The Alpha grunted. “If you must.”
“He knows things,” she tried to reassure him.
Lord Maccon could not argue with that. “He generally knows too many things, if you ask me.”
Miss Tarabotti tried to make her position clear. “He is not interested in me, as anything, well... significant”
“Why would he be?” wondered Lord Maccon. “You are a preternatural, soulless.”
Alexia winced but strode doggedly onward. “However, you are?”
A pause.
Lord Maccon looked most put upon. His caressing thumb movement stopped, but he did not withdraw his hand from hers.
Alexia wondered if she should force the issue. He was acting as though he had not given the matter much thought. Perhaps he had not: Professor Lyall said the Alpha was acting entirely on instinct. And this was full moon, a notoriously bad time for werewolves and their instincts. Was it appropriate to inquire as to his feelings on the matter of her good self at this particular time of the month? Then again, wasn't this the time when she was most likely to get an honest answer?
“I am what?” The earl was not making this easy for her.
Alexia swallowed her pride, sat up very straight, and said, “Interested in me?”
Lord Maccon was quiet for a few long minutes. He examined his emotions. While admitting that at that moment—her small hands in his, the smell of vanilla and cinnamon in the air, the neckline of that damnable dress—his mind possessed all the clarity of pea soup full of ham-hock-sized chunks of need, there was something else lurking in said soup. Whatever it was, it made him angry, for it would desperately complicate everything in his well-ordered life, and now was not the time to tackle it.
“I have spent a good deal of time and energy during the course of our association trying not to like you,” he admitted finally. It was not an answer to her question.
“And yet I find not liking you comparatively easy, especially when you say things such as that!” Miss Tarabotti replied, trying desperately to extract her hand from his odious caress.
The action backfired. Lord Maccon tugged and lifted her forward as if she weighed no more than thistle down.
Miss Tarabotti found herself sitting flush against him on the small couch. The day was suddenly as warm as she had previously implied. She was scorched from shoulder to thigh by intimate contact with his lordship's prodigious muscles. What is it, she wondered, about werewolves and muscles?
“Oh my,” said Alexia.
“I am finding,” said the earl, turning toward her and caressing her face with one hand, “it very difficult to imagine not not disliking you on a regular and intimate basis for a very long time to come.”
Miss Tarabotti smiled. The smell of open fields was all about her, that breezy scent only the earl produced.
He did not kiss her, simply touched her face, as though he were waiting for something.
“You have not apologized for your behavior,” Miss Tarabotti said, leaning into his hand with her cheek. Best not to let him get the upper hand, so to speak, in this conversation by getting her all flustered. She wondered if she dared turn her face to kiss his fingertips.
“Mmm? Apologize? For which of my many transgressions?” Lord Maccon was fascinated by the smoothness of the skin of her neck, just below her ear. He liked the old-fashioned way she had put up her hair, all caught up at the back like a governess—better access.
“You ignored me at that dinner party,” Alexia persisted. It still rankled, and Miss Tarabotti was not about to let him slide without some pretense at contrition.
Lord Maccon nodded, tracing her arched black brows with a fingertip. “Yet you spent the evening engaging in a far more interesting conversation than I and went driving the next morning with a young scientist.”
He sounded so forlorn, Alexia almost laughed. Still no apology, but this was as close as an Alpha got, she supposed. She looked him dead-on. “He finds me interesting.”
Lord Maccon looked livid at that revelation. “Of that I am perfectly well aware,” he snarled.
Miss Tarabotti sighed. She had not meant to make him angry, fun as that could be. “What am I supposed to say at this juncture? What would you, or your pack protocol, like me to say?” she asked finally.
That you want me, his baser urges thought. That there is a future, not too far away in space or time, involving you and me and a particularly large bed. He tried to grapple with such salacious visions and extract himself from their influence. Blasted full moon, he thought, almost trembling with the effort.
He managed to control himself enough so that he did not actually attack her. But with the dampening down of his needs, he was forced to deal with his emotions. There it was, like a stone in the pit of his stomach. The one feeling he did not want to acknowledge. Further than just need, or want, or any of those less-civilized instincts he could so easily blame on his werewolf nature.
Lyall had known. Lyall had not mentioned it, but he had known. How many Alphas, Lord Maccon wondered, had Professor Lyall watched fall in love?
Lord Maccon turned a very wolflike gaze on the one woman who could keep him from ever becoming a wolf again. He wondered how much of his love was tied into that—the very uniqueness of it. Preternatural and supernatural—was such a pairing even possible?
Mine, said his look.
Alexia did not understand that glance. And she did not understand the silence that came with it.
She cleared her throat, suddenly nervous. “Bitch's Dance. Is it... my move?” she asked, naming pack protocol to give herself some credence. She did not know what was required, but she wanted him to know she had come to understand some part of his behavior.