s is pressed against his still rigid e******n and his breath is hot on my neck. “But when it’s all over and we’ve passed the trials, you have to promise me one thing.”

“I don’t have to promise you anything,” I say, even as I arch my back, pressing closer to his hard-on because my body is weak when it comes to this man. So f*****g weak, I’m okay with putting the locket on and numbing out a little, no matter how good it’s starting to feel not to have my senses stunted.

“After the trials, you keep the locket off when we’re alone together,” he says, reading my mind again as he cups my breasts in his big hands. He finds my already hard nipples with his fingers and pinches them through the fabric of my dress, making my p***y throb. “If I have to fight the things I feel for you without any help, it only seems fair that you should, too.”

“Since when is life fair?” I rasp as vivid fantasies of Ford bending me over this table and taking me from behind pulse through my head, sending fresh heat rushing onto my panties.

I fumble for the locket, needing every bit of help I can get fighting the urge to beg Ford to f**k me, but he covers my hand with his, pinning it to the table.

“Or are you afraid you can’t cut it?” he asks, nipping at my ear as one hand leaves my breast to skim down to my waist. A moment later, he’s flipped up my skirt and shoved my panties aside, wrenching a hungry sound from low in my throat as he slides a finger inside me. “Are you afraid, without your crutch, you’ll be too weak to be the ice princess all alone on her throne?”

The throne.

It’s the best thing he could have said.

It reminds me that Ford wants my throne as much as he wants me—probably a hell of a lot more. This isn’t just about desire or fated connection for him. It’s all wrapped up in his l**t for power that, by rights and tradition, is mine, and mine alone. That’s never going to be acceptable to me. Even if I fell head over heels for him, I could never be sure if Ford wanted me or my birthright.

There would always be a power imbalance. He would know I wanted him for him, in spite of my serious reservations, and I would always wonder if I would have been enough all on my own.

Clinging to that truth, and how shitty I know it would be to live that kind of life, I pull in a bracing breath and say, “I have to go, Ford. I have to rest for first day of classes. I have everything on my list that you have on yours, as well as learning to shift practice after dinner.”

“Where are you practicing?” he asks, brushing one finger over my clit as he pulls back and thrusts into me again.

I swallow hard, fighting the shiver of pleasure building at the base of my spine. “I’m not sure yet. Catherine and Alexander are going to help me so…they’ll probably…” I bite my l*p until it hurts and will myself to focus. “They’ll tell me soon, I guess.”

“I’ll touch base with Alexander then and meet you there,” he says, still finger f*****g me with a skill that has me trembling again, no matter how hard I try to fight it. “I want to do everything I can to help you succeed.”

“Then let me…go,” I say, a gasp escaping my lips as he grips me harder in response, holding me prisoner with one strong arm as he drives the other faster between my legs.

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” he says. “Not until you promise to play fair with me after the trials are over.”

“F**k, Ford,” I growl, the words a curse and a secret wish, all wrapped up in one.

“I won’t ask for another thing from you,” he says, quickly bringing me to the edge all over again. “I’ll devote myself to helping you make it through the trials and craft a takeover plan that can’t fail. I just want to know I won’t be alone in this f*****g overwhelming, soul-crushing need while I do it.”

I cry out as I come on his hand again, shaking from head to toe as I sag onto the table on my belly. But even as pleasure burns through my every cell and my skin starts to glow pink again, a part of me still wants to beg him for his c**k. He’s brilliant with his hands, but they’re not enough. I need to be joined with him, to drown in him, to merge with him so completely words like “yours” and “mine” become irrelevant because there is only “us.”

Which means I can’t afford to play fair.

“Fine, I promise,” I lie, already plotting how to keep the implant close without him knowing. I can tuck it in my sock or sew it into the lining of my coat or ask Catherine to put it back into my wrist if things get bad enough.

I will do whatever it takes to stay in control of my own destiny, even if it means giving up my shifter form again once the trials are over.

“Good.” Ford brushes my hair to one side and k****s my neck as he pulls his fingers from between my legs and guides my dress down over my thighs. “I’ll walk you to your room and then I need to go. I have to get back to my dorm before someone notices I’m gone.”

“Better hope your roommate is a hard sleeper,” I say, thinking of starving children and all the souls lost to the Circus of the Strange and my garbage, daughter-abandoning mother, anything to banish the pink afterglow from my skin and get my head back in the game.

“I don’t have a roommate,” he says as I put the locket on, instantly making fighting my l**t at least ten times easier. “So, if you want a night alone together, I have a place we can go. I’ll sneak you up the tree outside and in through my window and make you come on my c**k all night long.”

“Thanks for the offer,” I say as I turn to face him, “but we’re focusing on other things until after the trials, remember?”

He glances down at the locket and back at my face. “I hate that thing.”

“I hate that the trials are rigged against my entire dorm. We have to help them, Ford. Especially Diana and Layla.”

He nods. “We will.”

“You promise?”

“I promise,” he says, taking my hand as he starts toward the stairwell.

Hoping his promises will prove more trustworthy than mine, I let him lead me down the two floors to my hallway and deliver me to the door of my room. But I don’t k**s him goodbye, even though I want to.

That would send the wrong message and add to the hurt Ford’s going to feel when he realizes I’m serious about ruling alone. About being alone. If I can’t have a connection I know is based purely on love, I don’t want one at all.

It’s a vow that comes back to haunt me in my dreams, as my subconscious torments me with a variety of imagined futures, all of them cold and passionless without Ford in my bed.

But that’s just fine. I’m used to bad dreams.

It’s the good ones that scare me.