“Thereis something between us,” Lincoln insisted.
“Yeah. A wall. One I’m never tearing down,” I said coldly, walking on and trying to ignore the feeling of his eyes on my back.
“Sylvie,” he said, jogging after me. “You’re operating with only half the truth here.”
“Am I?” I asked, meeting his eyes without flinching at the blue and gold fires. “Did you, or did you not, hide the truth from me?”
His face screwed up in a grimace. “It’s not that simple,” he protested.
“Yes,” I said softly, “it is.” Then I kept going.
“You claim you want to know the truth. Now you’re walking away, refusing to hear it.”
I laughed. “Your problem is thinking that I could believe a word that comes out of your mouth. You would say anything to get me in bed, it seems. What would you have done if you got me there? Checked my hymen? If it’s intact, was I a good enoughgirl for you? If you broke it, would you be my savior? Bad news, mister wolf, it’s long gone. Guess I’m the bad girl now.”
I hadn’t even lifted my foot from the ground when the darkest, angriest snarl I’d ever heard erupted from Lincoln’s throat. It was the first time he’d ever directed it at me, and I froze, basic human fight-or-flight instincts kicking into high gear and urging me torun.
Lincoln stalked up next to me and around the front. “Hate me if you must,” he said with bared teeth, “but don’t youever suggest that I would use you for sex like that.”
His chest was heaving, his eyes narrowed to slits. “Maybe I didn’t tell you everything. But I had reasons for that. I’ll tell you, if you’d like to hear the whole story. Or you could claim to want to know but walk away anyway. Judge me on half the information. Just like my people tried to do to you until I came up with thisplan.”
I ground my teeth together at the challenge in his voice.
“A plan, by the way,” he added in a calmer, less threatening voice, “that was designed to try to prove youinnocent
, by the way. Though I’m sure that gets in the way of your fun little narrative that I was doing everything in my power to bend you over and fill you from behind until you screamed your throat raw with pleasure.”
His eyes bored into me the entire time, giving me no room to breathe, no room to conceal the primitive, need-driven reaction that occurred deep within me at his words. A reaction I could not control, though I did not desire it.
“Fine,” I said hoarsely, able to only inject a fraction of the sarcasm I wished for, “tell me the real story.”
Lincoln eyed me for a second or two and then nodded once. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Back to my cabin. Where we can sit and talk, like civilized people who are willing to actually listen to what the other has to say. Instead of shouting in public.” He gestured around us. “These are my people. They don’t need to see my dirty laundry aired like this. They have enough problems and fears of their own right now. I need them to know I will solve them all as well,if cooler heads prevail.”
The care for his people was admirable, even through my anger. I could not take that from him.
“Fine.” I set off for his house, not waiting to walk there with him. It was a handful of minutes’ walk, and we made it in silence.
“Any water?” he asked, doffing his shoes and heading right for the kitchen.
“Okay.”
He served us a pair of glasses filled with cold, clear water, putting them down on the table. We sat stiffly, facing each other.
“Where should I start?” he asked. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
“A simple question. A complex answer.” He drank. “On the one hand, my part with you is quite simple. Ever since the first time I saw you, my wolf and I have been drawn to you, like a magnet to metal. I don’t know why or how it happened. But something about you calls to me, Sylvie. When I’m not around you, I …”
His fingers curled around the table until the wood creaked. He glanced down, and with visible effort made himself relax.
I took a sip of water, looking away and trying to stay composed. Being alone with him like this, despite everything,was more difficult than I’d expected. Especially when he went ahead and said things like that to me.
“All I knew,” he continued eventually after recomposing himself, “is that I needed to spend more time with you. That was a problem, however, in the eyes of the elders.”
“Elders.” I chewed on my lower lip. “That would be the group of retirement home men who looked like they should be playing shuffleboard, not fighting evil?”
Lincoln snickered. “Shuffleboard. Oh, yes, I’ll have to rememberthat one.”
“I don’t understand, though,” I said, placing both hands on the table. “I am fairly confident that I’ve never met them before. Any of them. And I know I certainly have never done anything to offend them so badly.”
“I know.” Lincoln’s eyes softened with unexpected compassion, throwing me wildly off balance. “They’ve never met you either, not before tonight. But theyhave met your grandmother.”
“What?”
He nodded. “They’re convinced she was an agent of evil. Thus, through her, you are too. Which is why they didn’t want me to spend time around you. Which was not an option for me. That was the one thing I knew Ihad to do. So I told them my plan was to get close to you, to verify that you weren’t this agent of evil they suspected.”
“So you were using me. Lying to me, just to prove something.” I sighed.
“What?” Lincoln cried. “No. That’s not it at all. You’re not understanding.”
“I think I am,” I told him. “You had ulterior motives while seeing me.”
“But that’s not …”
I leveled a finger, quieting him. “You did too, Lincoln. You pried into my life. You asked questions that weren’t natural conversation. You needed to know things about me. You were trying to figure out if I was using you.”
“Fine! Yes. I was.”
“I thought so.”
He waved his hand dismissively. “You’ve still got it all wrong, though. I was trying to figure it out.”
“Figure what out?”
“If what I was feeling was genuine, or if you had put me under some sort of spell.” He laughed bitterly. “I lied to my pack for you, Sylvie. So that I could spend more time with you. I’m their alpha, I’m supposed to lead by example. But instead, I lied to them, to see more of you. Because I-“
His fist came down, smashing the table and cracking it. “It was a lot less scary to believe you had enchanted me than it was to think I was falling so hard and so fast for you naturally. All right?” He tossed his hands in the air helplessly, not something I saw often from him. “There. You have the truth now. All of it.”
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