The Wrong Brother's Temptation novel Chapter 161

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Chapter 161

Connor

The moon was doing something showoff-worthy tonight, and I stood on the terrace watching it like it might have some useful advice to offer, hoping the Moon Goddess was having a really good time watching me suffer.

Ever since I understood power and what it meant to be an alpha, I had worked hard to ensure I became one so I could bring my mother home. I wanted her to be with me, not in a hospital, alone and scared.

I wanted her to show that I grew up to be the man she dreamt I would become one day, and see me as the alpha of the Ashford pack. She deserved to stay here, in her home, not just her husband who dumped her in a mental hospital the moment she’d stopped being useful to him politically.

But then somehow a freckled girl with a knife in her hand walked back into my life and ruined my carefully crafted plan.

I’d been in a one-sided argument with the Moon Goddess on the terrace when that same girl showed up and relief crashed into me because I hadn’t seen her for a whole day and I was resisting the urge to call or meet her.

I heard the door open behind me before she said anything, which was mildly annoying, because I’d have preferred another minute of pretending I wasn’t thinking about her.

She came to stand beside me at the railing instead of leaving because leaving would have been the sensible option, and Sienna Miller had never once in her life chosen the sensible option when a more chaotic one was available.

She’d found out what the elders had asked Aaron for his succession task, and she wanted to hand it to me like a gift, like this was the kind of help I actually wanted from her.

I said no before she’d finished the sentence and she looked at me like I’d started speaking a different language.

The infuriating thing was that I understood exactly why she’d assumed I’d take the advantage.

I’d

spent fifteen years being exactly the kind of person who would have. Old me would have taken the information without a second thought, would have used it, would have found the whole concept of fair play faintly ridiculous. But old me had also spent those fifteen years making her cry, being precisely the monster my mother sometimes still saw when she looked at me.

I wasn’t interested in being him again.

She frowned at me like she couldn’t reconcile the two versions of me standing in front of her, and I understood the confusion, because some days I couldn’t fully understand it myself either.

What I couldn’t say to her was that I’d started wanting to be a better version of myself somewhere around the time she’d started looking at me like I was one.

I wasn’t going to give over that reasoning to her easily.

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She stood there in the cold, hair blowing across her face, and I knew she wanted to say something more. I let her circle it because watching her work up to things had become one of my favorite forms of entertainment.

When it finally came out I had to work very hard to not look amused.

I wasn’t a saint and no girl had ever walked away from me without having a good time but Sienna’s was the most absurd and insane request any girl could have ever made to me.

This girl never failed to surprise me. It was like we were playing some sort of push and pull and despite me being the bully and an alpha, she was the one who made the rules.

And now she’d just handed me the control back neatly gift-wrapped and with instructions.

So I went to my room and poured a drink because I needed to calm the fuck down.

How exactly was I supposed to survive this?

She’d handed me permission to seduce her while simultaneously making it clear the whole thing was a test and somehow I was supposed to restrain myself so that it didn’t drive me completely out of my mind.

She had no idea what she was asking.

She thought this was about testing her body’s response, about proving the meds worked. But she hadn’t once considered what it would cost me to be close enough to torment her without actually touching her the way every single cell in my body wanted to.

I watched her build a wall of pillows down the middle of my bed like I was some kind of feral animal that needed containing.

The meds seemed to be doing an excellent job dampening her scent temporarily but did absolutely nothing for the roar in my own head due to the sheer and exhausting fact that I wanted her.

I told her I was worried about my own dignity. Let her think it was a joke.

I lay down on my side of the bed still fully dressed, and listened to her easing slowly into sleep while mine stayed exactly where it had been for the last hour, wide awake, and completely useless.

“You are a masochist” Fang, my wolf, muttered in my

head.

I ignored him and told myself that this was manageable and that I had survived worse and that I would just take one look at her and go to sleep.

That was a mistake because she was now facing me and looked so damn sweet and innocent, it hurt to not pull her close.

She’d shifted in her sleep and had one hand tucked under the pillow.

A strand of hair had fallen across her cheek and was catching against her mouth every time she breathed. She made a small, unconscious sound of irritation in her sleep, trying to move it without waking.

I should have looked away but I kept staring at her instead, trying to memorise and count every speckle that

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The Wrong Brother’s Temptation

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