But Sonia didn’t care.
“You just slammed the door, accosted my book and tossed me across the room because I didn’t come to the study?” she shouted.
“I didn’t toss you across the room but I did tell you we were talking this morning and you didn’t come to my goddamned study!” he shouted back.
“Don’t you yell at me, King Callum,” she yelled.
He put his hands to his hips and leaned forward, yelling back, “I’ll yell until I find out what in the fuck is wrong with you, Queen Sonia!”
“There’s nothing wrong!” she screamed her lie, leaning toward him too.
“There isn’t?” He leaned back. “Then my wife is denying me her affections because…?”
He let the last hang but Sonia didn’t.
She lied again, “I’m not denying you my affections!”
“Really?” he asked mockingly. “Have you been fucking me in the night and I haven’t felt it?”
Her hands clenched into fists, so angry she couldn’t have stopped herself even if she’d tried.
Which she didn’t, she’d been holding onto this long enough.
So she just let loose.
“Well, I figured, since you’re out fucking whoever at night, you wouldn’t need me!”
His body jerked but he scowled at her through the movement, muttering angrily, “What the fuck?”
“You’re cheating on me, Callum. I know it. Remember? I have gifts! I can smell it! You go off in the middle of the night, come home and you reek of it!” she screamed.
He stared at her looking both stunned and furious and shouted, “Fucking hell, are you mad?”
“No!” she shouted back. “I’m not mad!” She shook her head and threw out an arm, looking away and talking mostly to herself but still doing it heatedly. “I shouldn’t care. I keep telling myself I shouldn’t care. Why do I care?”
“You shouldn’t care?” Callum muttered, low and dangerous, his tone making Sonia’s eyes go back to him and if she thought he was angry before, she was wrong.
Now he was incensed.
But she was too far gone.
“No, I shouldn’t care,” she hurled at him.
“You shouldn’t care that you think I’m fucking around on you?” he asked, still in that low tone.
“No!” she shouted.
“Why?” he shot back. “Because you want me to get it elsewhere now that you know I’m wolf and you don’t want that sweet little body of yours defiled by an animal?”
Sonia gasped in outrage at his words and screeched, “How dare you! I love wolves!”
“Yes, honey,” he said cuttingly, “and three weeks ago you told me you loved me. The next day I find my fucking rings in the fire and you fucking avoid me all day and then you find out I’m wolf and do everything you can to avoid me for the next three fucking weeks! Is that what love is to you?”
“No, Callum. I did all that because you made me tell you I loved you while making me sit in your lap after you’d come home from fucking someone else and still reeking of it!”
“I’m not fucking anyone else!” he roared, losing what little hold he had on his temper.
But something broke inside Sonia. It had broken before, time and again, and it still hurt so much it was a miracle she didn’t fall to her knees.
Instead, her anger and heartbreak keept her breathing, standing and fighting.
She turned and rounded the bed, her eyes locked on her mate, her hand lifted with finger jabbing the air at him all the while screaming back, “You are so full of it! You don’t want me. You never wanted me! I’m just your duty. Another in a long line of duties.” She was still screaming as she made it to him and she used both hands to shove his chest, rocking him back on a foot as he stared down at her looking shocked. “You said in the beginning we were a farce! Your brother said you wanted to get the claiming over with, that you felt forced to be at the cabin with me and that I’d have to understand your need to fuck around with your own kind.” She shoved him again and kept screaming. “Your other brother called being up at the cabin with me ‘dicking around’. That crazy Desdemona woman said you hated blondes and I’m blonde! And everyone, but everyone, Calder, Yuri, even Titium, talks about your legendary prowess with women.”
He caught her wrists and hauled her up to his chest, muttering, “Sonia –”
“No!” she screeched in his face. “I’ve got good news. This is over for you, Callum! Over. You don’t have to pretend anymore. You don’t have to playact. I promise, I’ll do my duty as queen and you can just go off and do… whatever it is you have to do and somehow I’ll deal with it. I’ll cope. I’ll find a way to be happy even though I’m with you but I’m still, like I’ve always been, alone.”
Then she tore her hands from his wrists and started to run but he caught her around the waist and tugged her straight back, front-to-front.
“Baby doll –” he started.
The tears hit her eyes at those two words and she shrieked, “Stop calling me that!” She pushed at his chest with her hands and struggled in his arms. “Stop calling me that when I’m not that to you. I’ve never been that to you. I’m only that in my stupid, stupid dreams!”
He barely controlled her struggles while whispering, “Honey, settle down and listen to me.”
Working hard to hold back the tears, Sonia stammered, “N… no!” and kept right on fighting.
But Callum kept right on controlling her thrashing so she had to do it harder.
She had to get away, far away. Far enough to get her head together and piece her heart together and find some way to get on with her hideous destiny.
She managed to break away but he caught her again and pushed her on the bed.
She rolled and almost got to her knees but his fingers wrapped around her ankles, twisted her back, yanking her down the bed and his big body landed on hers.
In a panic because this was not where she wanted to be (even though it was), she bucked and pushed at his shoulders, shouting, “Just let me get away. I need to get away!”
“Baby doll, you need to calm down,” he murmured softly.
Something in his tone struck her.
Her body stilled and her mind cleared but her hands still pushed at his shoulders as she looked away from him and stared at the side of the bed.
She took in a ragged breath.
Then she took in another one.
Then she realized what she’d said and what she’d done and how much it betrayed about how very much she felt about him.
Then, deflated and crushingly humiliated, she made an attempt to salvage a very bad situation, whispering, “You’re right.”
His hand rounded her jaw and he said softly, “Look at me, honey.”
She closed her eyes tight and resisted but finally, taking in a breath, she looked at him.
God, he was beautiful, watching her with tenderness etched in every feature.
Seeing him looking at her that way, she realized she was so caught up in the hurt, she forgot that he was dealing with a hideous destiny too.
“I’m sorry,” she was still whispering. “You don’t need this. You have a kingdom to worry about. I should have… I should… I should have just learned to deal on my own.”
He stared at her a moment then his eyes went over her head and she could almost hear him counting to ten in his.
Then his gaze came back to hers and he stated, “I’m not fucking around on you, Sonia.”
A hated sob welled up in her chest and she swallowed it down on the word, “Don’t.”
“Baby doll, I’m running at night.”
She blinked at him, sudden confusion swept through her at his words then she asked, “Running?”
“Transforming to wolf and running. I did it at the cabin too. I have to do it, compelled to by the wolf in me,” he told her and she stared because no one had told her that. “I couldn’t do it when we were in the city but I do it here all the time. You always slept through it, me l
eaving and returning.” He paused and then finished, “Until lately.”
She kept staring, trying to wrap her mind around this strangely logical fact.
“Do you… do you,” she shouldn’t ask, she really shouldn’t ask but, on a barely there whisper, she asked, “run with someone else?”
His lips twitched and he said, “No, little one, I’m a lone wolf.”
“But you smell like –” she started.
He cut her off. “I smell like wolf.”
“But, I’d never smelled it before except when –”
“The scent wears off quickly, definitely by morning.”
“But it smells like after we –”
He grinned. “Yes, honey, that’s exactly what it smells like.”
She thought that was kind of neat, and definitely sexy, and she felt her body getting soft under his. “So you’re not meeting someone?”
His face grew serious when he replied, “I’d never fuck around on you, Sonia,” then his face dipped closer when he finished on a growl, “never.”
Relief started sliding through her but she couldn’t let go. “But…why? You don’t want me. You said… and Caleb and Yuri –”
“Forget what Caleb and Yuri said.”
She was back to staring at him and getting annoyed so she snapped, “Forget?”
“I’ve lived for nearly four hundred years and you know I like to play,” he calmly explained.
Yes, she was definitely getting annoyed. “Right, so –”
“No, baby doll,” he cut her off firmly. “You said what you had to say. It’s my turn to talk.”
She clamped her mouth shut and glared at him.
He watched her as if waiting for her to defy him and then he went on, “I’ve had a lot of lovers but I’ve never had a mate.”
She opened her mouth and shot back, “A mate you don’t want.”
Now Callum looked like he was getting annoyed when he informed her, “Sonia, you’re talking.”
“Yes, I am,” she retorted. “There’s no reason to do this. I get it. I understand my place. You know I understand it, so it’s over.”
“But you don’t understand your place,” he bit out.
And yes, he was definitely getting annoyed too.
“I –”
“Sonia, shut up,” he clipped.
Sonia glared.
Callum scowled.
This lasted a while.
Sonia finally lost patience. “You wanted to talk… talk.”
“Christ, you’re a pain in the ass,” he told her.
“Thanks,” she snapped.
His eyes narrowed and he lost control of his temper. “All right, baby doll,” he gritted out through his teeth, “I never thought this was the way I’d tell you but here it is. You’re perfect.”
Sonia stopped glaring and her mouth dropped open.
Callum kept talking, “You have to know, I didn’t think I would feel that way at first but every fucking second I was with you I realized it more and more. Every day, I would wake up and think you were perfect and every night I’d go to sleep thinking, somehow, during the day, you got even more perfect. If I could have wished what I thought was my perfect mate on the wind and had her come back to me in a storm, I could never have come up with anything as exquisite as you.”
Sonia gazed wordlessly up at her king.
She had never, in her whole life, heard anything so beautiful.
Not said about her (even if it was said with clipped irritation).
Not ever.
She felt the tears welling in her eyes as she whispered, “Callum –”
But he talked over her. “I don’t know what you heard when you were listening and no one knew you were eavesdropping or what was said to you flat out but whatever it was, they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. The minute you woke up in my bed in the cabin, I wanted you. I questioned it, that first day wasn’t great but I questioned it for about an hour before you started to get interesting. Then more interesting. And when we lay on the couch that first night I thought our lives together would be sweet…” His hand slid in her hair as she stared at him in loving shock. “And I knew by the night of your claiming when I fell asleep connected to you that our lives would be beautiful and I’ve never thought anything since except, every day, it seemed to grow impossibly more beautiful.”
“Callum –”
Then he concluded, “Until the last three weeks.”
She closed her eyes and everything that was him danced across her eyelids.
Callum holding her in his lap and telling her she had family.
Callum holding her close in his arms while the Christmas lights twinkled, telling her she was home.
Callum fiddling with her charm on her chain, wanting her to wear it outside her clothes so he could see it, his people’s symbol, like her wedding bands, telling everyone that she was his.
Callum taking her sledding, playing board games and watching Christmas movies then, later, taking away the pain when her blood started to boil.
Callum bending over backward to give her the best Christmas she’d had in thirty-one years.
Callum coming direct to her after a bloody, eight day battle and sleeping his exhaustion away with her held close and later trusting her to bury the hideous memories by taking her, again and again.
Callum’s gentleness when she discovered Waring had died.
Callum letting her be who she was, the first person since her Momma and Papa died.
Just who she was, without hiding anything.
He’d been right those weeks and weeks ago.
And she’d been there for weeks and weeks.
She was there at that very moment.
She was home.
“I love you, baby doll,” he said, his voice no longer annoyed. It was filled with tenderness and her eyes flew open to see his face was filled with the same thing. “I loved you before you took your first breath on this earth because that was my fate but you made me love you because you’re just… fucking… you.”
Her heart fluttered, her belly melted and, of its own accord, her hand lifted to the side of his face. Her fingers slid in his hair and she watched as her thumb smoothed his eyebrow then along the beautiful angle of his cheekbone then across the fullness of his bottom lip.
When her eyes went to his, they were closed and he looked, for some reason, as if he was experiencing a weirdly painful ecstasy.
“Cal?” she called. His eyes opened instantly, they were golden, she loved that so much she felt her heart swell and she whispered, “You love me?”
He answered without hesitation. “With everything I am, baby doll, and everything I’m meant to be.”
She felt the sob move up her chest. She lifted her head to shove her face in his neck and her breath hitched from the effort of holding it back.
Callum heard it, rolled to his back, pulling her on top of him and he held her close, one arm at her waist, the other cocked along her spine with his fingers in her hair while she pressed her face into his skin, battling the tears.
Then a thought occurred to her. It was so huge, her body jerked with it and her head snapped up.
“You’re real!” she cried with joy as if she’d made some fabulous discovery that was going to light the world on fire.
He grinned at her and said, “I’m right here, baby doll.”
She stared at him, her dream man, her handsome wolf. She was in his arms in their bed in their room in their castle.
“You’re real,” she whispered.
His arms got tighter and he whispered back, “I’m real.”
“And… and,” she gulped as the enormity hit her, blocking her throat, “you’re my puppy too.”
His grin turned to a smile as he moved a hand around to caress her cheek tenderly with his thumb. “I’m thinking me being your ‘puppy’ should stay between you and me, little one. Not likely to strike fear in the hearts of my enemies, being known as The Puppy.”
All of it real.
“Cal?” she called into his neck.
“Yes, honey?”
“You remember you asked me if I was happy?”
“Yes.”
“I lied.”
His arms tensed.
She lifted her head and looked at his wary eyes a moment before she put her mouth to his and whispered, “Now… I’m happy.”
His hand slid back into her hair as his head slanted, crushing her mouth to his at the same time he rolled and he kissed her.
And his kiss was hot, sweet, wet, deep, long and, best of all, perfect.
* * * * *
Sonia woke in the middle of the night held close in Callum’s arms.
They’d spent the entire day in bed making up for lost time with Callum leaving her only to go down and order food to be brought up.
All day, she’d been what she told him she was.
Happy.
Ecstatically so (as well as hot and bothered, but that was ecstatic too, as only Callum could do).
But things happened to your mind when you woke in the middle of the night and they happened to Sonia.
Taking in a quiet breath, she slid carefully out of his arms, out of the bed and walked to her robe. Pulling it on and tying it tight, she went to the window and stared out at the night, the cloudless sky allowing the moon to shine bright on the snow making the forested hills a winter wonderland.
For a moment, she wished with everything that she was out in it, like Callum could do, turning to wolf and running though the snow in the night.
Or, at least, like she’d do with her Papa, walking, seeing, listening, hearing, smelling, experiencing.
But then these pleasant thoughts melted away and Sonia realized that the cosmos wasn’t quite done with its joke.
“Honey?” Callum called and she turned to him.
He was up on an elbow, his beautiful eyes on her.
“What are you doing up?” he asked.
“Thinking,” she replied.
“Well, think over here,” he ordered.
She felt her mouth quirk into a smile because he was really so gosh darned bossy.
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