Reluctant Mate

Chapter 5

 And damn did he look good in black!

  Alex had waved his hands over his head, smiling at all the roars for them, then stopped upon making eye contact with me. A slow grin spread across his lips again.

  So fucking gorgious and tempting that my gaze lingered on him a millisecond longer to enjoy that grin before peeling my eyes from him and rejoining the chatter at my own table.

  If I were being honest, Alex was what I feared most about this evening. It was nerve-racking to think that tonight I would have to come face-to-face with him, a man who brought me to life and who seemed determined to be involved in my day at one point or another.

  Okay, maybe that last claim was a little drastic and existed only in my head? Still, it was a mystery why my subconscious was highly aware of him. He made me nervous. He was intriguing and oh, so gorgeous, but the man was a stranger to me, so I cursed myself for even thinking about him at all. 

  That perhaps made me sound like a cheater considering Tyler was waiting for me back home, but aside from being attracted to another man, I hadn’t done anything wrong. With only three encounters with the male werewolf under my belt, perhaps my interest was all in my head. Like the little scenarios that randomly played out in my mind unthinkingly ever since he whispered in my ear last night.

   There was perhaps some leniency in saying I unreasonably developed a small interest in him. That was all I was willing to admit to myself, crediting it as a slight fascination with his ability to make me annoyed and nervous all at once. Of course, that didn’t help the cheating projection either.

  “He is so damn fine,” one of the women sitting at the table mumbled to the rest of us.

  Candice, I think, was her name. 

  “Which one?” Jordan chimed in, sounding like she was attractive to all four men and wouldn’t mind attention from any particular one.

  “You know exactly which one I'm talking about.”

  How old were these women again?

  “That should be illegal,” she drawled, eyeing someone across the bar. I refused to follow her line of vision because it would incline that I was interested in who she was referring to. I was having my own issues with one of the four men that recently sauntered through the door and couldn’t afford to risk those thoughts being known. 

  “Why haven’t you introduced me to Alex yet?” Brittany asked Steph from across the table. “Isn’t he your cousin or something?”

  That sparked my curiosity.

  “Yeah, but he’s seeing someone,” she replied.

  Was he? 

  “Damn. Could you imagine being tossed on the bed by that? Lucky girl.”

  Oh my god, I thought. But yes… Whoever she was, she was very fortunate. 

  Wait! What?

  “Maybe you can still get some of that,” Candice encouraged, wiggling her eyebrows. “Why else would he be here alone?”

  I felt like I needed a drink. A real one, for that matter.

  “Maybe,” Brittany pondered.

  As if reading my mind, Steph stood up, announcing she was getting a refill, and asked if anyone else needed one as well, but they all refused. 

  “Do you want another one?” she asked me.

  “Sure,” I replied, but deliberately didn’t inform her it was alcohol-free because I really just wanted to have a little fire in my veins. Surely it would help me relax around these strangers who were intimately talking about someone I had thought about in almost the same manner. However, I wasn’t as experienced as them.