Page 30 of Gold Rush
Arin looks over at me, his eyes falling to Bennett’s hand on my arm before he leaves the kitchen. I struggle to swallow, my tongue feeling thick as I mutter, “No, I should go — I need to pack —”
Seth jumps up, moving over to me only to cup my face. “No.” He shakes his head, his eyes full of concern as he takes me in. “No leaving. Do you like chocolate chips in your pancakes? Bennett makes them taste so much better than anywhere else. I don’t know how he does it.”
My heart pounds in my chest, my skin feeling clammy as I glance up at him, then over at Bennett. “I —”
Bennett cleans the charred pancake out of the pan, dumping it into the trash before pouring fresh batter in. “Answer us. Plain or chocolate chip, darling?”
My eyes burn as I lean into Seth’s touch, taking a shaking breath. “Chocolate chip.”
“Good choice.” Seth smiles, hugging me securely, lips pressed against the crown of my head. “I knew you liked chocolate.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THEO
“Get in.”
Arin’s office smells like fresh honey and mint leaves.
He looks rested for once, his eyes cutting me as he leans against his desk.
And then he just…stares.
I fucking hate when he does this.The anger helps clear the haze in my brain from the mix of their perfumes, the scents that make me want to charge back out and make her scream at me until I can remember why I hate her so much on principle alone.
“Go ahead, yell at me.” I glare at my prime, crossing my arms.
“No.” He pushes his hands into his pockets, his gaze narrowing. “You need to explain yourself to me, using complete sentences.”
I’m barely in the room, but it doesn’t help or abate the overwhelming swirl in my brain, two sides of me fighting tooth and nail with each other. There’s the side thatknowsa bad idea when it sees one, and there’s the alpha side of me, my hindbrain reacting to biology and scents and fuckingpheromones. And the alpha is clawing, it’s howling, whining, trying to getout.
I made her cry. More than that — I reduced her to panicked whines— twice.
“I don’t like her.” I bite out the words, gritting my teeth.
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’mnot,” I snap at him, but it’s plaintive, and my face screws up as I try to breathe through my mouth, not my nose. The honey coats my tongue, seeping down my throat, sinking into my fuckingblood.
“You are.” Arin glances at me, and I shift, hoping my loose gym shorts aren’t giving away my body’s confused reaction. “You do like her, you only don’t like that you, for once in your life, find yourself wanting something you’ve insisted you can’t have.” His eyes flicker down, over my front, lingering on my shorts before he looks back up. “Wanting anomega.”
Iwantto spit at him. I want to rip his soft, black curly hair from his head. I want to shove him into the desk andbreakit. I want to crash his head into mine. I want my lips on his. I want him to put me on my knees. I want her between us. I —fuck.
Arin holds up his hand. “Donotspeak right now, Theodore. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stand there and listen to your alpha.”
The snarling inside me dies as quickly as it came on. The weight of his stare makes me want to hang my head and look away, but instead I clench my jaw and refuse to back down.
“You want something you’ve sworn off of since birth, since becoming an alpha, and that pisses you off, the same way it upsetsherthat the life she knew, the life she waslivingis now gone.” Arin says the words plainly. “You’re both mourning something lost — freedom. But what you both don’t recognize is that you can give each other that freedom back. It’s not out of reach, the way it looks has only changed.”
My jaw works as I growl, “I don’twanther.”
“Stop lying to me.” Arin snaps, the bark rocketing through me, my tongue loosening as he sighs and cards his handsthrough his hair. “Fuck, Theo.” He looks at me, put out andsad. “How many years have we known each other?”
I clear my throat, unable to lie. “Twenty years, give or take a few months.”
We met when we were both teenagers, I was fifteen, Arin was sixteen. I was there when he emerged as an alpha, more powerful than any other I’d ever been around, on a shared family vacation with his rag-tag siblings. Arin’s sisters were always happy, his parents are stupidly inlove, meanwhile I grew up only knowing the way my fathers constantly barked at my mother, reducing her to tears multiple times a day.
“I would think that those two decades have given me the right to say this.” Arin’s voice softens and I look up at him. “In all your attempts to get rid of her, you’ve turned into the very men you were trying to avoid becoming. You’ve become your fathers — terrorizing a woman who did nothing to you but exist. You might not have bonded her against her will and abused her, but you’re making her just as miserable as your fathers do to your own mother. And I’m incredibly disappointed in you.”
