Page 83 of My Unhinged Alphas
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one you’re getting.”
She turns in the seat to look at me, Vale’s shirt bunched around her thighs, hair still a mess, mouth still a little bruised from everything that happened before I brought her out here. She looks exhausted. Pissed off. Alive in a way I can’t stop watching.
It would make more sense to lock this down, keep her under watch, wait for the next move to come to us. That’s what Knox would do. That’s what any sane man in my position would do.
But I never liked waiting.
And I definitely never liked safe.
I want to know what she does when the door opens and no one is physically blocking it. I want to know whether she runs, whether she lies, whether she goes home and pretends none ofthis happened, whether she looks over her shoulder for us every ten seconds or every thirty.
I want to see what the lamb does next.
So I drive.
The drive is quieter than I expected.
She sits beside me, close enough that I can feel the heat of her without touching her, and for once she isn’t fighting me, isn’t glaring, isn’t trying to claw her way out of her skin. She’s tense, though. I can see it in the way she holds herself, hands folded too tightly in her lap, shoulders pulled in like making herself smaller might help.
It won’t.
I glance at her for a second, then back at the road.
I still don’t understand it.
She isn’t my type. Or at least, she shouldn’t be. Too quiet on the surface. Too mousy. The kind of girl most men would overlook until she looked up and said something with teeth in it. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? She does have teeth. Under all that caution and wide-eyed shock, she’s got this stubborn little streak that keeps pushing through, even when it would be smarter for her to keep her mouth shut.
I don’t know why that gets to me.
Maybe because it surprised me.
Maybe because she surprised me.
I remember the way she came undone earlier, how she fought it even then, how her body gave away things her mouth wouldn’t. I remember the look on Vale’s face too, and I have to tighten my grip on the wheel for a second to stop myself from thinking about that too hard.
That annoys me more than it should.
She turns her head and catches me looking. “What?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
She gives me a look that says she doesn’t believe that for a second. Good. She shouldn’t.
Streetlights slide over her face in intervals, lighting her up and then taking her away again. Every time I look over, she seems slightly different. Softer in one moment. More guarded in the next. It does strange things to my head.
Part of me wants to know what she’d do if I pushed. Part of me wants to know what she sounds like when she stops pretending to be brave. Part of me wants to shake myself for even caring.
“You ask a lot of questions,” I say.
“That’s because nobody tells me anything.”
I smile a little. “That’s not true. I tell you things.”
“Not real things.”
“Safe things.”
