Chapter 32 Chapter 32
“Yes.” My response came after about a minute.
“Then why,” Zane said, pulling me even closer, “did it seem like it was more than that? Why are you nervous just from talking about it?”
“It wasn’t. I am not ner—”
“Did he hold you like this?” His voice dropped lower. “Did his hand rest here?” His thumb traced a slow line along my waist. “Did you feel this?”
The bond flared between us, hot and insistent.
My breath caught. “No.”
“No?”
“It was different.”
“Different how?”
I didn’t know how to explain it. How dancing with Kaius had felt safe and easy. But dancing with Zane felt like standing at the edge of something vast and terrifying. A high and wild cliff end overlooking the ocean.
“It just was,” I whispered.
We turned again. The music shifted into a rhythm much more slower and intimate.
Other couples around us moved in their own rhythms, lost in their own worlds. But I was hyper-aware of every point where Zane touched me and every shift of his body against mine.
“When you thought I had left,” he said after a long pause, “what did you think would happen?”
Even as this was not the picture perfect conversation I would have thought out, it was undoubtedly the first time Zane had exchanged this much words with me.
“I thought…” My voice wavered. “I thought you were angry enough to leave me here. To let everyone see that our bond was merely built out from an arrangement.”
“And maybe…”
“Maybe what?”
“Free me from the bond, and send me out of the pack house.”
His hand tightened on my waist, firmly but not causing any pain.
“I was angry,” he said. “I am angry.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t leave.”
“I know that too now.”
“And I am not sending you out of the pack house, You are going nowhere till you bear my heir.”
A bile, was it a clump of anxiety? Well, it rose up to my chest.
But I could not blurt out any opposition. What did I want to say?
We moved in silence for several measures, according to the music. I was not paying any attention to the steps I took, but somehow Zane’s overwhelming presence led me and I followed.
“The practice,” he said suddenly. “With Kaius. Did Madam Celeste say anything? She’s great at giving unrequested compliments.”
I blinked at the shift, wondering why he was back to this.
Against my will, the words I had been trying to forget, resurfaced.
‘You two look like a perfect couple.’ It might have seemed like a normal and very regular compliment to her, but it had been getting my body to an overdrive. I even had a war with my wolf.
Before everything that had been happening, and becoming Luna, I only knew Kaius as the Alpha’s nephew. But here I was thinking if a compliment I got from a ‘practice’ dance with Kaius, could ever be beaten by what I hoped to share with Zane.
“She said—” I hesitated. “She said we danced well.”
“That’s all she said?”
“Yes.”
His eyes searched mine, possibly looking for cracks in the facade.
“It does feel like you are hiding something. You’re trying to protect him and I don’t understand why,” Zane followed up.
“I am not. I am sorry, Alpha, but it’s beginning to seem like you are just finding issues to hold him to. I know I danced with him and I’m sorry about it. But it’s really just that.”
“You think so? That I am just finding issues?”
“Yes. I don’t think he has done anything wrong.”
“Didn’t he?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. Because Kaius had been kind and gentle. Yes, he had looked at me in ways that made me feel seen. But that was all.
And maybe if he had crossed any lines, it was invisible ones that I hadn’t recognized until Zane had yanked me away from him on the dance floor.
The music began its final crescendo. I let out a minor exhale, glad that in no time, I would be out of Zane’s hold and the hot air of questions.
Zane pulled me closer still—so close that I could feel his heart beating against my chest. Fast. Harder than it should be.
And it got me wondering if he was as controlled as he portrayed.
“You really think he has done nothing wrong and that you have every reason to make justification for him?,” he added, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper.
My eyelids flapped rapidly before I muttered the courage to reply. “Yes.”
Zane made a one hundred and eighty degrees turn with me, that had the back of my head pressing against his chest.
His left hand wrapped around my waist, pulling me tightly to him. Then, he leaned in. His mouth near my ear and his breath warm against my skin.
“Then how do you explain being with him, late in the night the other day, at the private lounge?”