He nodded to the huge mountain of food, watching me with those eyes. My hand wrapped around the fork tightly, feeling the growing pressure to do something, anything. But I remembered the slap of my grandmother’s hand down on mine when I was a kid, invited over for dinner one night, all ready to hoe into the yummy smelling food before I was given permission.
“Just eat something,” he said finally, dropping his eyes and doing the same with his food, like I wasn’t quietly having a breakdown.
“It’s OK,” Jaz hissed, giving me the side eye. “Just calm down and have a meal. He’s not gonna set up shack in your house tomorrow.”
Right, right…Beth’s food, plentiful, lovely, and warming, focus on that. Jai’s eyes flicked my way as I speared a chunk of potato salad and put it in my mouth, only partially stifling the groan of pleasure when I did. She always added these seemingly weird ingredients like walnuts, green onions, sun dried tomatoes and parmesan cheese to it, and it was amazing. He snorted at that, no doubt catching every sound with that hearing of his, and kept on eating.
As we all ate, I thought I’d earned a reprieve, lulled by the incredible tastes of Beth’s food. Eddie had been right, nothing beat her cooking, not even pizza. But as plates were put down and forks laid across them, the men reached out for the girls, and bloody Jaz and Rita took them, leaving me sitting on the log alone. I put the plate to one side, finally giving up as my stomach felt stretched tight as a drum, and Jai shifted in a fluid movement to sit beside me, my body instantly tensing.
Something that only ratcheted higher when his leg came to rest against mine. I felt and heard everything—the crack of his beer can as he opened it, the sound of him swallowing, the shift of his body as he put his hand behind my back, resting it on the log. Then came the swell of his scent, spicy, woody male mixing with the fragrant smoke from the burning eucalyptus logs. I found I was breathing noisily through my mouth in an attempt to stop it from flooding my senses.
“Shan, it's OK.”
His voice was light, calm, gentle, but it contained that thread of iron that had all non-pack nodding along. I felt it more than most, but still, my spine loosened, my breath lengthened, and the tension leached out of me slowly at his say so. I let out a long ragged sigh, appreciating the benefit, even if it was forced on me.
“You always smell so good…” came his dark, disembodied voice. “Part prey, ready to skitter away before me, for me to hunt down, part…”
My teeth ground down at that. I’d spent most of my school years around boys like Jai, who took incomprehensible glee in startling me. His people and mine were two sides of the same coin. We could control them in animal form, and they us in human form with that shifter alpha whip. The boys had played at this sometimes, young cubs finding their power and flexing a bit, freezing us girls on the spot, only to let us go moments later.
“You wouldn’t like that?”
My eyes flicked up, meeting his, and damn the consequences. I didn’t come by here often unless called, finding the strictures of the pack hard to cope with. My nan and the alphas had a pact that I would always honour, but I was apart from this, them.
“Look, Jai…”
“And she’s going to shoot me down.” He snorted at that, then rubbed at his face. But he recovered quickly, eyes dropping down slow to rest on my lips. “Tell me you don’t want it. I know what she told you, that you can’t say no, but you can. To this.” He caught my gasp when his eyes met mine again. They burned now, catching some of the firelight in those bronzed depths. “Tell me to piss off, that there’s no hope here.” The steel was back in his voice, demanding a response from me.
“How about you talk to me about whatever the hell this is?” I hissed, my hand going to my lips as soon as I realised how I’d spoken to him. But he smiled, slow and easy, like somehow, I’d pleased him by breaking the rules. “We haven’t talked beyond simple pleasantries since…”
He nodded encouragingly, like he needed me to be the one to put it into