Come Out Swinging (Reach for the Moon Book 2) by Sam Hall (readict books .TXT) 📗

down at me. Mason went to push my hair back, but his hand froze, his eyes wide and staring.

This was wrong. Mason Klein did not look at me like this, never. Not like the secrets of the world could be discovered in my eyes, not like he couldn’t bring himself to do anything else, even as the guys began to move around us. But I couldn’t look at them either, caught on the spike of Mason’s eyes.

There was this internet thing that claimed if you stare into someone’s eyes for four minutes, you’ll fall in love with them. It was probably bullshit of course, and I didn’t know how long we stared, because time, the room, the guys, the world seemed to stop. I’d ripped Mason from the jaws of the giant wolf I’d seen, but I hadn’t really had time to process that, to process anything. Well, now I got it.

My eyes traced every little detail of his face—the wave of his hair as it pulled back from his forehead, the stubble that grazed his chin, the sharp slice of those devastating cheekbones, seeming to arrow down on lips too full, too plush for a man, and yet they were his. They’d be soft when I kissed him, and my tongue flicked out to moisten my own dead dry ones, almost able to taste it. I followed the broken line of his nose, those imperiously cocked eyebrows, but it was his eyes that caught me.

Mason loved me, but that was really hard to take. Sure, I’d heard him say it, felt him communicate it with his body, but… I couldn’t even form a response because I’d told myself no, no, no too many times before, but with no other distractions, I couldn’t get past it. He was here, he was holding me in his arms after watching me cavort with several other men, but he held me like I was the most precious thing in the world.

“You know,” he said softly, harder for anyone else to hear but me. “You can feel it.”

“Do I?” My eyes dropped down. “It bears repeating, seriously.”

“I love you.” I wasn’t drunk this time, so the words hit me like a slap to the face. “I’ll always love you. I loved that young woman who put herself on the line and offered her heart to me.”

“Only for you to stomp on it,” I growled out.

“I loved you when you were gone, trying to pretend you didn’t exist at first, then watching the videos Adam showed me, feeling the knife twist in my guts when I did. I loved the girl that drove all night to come home, despite not wanting to. The girl who stepped up, held a vigil for her father, who commanded us to order, who accepted and worked with what she was as she discovered.”

“Which you didn’t,” I said, catching his eyes for a second, but I couldn’t hold them. It was too intense, too personal. Before, I’d been protected by a haze of tequila, but I had nothing now. Nothing but us.

“Which I didn’t. I’m a dick, Zack will tell you.”

“Fuck, yeah,” the man himself replied.

“He always saw things clearer than me. He’s the mate you need, the one who sees you, sees what you are, what you’re gonna become, and shepherds you towards that, walking by your side. It’s why I let…him take me, that wolf. He demanded a price for what we have, and I could pay it. It’s all I’ve got to offer you, Paige. I can’t take back the words, the bullshit, the—”

“But I want something quite different now.”

We all spun around, the guys swearing as the darkness in the room seemed to multiply exponentially, the artificial lights fighting to illuminate anything. Micah’s beast seemed to ride him harder than any of us, and there was always something a little feral about him, which just seemed to have grown. That same lazy swagger, those same bright eyes against his deep brown skin, his hair half obscuring his face, his grin bright and full of sharp teeth. But it was the shadow behind him that got our hackles up. The outline of a wolf formed on the hotel wall, growing bigger and bigger as he ambled closer.

“Female wolf shifters are the perfect compromise,” he said, taking my hand from Mason’s and spinning me around between the two of them, like this was some kind of naked dance. “You are your Mother’s daughter, with all of her soft flesh.” His hand ran down my side before I slapped it away. “Her sweetness that gives beneath our hard. We want to hunt you down and bring you to the ground like we did the first Moon Maiden, but you…” He stopped, staring at me with alien silver eyes I knew I’d seen before in that dark place. “You have our teeth and our claws and our strength and her terrible power. You are the result of the moon and the wolf coming together, and you have the power to bring us to our knees.”

This was bad, whatever it was. I could still feel the bite of that dark place on my skin if I thought about it for long enough, but when you faced down an apex predator, you didn’t show fear. I pulled away from Mason, but I could feel the weight of him in my shadow as I approached Micah.

“Well, then get down on them.”

My voice was crisp and imperious, full of as much dominance as I could muster, and for a few heartbeats, there was a war fought in my eyes, in Micah’s. Or whoever else was riding him. Maybe this had been him all along, maybe we’d brought something back, something dark, when we’d returned from that other place. But I felt a surge of relief when he did so, dropping down to the floor, a strand of his hair falling over one silver eye. I brushed it away with one hand and replaced it