“Caleb, can I ask you something?” Brielle said softly, pausing to take a nibble of something called a Halva, which reminded him of a small Milky Way bar and was just as delicious.
“Um…sure,” he said, forcing himself to look away from the chocolate smeared across her lower lip, begging to be licked off. “Whatever you want.”
“Why did your eyes turn blue like that when we kissed on that pier in Odessa?” Her voice was small, almost timid. “Was it because kissing me was that bad?”
At the question, Caleb was immediately transported back to that moment near the water, the feel of her lips on his, her body pressed so tightly to his chest that he could feel every scrumptious curve of her exquisite form. It had been like nothing he’d ever experienced. It was so exhilarating it had been damn near overwhelming—at first in a very good way but then in a scary way as he’d felt himself losing control. His body had started tingling, his heart racing, his fangs and claws extending. Even then, it had been perfect. The sensation of his fangs scraping gently along her tongue had made him feel like he was about to lose his mind. It had been beyond perfect. It had been heavenly.
Right up until he’d felt her heart beating against his chest like a drum when fear had consumed her. That realization had been like a knife through the chest, and he’d immediately pulled away, feeling like a fool for letting his omega side almost slip out with her.
And for thinking he could ever have something with her.
He’d done it to protect her and keep her safe. Caleb had thought that was blindingly obvious. But he’d never considered she might have taken it a different way, that she’d thought he was rejecting her. He bit his tongue to keep from laughing at the absurdity of such an idea. That Brielle would think someone like him wouldn’t give half a dozen body parts for the mere privilege of tasting her lips for even a second.
A woman like her should have been the one to walk away from him.
Even better, she should have run.
Didn’t she know that?
“No,” he said, lifting his head to look at her when he was finally capable of stringing a few semi-intelligent words together. “It was nothing like that at all. My eyes turned blue because, when I was kissing you, I started to lose control. I’m an omega. Losing control is sometimes what I do.”
She gazed at him, her expression caught somewhere between hurt and confusion. “So kissing me wasn’t that bad?”
He shook his head, a slightly out-of-control laugh on the edge of escaping. “No. It was that good. I’ve kissed women before. Lots of them. But losing it like I did has never happened before.”
That earned him another long look, this one more curious—and assessing—than before. “I suppose I should take that as a compliment, then. Is that why you pulled back on the pier? Because you hate losing control that much?”
He was still musing on the whole compliment thing and how it definitely wasn’t what he’d been expecting her to say. Then the second part of what she’d said filtered through his fuzzy mind, and he realized she was waiting for an answer.
“Actually,” he started softly, “when you were in my arms and my fangs came out, I felt your heart start to beat like crazy, and I knew I was terrifying you, so I pulled away.”
Behind her bangs, Brielle lifted an elegantly arched brow. He decided she looked good when she did that. “We were making out and my heart started thumping, so you decided I was terrified? Tell me, how many women have you kissed before and were they actually in the room with you at the time?”
He snorted, ready to say something snarky, when he realized exactly what she was implying. Her heart hadn’t been racing because she was scared. She’d been…
“Oh,” he murmured.
“Yeah, oh.”
She went back to nibbling on her Russian version of a Milky Way. He told himself to not look at her lips as she ate…and failed miserably.
“So losing control seems to be a recurring theme for you as an omega,” she observed in between bites. “I’m guessing that sucks.”
Okay, he supposed that was Brielle’s way of making conversation.
And people say I’m socially awkward.
“Pretty much,” he admitted, taking a sip of cola. “There are some things I like about being an omega werewolf and other things I could do without. But I deal with it. I mean, it’s not like I have a choice.”
Brielle took another bite of chocolate. “This is probably going to sound really stupid, but I’ve never had a chance to sit and talk with a werewolf before, so I’m just going to come right out and ask. Did you get bitten by another werewolf? Is that how you turned? Or were you born this way and have been losing control, wolfing out, and destroying stuff since you were a baby?”
Caleb took a second to imagine that scene, thinking she’d hit much closer to the truth than she probably realized. He genuinely had been making a mess of his life since he was little. Maybe not since he was a baby, but damn close. Of course, he couldn’t blame it all on the werewolf gene.
“No, I didn’t get bitten. And no, I haven’t been this way my whole life, either. That isn’t how it works for us.”
“How does it work, then?”
He sipped his drink, trying to figure out how to explain it. “I’m not a doctor—or a science geek—so don’t hammer me on the details, but basically, some people are born with a gene in their DNA that predisposes them to becoming a werewolf if they’re exposed to the right stimuli.”
“That sounds rather ominous,” Brielle said. “When you say the right stimuli, I’m guessing you’re not talking about a nice, friendly full moon or anything like that?”
Caleb snorted. “I wish it would have been something that simple. No, we have to go through a traumatic event that typically involves a lot of adrenaline and pain. The rush of chemicals in the body flips the gene, and we change. The specific details of the event decide what kind of werewolf we turn into when we come out the other side.”
She considered that. “I have a basic understating of the difference between each type of werewolf, but I don’t understand how the trauma affects what kind of werewolf you become.”
He sighed, really not wanting to talk about this part. Normally, it never bothered him to tell people the nasty details of what had happened to him. But for some reason, he wanted to hide those aspects of his past from Brielle. He didn’t want her knowing about the things he’d done to end up where he was now. But he didn’t want to lie to her, either.
“It’s not all that complicated,” he said, reaching into the bag for some more dill pickle–flavored chips but not eating them yet. “If you go through all that pain and suffering with the best of intentions to save someone else’s life, you come out an alpha. If the pain and suffering isn’t due to any fault of your own and it was one of those wrong-place-wrong-time kind of situations, you come out a beta.”