he Alpha Men's Secret Club 2(20)
“Yes.”
Carlo’s eyes glittered, and that was when she knew they had made a mistake.
10
Later that night, Rust tucked her into bed beside him. They were both naked on the big bed in his bedroom.
“I don’t think I can fuck anymore tonight,” he groaned.
She had to laugh. “Me neither. I’m glad to know you’re human.”
“Not quite.” He turned to her in the darkness. They had showered again and his hair smelled of clean shampoo. “This is nice.”
The tone in his voice was pensive.
She sucked in her breath.
Then she said, “Yes, it is.”
Silence. She could see the silhouette of his Adam’s apple moving.
He said in a casual air, “You ever thought of moving out of that college dorm of yours?”
The air froze around them. Did she just hear what she thought she heard?
She licked her lips. “Moving out?”
“Yes.”
Did she dare say it? Or was she setting herself up for disappointment again? Here comes the put down. So what’s new, Kate Penney?
But she was a masochist. A literal one.
And so she said, “Where would I move to?”
She could hear the thudding of her heart in her ears. Fool, fool, fool, she scolded herself. Why do you do these things? It was just like those diamond earrings. Carlo was right. She was a train wreck waiting to happen. A doormat waiting for Rust O’Brien to stomp all over and wipe his feet clean on.
After a long silence in the darkness, he said, “I was just thinking . . . that it would be nice . . . if you stayed here once in a while.”
There was a buzzing in her head which had nothing to do with her ears.
“A while?” she said.
“Yeah. You know . . . a while.”
He clammed up after that, and she waited for him to speak again. But he didn’t. After a beat, she heard his gentle snoring. He rarely snored. He must have been tired out by tonight’s antics.
Oh, but how would she be able to go to sleep now?
Come on, Kate, he’s not asking you to move in. You are not even in that part of your relationship. He just mentioned it would be nice if you stayed over once in a while. You know, like a sleepover.
But he had been on the verge of asking her to move in. She knew it in her subconscious!
She gazed at his form in the darkness. The windows were framed with blackout curtains. Rust O’Brien preferred to sleep in absolute darkness.
“I love you,” she whispered to his sleeping body.
And she did. She really did.
With her body, heart and soul.
Train wreck.
11
Rust O’Brien woke up suddenly in the darkness.
He was thirsty. Phenomenally so. And hungry.
He was aware of the sleeping girl beside him. His loins twitched. Not again., he inwardly groaned. He had made such a fool of himself in recent days.
And it was all because of the girl.
He swung his legs noiselessly out of bed. The hormones coursed throughout his body like molten lava. Swiftly, he shifted into his tiger form and padded out of the bedroom. He was seemingly more at ease with his tiger form these days, and he had been having more and more urges to shift.
Not an urge.
A compulsion.
He walked into his bedroom lounge, which was connected to his study. He should know about compulsions well. He gazed out into the cityscape from the glass window there – at the spread of buildings and houses under the blanket of the night sky.
What was happening to him?
He was obsessed with the girl. Kate Penney. He who had never been obsessed with anyone in his life.
But she was everything he told her she was. Pliant, submissive, beautiful and sweet. He had never been with anyone like her. His last lover, the wildly feral Shamilar, was a panther, and she liked to scratch him in bed with her sharp nails as he fucked her. Truth be told, he was getting tired of women like those. Bold women who were as dominant as their shifter alter-egos. Women who hunted. Women who were predators themselves.
That was why when Kate Penney trailed him that first night, he let her.
He knew that she was following him out of morbid curiosity and her schoolgirl crush. And he was flattered. Of course, he knew that half the students and the teacher faculty desired him, but Kate was like an innocent lamb, so different from the predatory women that he knew and was used to. He knew that she was out of her league – that it wasn’t in her genetic and psychological makeup to do the things she did that night.
And yet, there she was. Breaching her own comfort zone to follow him and, subsequently, to be with him.
More overwhelming yet was his own reaction to her later. The sex. The incredible sex. The feeling of power he had over her to make her physically and emotionally obsessed with him.
He found himself thinking of her the next morning and well beyond that. He found himself reliving the sex they had together over and over and craving for more of it. But he couldn’t make the first move. That was the one and only time, he told himself. He was a professor at the college, and she was his student.