shoulders like boulders, biceps that strain against his sleeves. His dark hair blows in the wind as his blue eyes trace up and down my body. I can’t help but admire how sexy this man is, and I clear my throat, nudging away the monsters in my thoughts.
On the way, he pauses and grabs something from his bag and comes by my side. He hands me a folded blanket.
I flash him a smile and take it greedily, then cover my legs.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
My skin flushes at being this close to him, and my breath catches. His effect on me still surprises me. I hate to admit that I seem to have such little control of my body, how all over the place I am. From holding back tears to my body betraying me and craving him, I’m a hot mess.
“A week’s worth of sleep would help. Though I put my exhaustion down to someone almost drowning me.” I give him a sarcastic grin as I arch an eyebrow.
He settles down, and when he looks at me, our gazes clash, the sides of our arms touching. A buzz zips up my body, and a warm sensation engulfs me, just as it had back in the river with him naked, forcing us together, his large cock pressed against my stomach. He roused my wolf to the surface, something that scared the hell out of me, as she’s never been that close to coming out for another Alpha since Martell.
“So you’re not tired from battling the tree goddesses who almost killed us?” he asks, his deep voice slicing through my thoughts.
“Nope,” I lie, which has me involuntarily smiling, and he catches it.
The way he looks at me leaves me covered in excited goosebumps. Earlier today I wanted to kill him for almost drowning me, and now those feelings remain, yet there is a headier sensation crawling over my mind. How could I ignore four gorgeous men who make my knees weak? Except, I know all about Alphas. About what they want, what they are capable of. Still, my body responds so easily to Ragnar being this close to me.
“While you are with us, you will always be protected. I wouldn’t have let you die,” he admits. His hand moves and settles over mine in my lap, and his touch is all I can think about, all that my lust-driven mind can focus on.
“You could have fooled me.” My gaze drops to how large his hand is over mine, to the healed scars on his knuckles from what I can only imagine are too many battles to count. “There are other ways to get information from people,” I mutter.
“True, but they are lengthy and not as effective.” He pulls his hand back, and I feel the coldness instantly.
“My mother once told me that Alphas are born fighters and females are born to bear children,” I say. “I hated her for a long time for telling me that, but then I realized that her words had the desired effect. She made me detest the idea of what is expected of females so much that I decided I would never mate with anyone. But the universe really did have a way of punching me in the gut once I grew up.”
I can’t help but think of how quickly I accepted Martell as my soulmate, how I went to him for the mating night. Of course, I did it for my sisters, for my wolf… but not for me. I lost part of myself long ago, and it’s scary how easily I’ve accepted that too.
“From the age I could walk, my father threw me into fighting pits to train, to become his warrior, so your mother wasn’t too wrong.”
His admission has me curious. “Is that common in Denmark?”
“In the Ulv pack, yes. We lived close to a dangerous pack who killed our men and stole our women, so it was fight or die.”
Nikos’s words come to me about him being exchanged with Ragnar’s sister… Was his family pack that vicious?
“In the pack I grew up in, the Alphas rarely trained, but they went out to fight other packs all the time,” I say.
He licks his lips and asks, “Is there a reason your Alpha never claimed the Savage Sector, then?”
“For a long time, I thought he had,” I admit, realizing how stupid I must sound. “Then I left the pack and realized how small-minded I’d been in my thinking and how much bigger the