“Then there is nothing for you to give up when you leave, Alexandra?” he asked, searching her eyes. “Nothing to regret?” Before she could react he closed the space between them and took her in his arms. “Not even this?”
His mouth came down on hers. She tried to hold herself passive and still, but it was like trying to resist a force of nature. She welcomed his lips, his tongue, the strength of his body. She felt him claim her and nothing in her rational mind had the strength to fight back.
He could still make her want him so easily. His desire for her was unmistakably clear. But wanting wasn’t enough.
She stiffened, but he didn’t release her. He pressed his mouth to her neck just above the collar of her coat, biting with the gentlest of nips.
“You’re my mate, Alexandra,” he growled against her skin. “I won’t let you go.”
She turned her face from him and closed her eyes, unmoving. Gradually his caresses slowed and stopped. When she looked at him again his expression was grim and far from loverlike. He dropped his hands from her arms.
“I’m not a wolf, Kieran,” she whispered. “I’m not a… loup-garou. I can’t live like one.”
He backed away as if she had struck him. “You’re afraid, Alexandra,” he said. “All the time I could have been a killer, and you weren’t afraid of me then. But now—”
“We’re too different, Kieran.”
“No.”
“I can’t be what you are!” she burst out. “I won’t ever run with a pack or know what it’s like to be a part of all this.” She threw her arms wide to encompass the silent forest. “You can, Kieran. You were meant to.”
Amber fire flickered in his eyes. “Arnoux thought he understood my true nature. Was he right?”
“You know he wasn’t.”
“But it isn’t possible that you could be wrong as well.”
She stared at him in shock. “You accept what you are. You must—”
“You would have me deny half my soul.” He didn’t move toward her again, didn’t touch her, and yet he held her in an unbreakable grip. “I want the truth, Alexandra.”
“What truth?” she whispered.
“Were you lying when you said you loved me?”
She couldn’t answer. God help her, he must know she hadn’t been. But he—he had never told her he loved her. Needed, yes. And wanted. As she needed and wanted him so desperately now.
His voice dropped very low. “If you want to leave because all this is too much to accept…”
Treacherous tears formed in her eyes. She stared past his shoulder, feeling him as she’d never felt him before—not with her body, but with her soul.
“A clean slate—is that what you want, Alexandra?” he asked. “To forget everything that’s happened?”
The safety of her anger deserted her. “I’d think you’d want to forget,” she whispered.
“No.” He held his body very still. “Forgetting is like running. I won’t run anymore. There’s too much I want to remember.”
His eyes told her what he remembered, wordlessly, in shattering detail. Alex felt herself beginning to come apart at the seams.
“What do you want of me?” she demanded.
“Only one thing, Alexandra. All I ask is that you deny it. Deny that you love me, and I’ll let you go.”
It should have been possible. She’d lied to herself plenty of times until Kieran had come into her life, and even afterward. It’s for his own good. I have to… “I can’t,” she cried. “I can’t.”
He gave a great, gusting sigh and pulled her against him, pressing her face into the hollow of his shoulder. “That’s why you’d leave me now, isn’t it, Alexandra? Loving me, believing it’s best for me that I stay with my people.” He tangled his fingers in her hair and held on as if he thought she might escape again. “You’d take everything on yourself—look after Kevin’s future, go back to Minnesota and face what we left behind there. Alone. For my sake.”
She stiffened against him and he let her go just enough for her to look up into his eyes. “You can’t go back,” she said. “There’s little they can really do to me. But you… you’re still going to be a suspect in Peter’s murder, Kieran. Maybe Lori’s as well. They’ll ask you questions, arrest you, put you behind bars. All the things we ran from in the first, place. Until the truth comes out, there’s no telling what will happen. I won’t let you go through that.”