at him, my eyes wide, confusion settling in my chest.
“I don’t like repeating myself,” he throws back easily, his grin making him seem younger than what I can only guess is about forty years.
“No. I’m not. I want answers.” I don’t want to sound like a petulant child, but I know I do. I can hear it in my voice. It annoys me that he does this to me. I’m not this girl. One who acts like an immature teenager, but something about Lycan Shaw makes me feel young.
Lycan stays silent for a long while before he sighs. “Your father fucked up,” he speaks, turning his back on me as he moves to the vanity. His fingers trail over the smooth surface before he glances at the window as if seeing something in the murkiness outside. “He did things that were…” He pauses for a long moment, and my mind whirs with something Dad would’ve done, and I want to scream. “Illegal.” He doesn’t look at me as he tells me this, and I wonder what my father could’ve done that was so bad. He’s always been a good man. At least to me, he’s been a good father. “He has secrets only I know, and that’s why he’ll repay me with your hand.”
“I don’t understand. Why not arrest him?” I push to my feet, needing to stand for this, or at least I think I need to be. “Lycan?” Lycan’s steps fall softly on the carpet as he takes two strides toward the window while keeping his back to me. For a moment, he stands there silently, and I wonder if he’ll answer.
His hand threads through his dark hair, a lock falling into a shimmering eye as he gazes at me over his shoulder. “Your father is a smart man, but I’m smarter. He wanted more than he could hold onto, including your mother. He thought secrets would remain hidden forever, but he fucked with the wrong person.”
My curiosity wins out as he trickles information to me, and I lap it up like a puppy needing sustenance. I take a couple of tentative steps toward him. “What do you mean?”
“He stole from me,” Lycan says, his profile half shadowed as he regards the window, his focus on the outside instead of me. “And now I’ve taken from him.” That’s when he turns to look at me. His one hand landing on the edge of the wooden vanity, his knuckles turning white, and I wonder briefly if he’s reigning in his desire to be near me.
“You can’t steal me. This isn’t some archaic eye for an eye belief,” I bite out, forgetting that this man holds all the power. But then again, I have control as well. He can’t do anything to me if I don’t want him to. He wouldn’t force me. He can’t.
“Those questions racing through your pretty little head right now, they’re pointless,” he tells me in his smooth baritone, a hint of an accent brightening his words, making them seem lyrical. “Because I can do anything I want, to anyone I want, at any time I want.” This time, he turns toward me fully, showing off his height, broadness, and dominance. The control and power that follow him like perfume grip my chest squeeze the breath from my lungs, and I can’t find the response I need and crave.
“Don’t treat me like a child.”
He chuckles before stepping away from the soft, silver illumination streaming into the bedroom from the moon outside. “Then don’t act like one,” Lycan counters seriously. He leans against the vanity, and for a moment, I see him as the wolf, but something internally, my gut, tells me he’s not. “I’m not the bad guy here.”
“You bought me from my father. I think that makes you the asshole.”
“If you continue to curse like that, I’m going to be forced to take you under hand and show you how naughty girls are treated,” he bites out, those jade orbs flaring with danger as he pins me in place with a stare.
“Oh?” I challenge. “What? Are you going to spank me, asshole?” I have no clue what I’m doing, why I’m taunting him like this, but a second later, before I have time to apologize, his body is looming over me, his one hand gripping both of mine as he spins us around, shoving me against the smooth wooden surface he was just leaning against. My butt sticks out toward him, which only makes me