Page 22 of Alpha’s Conquest

My hands shook, and I almost spilled my drink before I set it on the coffee table. “I’d rather be on his team.”

“What, and let you two cheat? No way. I want to win this time. Dad always loses.”

Adam sat beside me and grabbed his drink, rolling his eyes as he leaned back into the couch. I almost stopped breathing so I wouldn’t jostle him. “Thanks, son. Appreciate the vote of confidence.”

What followed next was nothing short of torture. Imagine sitting beside the man you desperately craved while your boyfriend kept smiling at you from across the coffee table during a game of charades. He thought everything was normal, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

In reality, I spent the entire hour trying not to touch Adam by accident and making sure I didn’t stare too deeply into his eyes while we guessed what the other was miming when it was our turn. I failed miserably because looking at him for hours, through round after round of movies and tv shows and song titles, made me weak at the knees. And every time I sat back down, his scent invaded me all over again, making it nearly impossible to focus.

David cheered when the timer buzzed, jolting me away from Adam’s eyes. Adam hadn’t guessed my movie title, ‘Animal Crackers,’ leaving David and Marshall’s team in the lead.

“Told yooou,” David whispered with a triumphant grin towards his father.

Adam rolled his eyes. “Shut up, David.”

We’d all polished off almost a full pizza each, but there was always room for breadsticks and fried mozzarella. I picked up the box of mozzarella sticks and frowned when I noticed it was empty. Damn. There was nothing like deep fried cheese.

“Sorry, Casey.” David licked his lips after chomping down the last one. Marshall got his next prompt and stood beside the couches, acting out a song title while David yelled out his guesses.

“Bridge. Water. Boat.” Marshall kept doing some kind of walking, then paddling motion. “Lake!”

With them distracted, Adam slid his plate towards me. There were two mozzarella sticks left, amidst a few pieces of crust. He was offering them to me. The old man who grumped at his sons all night was giving me his food. The mozzarella sticks were warm and savory, with the perfect amount of cheese pull. They tasted better than the ones I’d already eaten.

“Up a river!”

The answer was, ‘Walking in a row,’ and David hadn’t guessed it by the time the buzzer went off. After emptying two cases of beer between them, the two brothers were a little drunk. I’d only had one, and Adam never finished his first. That may have contributed to their failure to wipe the floor with us, as David put it.

David drained his beer and muffled a burp with his hand. “Alright, Pops. Last round.”

Adam took a paper from the pile and read it, then stuffed it into his pocket. Getting up, he turned towards me and held out three fingers.

“Three words,” I said, and he nodded to agree. He mimed turning on a remote. “TV show.” Adam raised his arms to mime something, but someone hooked me around the neck and pulled me back so I couldn’t see.

“So pretty,” Marshall whispered into my ear, his breath hot and sweet. Ahh, fuck. He was wasted. “C’mon, les go upshtairsh.”

“Nooo,” David loudly complained, his voice just as slurred. “I wanna beat Dad at Shharadesss.”

Marshall almost knocked me over when he put his full weight on my back. My weak attempt to push him off only made him lean more of his body on top of me. God, he weighed a ton. Adam grabbed his son by the collar and pulled him off me, holding him upright when his knees wobbled.

“Go to bed, both of you. You’re not making a mess of my house just because you’re drunk.” Even though both of his sons were smaller than him, it still took effort to get them upstairs and in their beds. I was struggling with Marshall until Adam returned from David’s room. He grabbed Marshall’s arm and slung it over his shoulder, and dropped him on his bed to sleep it off.

With his sons already passed out, that left us alone. Alone. With the Alpha who had been driving me mad all day.

Giving myself just the tiniest amount of distance from him, I went back to the living room and started picking up the trash from dinner. He came down the stairs and met my eyes as I stacked the pizza boxes. The air suddenly felt thick and hot between us. David and Marshall wouldn’t be up until morning. This was the first moment since we met where no one could stop us from taking exactly what we wanted, what we truly desired. We made excuses before. We were interrupted. But the only thing stopping us now was us. And that felt so, so dangerous.

“Uhh, t-there’s…” He swallowed hard, his jaw clenched as his eyes darted away. His scent… God, I would never get enough of it. “There’s a blanket in the office. I’ll go grab it. You should sleep down here.”

“Oh, I should, huh?” I tossed the last pizza box onto the pile. “So now you get to tell me what to do?” A rush of unexplainable anger came over me. Just watching him standing there, a temptation I had to resist, but I knew deep down I didn’t want to. This inescapable pull would be my undoing. Was it even just his scent that drew me to him, or was it everything else that went with it? Without a single thought, I was walking up to him, standing close enough to see the freckles dotting his sunburned cheeks.

He loomed over me, the pull between us so intoxicating, he couldn’t resist the temptation to touch me. He caught my chin with his thumb and tilted my head back as his own inched closer. “If you sleep upstairs in my son’s bed for one more night, I don’t think I’ll be able to…” He trailed off, his gaze fixated on my lips. His thumb stroked my chin, giving me a gentle tug closer.

“Able to what?” I asked, my voice low and husky with desire. I was long past the point of ignoring my reaction to him. I was so damn hard. I’d been hard all fucking night, and I could barely breathe with him staring right into my eyes.

“I’ll take you to my bed and make you mine, Casey. Like I should’ve done when I first saw you.”

The dam was breaking.

The cracks had begun since that first moment. It was inevitable. A pull this powerful. A need that cannot be ignored. It didn’t care who he was, or all the reasons we should say no.