Alexander

    Business to handle. Right

    The truth was, I’d made up the excuse because I needed to get away from E before I did something stupid again.

    Dancing with her under the moonlight had been torture of the sweetest kind. The way she’d felt in my arms, the rose in her hair, the utter adoration in her eyes every time she looked up at me.

    And that kiss. Goddess, that kiss at the banquet.

    My wolf had gone absolutely feral when E had pulled me down to her mouth. The taste of her, the way she’d responded to me, the little sound she’d made when I’d kissed her back… It had taken every ounce of self–control I possessed not to carry her out of

    that ballroom and straight to our bed.

    I wanted to strip that midnight blue gown off her body and worship every inch of her skin. I wanted to mark her again, deeper this time, until there was no question who she belonged to. I wanted to bury myself inside of her and make her mine in every way possible.

    But I couldn’t. Not yet.

    Not until I knew for certain whether she was a spy sent by her family to destroy me.

    Gabriel’s letter had been eating away at me for days now. E’s family had definitely orchestrated my parents‘ deaths–I had concrete proof of that now. And whether E knew or not, one thing was abundantly clear: they had sent her here as a tool to manipte me.

    What if she was exactly what Gabriel suspected–a perfectly trained weapon designed to make me fall in love with her?

    What if she did know and all of this was just a beautiful lie.

    The thought made my chest hurt, but I couldn’t ignore the possibility. My parents had been killed by E’s family. I couldn’t risk letting the same thing happen to myself, or worse, if I opened myself up to her too easily.

    So instead of following E upstairs and showing her exactly how much I wanted her, I’d locked myself in my office with a bottle of whiskey and tried to drown out my wolf’s increasingly desperate demands.

    The whiskey wasn’t helping much.

    I poured another ss and stared at the amber liquid, trying to focus on the way it caught the firelight in a desperate attempt to stop thinking about the way she had looked at me tonight.

    Like she might actually care about me.

    But that could all be part of the act, couldn’t it? If her family had trained her from childhood to y this role, she’d be good at making me believe whatever they wanted me to believe.

    I knocked back the whiskey and immediately poured another.

    Hours passed. The bottle grew lighter. My head grew fuzzier, but the ache in my chest only got worse.

    By the time I finally stumbled upstairs, the mansion was quiet and dark. E would be asleep by now, curled up in our bed wearing one of those silk nightgowns that drove me insane.

    But as I approached the door, I noticed a sliver of buttery light spilling across the corridor floor from inside. I heard E’s soft voiceing from within.

    Goddess fucking dammit…”

    She sounded awfully frustrated.

    The door was cracked open just enough for me to see inside, so I quietly crept over and peered through, just to see what was going on.

    E was standing in front of the mirror, still in that midnight blue gown, but she was twisted around trying to reach theces of her corset. Her hair had fallen loose from its elegant updo, tumbling in waves down her back, and the sight of all that dark silk against her pale skin made my mouth go dry.

    She was struggling with the corset fastenings, her face scrunched up as she tried to contort her arms behind her back to reach theces. Every time she stretched, the bodice of her dress pulled tight across her breasts in an all–too–delicious way, but it was the obvious frustration in her movements that really caught my attention.