She didn’t look happy, but he knew she’d look even more upset when she caught sight of him. In the seconds he had left before that happened, he wanted to take in the way she looked in the sunlight, how her silver earrings dangled from her ears, how she adjusted the fit of her little blue gloves almost nervously.
They’d never met in secret here, back when everything was different. He couldn’t risk his father finding out that he was willingly spending time with an elvish girl, and she couldn’t risk getting caught fraternizing with a scrappy coyote shifter.
Usually they met on the beach, where the borders blurred, or behind the waterfall in Yerba Buena Plaza after he finished a training session with her cousins. His father had been informed that Viktor’s punishment for trespassing was being meted out by Valen himself — a good excuse that kept his father from becoming too suspicious of the time his son spent with the elves. For a while, anyway.
But Viktor had always wanted to bring Camille to his land. He wanted to show her his den, to see her eyes light up when he explained why he’d chosen what he had, how he’d kept her in mind every step of the way. He wanted her in his home, no matter where that was.
To see her there, dressed like she was ready to join the picnic, made his chest tighten with an indescribable feeling. She was so godsdamned pretty and growly and his.
He didn’t bother reining in the coyote when he stepped out of the shadows several feet away from where she stood. He wanted her to see it. Maybe if she actually saw how much every part of him craved her, she’d let him in.
“Finally,” she tartly exclaimed, making his lips twitch with a wide smile. “I’ve been waiting for— no, you stand right there.”
Viktor halted his approach, his smile vanishing under a confused frown. “Cam, I’m not going to talk to you from halfway across the park.” He shot her a hungry smile. “I swear, I only bite when you ask me to, sweetheart.”
Her chin jutted out at a familiar, stubborn angle. “You stand right there or I’m leaving, Vik.”
Exasperated, he held out his arms. “Why? Are you afraid the big bad coyote is gonna gobble you up?”
Not far off from what I want to do, he thought, tactfully refraining from saying it aloud.
He watched, pleased, as a violet flush darkened the skin of her cheekbones. They were about twenty feet away from one another, but he had no trouble making out the way her eyes narrowed and her fists clenched by her thighs.
“No,” she ground out, “maybe I just don’t want to smell musty fur. Ever consider that?”
Viktor’s grin was sharp, full of the coyote’s need. “You had no problem with my scent that day in the meeting room.”
“A massive lapse in judgment.”
“A massive something, maybe, but I wouldn’t say judgment.” He dared to take a step forward and watched, eyes narrowed, as she took a matching step backward. She was nearly plastered to the car.
No part of him liked that.
Sure, the coyote and the man liked the chase, but the way the flush drained from her cheeks, the sight of the stark outlines of her neck muscles tensing under her collar… none of that was play. It wasn’t a game.
Camille really didn’t want to be anywhere near him.
He understood that he’d hurt her — and damn, if she’d just let him talk to her maybe they could start working through the thorny brambles of the past — but he didn’t think it warranted twenty feet of empty space between them.
Voice dropping into a growl, he pressed, “Why are you doing that, Cam? You came to talk to me, remember?”
“I did.” Camille braced one hand on the roof of the car, as if she needed the support, and announced, “You are going to withdraw your name from consideration.”
Viktor didn’t move. Didn’t blink. He didn’t even twitch. He simply stared at her, letting the silence stretch until she began to shift uneasily, before he answered, “No.”
Camille’s lip lifted in a snarl. “No? Why on Burden’s Earth not?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“This isn’t a game, Viktor!” The hand clutching the car turned into a fist. Her voice rose, pitched high with fury and some other, desperate emotion that set his teeth on edge. “You can’t play with my life like this! Not again! Go satisfy whatever it is that makes you think torturing me is fun somewhere else!”
“Torturing you?” Gods, was that what she thought he was doing? When all he wanted was to talk to her? To kiss her? To tell her that a day hadn’t gone by in twenty fucking years when he did not think of her?
What did she know of torture, anyway? Torture was giving up the thing shifters held most sacred for her own good. Torture was watching his mother slowly waste away and die under his father’s neglect, knowing that he had turned his back on his own mate. Torture was wondering every day if he’d made the right choice, if the pain of being without her was worth it, if she cried over the awful things he said.
She didn’t know torture. Elves took mates, but he knew nothing about the process. He doubted it came with even a little bit of the raw, agonizing want that wracked him.
There was no way she could comprehend what it was like to be him.
That didn’t mean he would take the comment laying down.
His shifter pride, the heart of him that loved her beyond anything the human mind could articulate, howled in outrage at the insult.
Viktor’s temper, already a problem in the grip of the fever, began to lick at his insides. A growl rumbled out of his chest. It was deep and furious, a sound that anyone in his pack would have known as a signal to stand down, to submit.
He watched as Camille’s eyes widened, her plush mouth parting in an astonished little o before she scrambled to circle the car. Only then did Viktor realize he’d begun to prowl toward her.
“Let me make one thing very clear, sweetheart,” he rasped, halting at the line where the sidewalk and the grass met, “I am not torturing you. I’m courting you. There is no one else. There will never be anyone else. This isn’t a game and I’m not fucking playing. Got it?”
From across the car, Camille sent him a wild-eyed look of disbelief. “You can’t be serious. You— you— Now? Why? Do you think that you can just decide that after—”
“Cam, we were sixteen,” he snapped, lifting a hand to rake his partially shifted claws through his hair.
“Exactly! You’ve had plenty of chances since then to make your move. So why now?”
Viktor tried to gather the frayed edges of his temper, but it was a losing battle. He hated fighting with her when all he wanted to do was soothe, but damn, she was the most stubborn woman he’d ever met. He wasn’t trying to cage her or swipe at her, but with the way she acted, one would think he’d been nipping at her damn heels.
Half snarling, he snapped back, “Why are you so insistent on a union now, huh?”
“That’s none of your damn business!”
“Yeah, well, maybe my reasons are none of yours either!”
He didn’t see it, but he knew she stomped her foot. “They are when they involve trying to sabotage my entire future!”
“Well, your reasons are my damn business when they involve you selling yourself to some fucking elf who doesn’t even care about you!” Viktor fought the compulsion to charge across the sidewalk, prowl around the car, and kiss the fury right out of her. He didn’t think it would work, but he didn’t really want it to. He hated fighting with her, but he loved her fire, the way she was totally unafraid to snarl at him.