Page 79 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
Ren closed the book with his finger inside to keep his place and looked out the window. The garden was green and still. A bird landed on the branch of a maple tree and tilted its head as if watching him.
Seventy-eight percent. Brody had knotted him. They hadn’t used a condom. Ren didn’t take birth control because the suppressants he’d been using since he was fifteen already contained a hormonal component that prevented ovulation, but those suppressants had been out of his system for days when Brody and he had fucked in that uncontrolled heat that had swept everything away.
He opened the book again.
“The knotting between destined mates has an average duration of forty-five minutes, compared to the usual fifteen or twenty. The longer duration exponentially increases the probability of implantation.”
Forty-five minutes. Ren remembered Brody’s weight on top of him, the heat that wouldn’t let up, the constant pressure of the knot filling him from within, and the way a fresh wave of pleasure would course down his spine every time he tried tomove. He hadn’t timed it. He wasn’t in any condition to time anything. But it had been long. Very long.
He closed the book and set it on the armrest of the chair.
He rested his head against the backrest and brought a hand to his flat stomach beneath Brody’s t-shirt. The fabric smelled of him. Ren took a deep breath and let the scent fill his lungs.
He did not want to be pregnant. Not now. Not amid that chaos where his father had put a price on his head and a Russian mobster was claiming him as his property, and his only protection was an alpha he’d known for less than two weeks.
He did not want to.
But his hand stayed there, on his stomach, and something opened up inside his chest like a sprout pushing through the earth before anyone had given it permission. Something that wasn’t fear or rejection. Something still and warm that looked all too much like tenderness.
Chapter 17
Ren dodged Jax’s hook with a twist of his hips and landed a straight punch to his side that should have drawn a growl. It should have. But Jax absorbed the blow with his elbow and took half a step back returning nothing. Not a counterattack. Not a low kick. Not even one of those feints that always ended with Ren hitting the canvas.
Ren frowned.
They’d been going like this for forty minutes. Forty minutes of Jax moving as if Ren were made of blown glass. He blocked, dodged, redirected, but he didn’t strike. Not for real. Every time Ren left an opening—his left side, his guard down after a hook—Jax saw it, Ren knew he saw it, and he didn’t go in.
Ren clenched his teeth and charged in with a quick combination: jab, jab, cross. The cross connected with his chest, and Jax took two steps back, raising his open hands.
“Water.”
He went to the edge of the tatami, grabbed the bottle, and drank. Ren stood in the center with his bandaged fists hanging at his sides and sweat dripping down the back of his neck. He watched him drink. He watched how Jax avoided looking at him while wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and then looked at him, but out of the corner of his eye, quickly, like someonechecking to make sure an expensive vase is still intact on the shelf.
Three days. He’d been fighting like this for three days. Ren had thought the first day was just a bad training session. The second, a coincidence. But by the third, the pattern was so obvious it stung.
Jax set the bottle on the floor and sat down on the bench against the wall. His shoulders, massive even when relaxed, rose and fell with slow breaths. He threw a towel to Ren, who snatched it before it hit the ground, yet Ren did not use it to dry his face.
“Hey, I’m going out for a bit later. Do you need anything?”
The question sounded casual. Too casual for a man who was never casual about anything.
“Going out where?”
“Runs.” Jax shrugged. “I’ll stop by the drugstore to buy some bandages. Do you need anything?”
Drugstore.
The word hit him like a bucket of ice water. Drugstore. And the way Jax had treated him for three whole days, as if he were fragile, as if a well-placed punch could break more than just his pride. And that constant sidelong glance, checking, measuring, evaluating.
Ren felt the heat rise up his neck to his ears.
“Son of a bitch!”
Jax didn’t even flinch.
“What a bastard!” Ren ripped the bandages off his right hand with his teeth and threw them on the floor. “Damn his mouth! He told you!”
“Ren…”
