I ought to have gotten up and moved, gone back to my own room.
I didn’t.
Fuck it. He could remove me himself if he wanted. I couldn’t be bothered.
Chapter 11
Like You Care
Declan moved around in the main room of the suite for a bit. Eating his abandoned dinner? And maybe also mine? I couldn’t muster more than the faintest sense of disappointment at the thought. Anger wouldn’t come.
That dream Declan had seen me having, the nightmare about my father trying to steal my alpha magic, had filtered back to me in bits and pieces, the memory summoned by Declan referring to a “real alpha.” My father had said those words in the dream as he cut my chest open and stuck his hand inside, fishing around for the source of my alpha-ness while I screamed in agony, immobilized somehow by the rules of dream logic.
What kinds of nightmares did my brother have, it occurred to me to wonder? He hated our father. He hated me. I’d done my share to make him hate me, probably. But he was so damn prickly. Teasing I’d meant in a friendly way when we were kids had made him go nuclear. And then I’d kept going with it after a while, only…not in a friendly way anymore.
He hated me for being an alpha.
And I was pretty sure my dad hated me for being an alpha, too.
They’d both despise me for the way I’d been acting with Declan, what I’d let him do to me, what I’denjoyedhaving him do to me, albeit for totally different reasons. Our father would see it as a betrayal of the family. Brook would sneer at me for not living up to the alpha standard he thought I cared about more than anything, for not being the perfect alpha when he’d always been treated like shit in our family for not being one at all.
But it wasn’t really my standard. It was our family’s standard. And unlike Brook, I hated the family business. Working there had always been the only other way to be seen as useful.
Fuck. I hated all of it. And I kept seeing my father’s grim, furious face as he tried to rip my magic out of my chest with his bare hands. Something about his face from the dream frightened me more than the action he’d been performing, and now that I’d remembered it, I couldn’t see anything else.
Declan’s footsteps came down the hall.
I hadn’t so much as twitched, still sprawled on his bed naked and sticky like a slut and with my hands over my face like a scared kid.
What a horrifying combination.
Something clinked as Declan came nearer, and then his bare hip nudged my side as he sat down on the bed.
Curiosity won over embarrassment. And besides, I couldn’t lie there in silence forever. I’d start screaming or something.
So I turned my head a little and peeked through my fingers. Still totally naked—distractingly so, in fact—he’d leaned back against the headboard, one knee up and the other leg stretched out. His muscular nudity held my attention so thoroughly that it took me a second to realize he was holding the plate of cheesecake.
Beefcake with cheesecake, a still life.
I let out a weird little giggle and then snapped my mouth shut, feeling my whole face going red-hot. Declan frowned down at me. “Are you all right?”
Yeah. Because I was acting like I needed the men in white coats, not because he cared.
I thought about it for a second.
“No.”
Declan let out a long sigh, and then abruptly held out the plate of cheesecake and a fork. “This ought to help, right?”
I stared at him. Help? He wanted to…helpme? With cheesecake?
“Why did you get that, anyway? Or the food earlier. The fancy salmon. Are you trying to run up my bill? I don’t know if I want to eat it.”
Declan’s fingers clenched around the edge of the plate. Dammit. No matter how drained and humiliated I felt, I had to do something about that. If he broke it and got shards of crockery in my cheesecake, I might lose my shit. So I scooted up on the bed—because fuck that new duvet and if Declan didn’t want his own come all over it, he shouldn’t have put so much of it in my ass—and snatched the plate out of his hands.
His grin as he let go of it didn’t have the same edge that it usually did. His eyes softened, and they crinkled around the corners. In a better world, he wouldn’t hate me, and I could lean against his chest and use him as an armchair while I ate dessert.
I hunched over and looked away, forking up a bite.
