Moon Touched (Zodiac Wolves: The Lost Pack #1)(48)
His eyes finally fell on me. “Are you okay?”
“What?” It was the last thing I expected him to say. I stepped out of the fighting stance I’d fallen into on instinct—feet wider, I could almost hear Kaden saying—and crossed my arms over my chest. “What are you doing in my room?”
“I heard noises. I thought someone had broken in and attacked you.”
What? Oh. Heat rose in my face, and I hunched my shoulders, suddenly realizing that the object of my sex dream was standing right in front of me, and I was wearing just a sports bra and shorts. It was one thing to participate in the casual nudity of a shifter, but it was another thing altogether when my body was aching, my desire still so present.
“It was nothing,” I said, trying to put as much bluster into the words as possible. “Just a dream.”
As if my own realization at my state of undress had sparked his, Kaden’s eyes dropped to my breasts, and then went down further, tracing the lines of my body. For a moment, I wondered if I was still asleep, if this was some weird dreamin-a-dream I hadn’t woken up from yet, but then he inhaled and closed his eyes.
“You smell of sex,” he said.
I was still so caught up in the dream that his voice saying those words sent another bolt of desire down my spine. I could easily imagine him saying other things next, similar to those I’d just heard in my dream. Gooseflesh popped up as if his words had caressed me.
When he opened his eyes, they were hard and angry. “Dreaming about your Leo mate?”
“What?” I asked, shaking myself out of the hold of his voice. “No, I—”
“Don’t do that under my roof. I don’t care who you want to fuck, but keep your fantasies of that piece of shit far away from me."
I opened my mouth to correct him, but what exactly would I say? Actually, I wasn’t dreaming about my mate, I was dreaming about you. How would that help the situation?
Part of me wanted to chase the last moment, to regain that hunger in Kaden’s eyes as he’d been looking me over, but that didn’t make any sense. He was angry, and an angry Kaden was a familiar Kaden. Him looking at me with lust had been out of the ordinary, and probably hadn’t meant anything, anyway. Mentioning it would just create conflict where there didn’t need to be any.
“Get out of my room,” I said instead, which was much more on par with how we usually interacted.
Kaden’s eyes flared again, and he looked like he wanted to argue. Then he simply shook his head and walked out, slamming the door behind him.
I took in a deep, shuddering breath. I tried to calm my racing heart, but I couldn't stop thinking about how hot my dream had been. I'd never had sex before. No one in the Cancer pack would touch me. I'd dated a human while I was in college but my parents forbade me from seeing him because he wasn't my mate. And of course, my mate didn't want me. Not that I wanted him either, but that didn't make the ache for him go away. Now I was going to be tormented by dreams of Kaden too.
Really graphic, detailed dreams. Damn, why couldn't he have waited another few seconds to wake me up?
Chapter Twenty
The next few days passed with no small amount of awkwardness. Kaden hadn’t brought up the incident in my room, and I hadn’t either. That didn’t change the fact that the midnight incident hung between us like a stench in the air. Neither of us went poking at it, but it was there, all the same, and I was just waiting for it to get to a breaking point. We seemed to dedicate extra time to ignoring it, carefully looking away and putting distance between our bodies, and it was driving me up the wall.
Worst of all, it was like we noticed every time we were close and made a big deal of getting past it. It was harder when Kaden was pressed against me in a hold, or pinning me to the ground after bowling me over, but there was no time to spend on physical attraction when I was trying to wiggle out of his grasp or throw a punch. It didn’t stop my brain from wandering in the off-moments though, and I found myself having to ask Kaden to repeat a lot of things.
It seemed like training was getting more and more physical, the hand-to-hand combat becoming more of a close-quarters thing as I got better and he actually had to work to take me down. He wasn’t getting distracted nearly as much as I was, but I still noticed the odd time or two that he stared at me intensely, almost the same look in his eyes as he’d had in the dream. My brain’s ability to conjure up the memory of it was eerie.
It was becoming increasingly obvious that Kaden and I had intense chemistry, and I couldn’t deny that he felt it either. Not that it mattered. As if the mating bond could feel that I was thinking about someone else, the sharp tugs drawing me back to Jordan became more intense. Every single time I got caught up in looking at Kaden’s muscles or drowning in his eyes, I’d feel it. It would be like an itch that I couldn’t quite scratch, something telling me that this was out of place. Reminding me that I should be somewhere else right now. I wondered if the moon goddess was getting a huge kick out of my predicament. Rejected by my true mate, and lusting after another shifter instead.
I scratched at my stomach, trying to rid myself of the odd pull as we walked. I shook my head as if I could clear the thoughts physically from my brain and tried to focus on where Kaden and I were headed. We weren’t doing combat training today, which was equal parts a letdown and a relief. Instead, we were walking the perimeter of the Ophiuchus pack territory for some reason he hadn't explained yet.