Mated to the Pack by Alanis Knight Page A

shorts,
appeared in the doorway.
    She twitched, her instinct to run to him,
but she stopped herself just in time. Instead, she tilted her head
to one side and said, “About time you showed up.”
    “Nice to see you, too,” he muttered, limping
into the room, followed shortly by Luke and Logan, also in
shorts.
    Michael rolled with a painful grunt onto a
cot and stared at the ceiling as the heavy stone closed, sealing
them in.
    “Were you followed?” Luke asked.
    “Do you think I’d have come here if I were?”
Michael growled.
    “Don’t be a dick,” Luke grumbled.
     
    Michael shot a warning glance in Luke’s
direction and said, “It’s because I’m a dick that you all are alive
right now.”
    “Sorry,” Luke muttered, plopping heavily
onto a cot across the room, his face taut with frustrated
contrition.
    “How long do we have to stay here?” Allison
wondered aloud.
    Michael gripped his ribs and grunted as he
pulled himself into a sitting position, and he glared deeply into
her eyes. “This is our new home thanks to you.”
    “Thanks to me?” she gasped, offended.
“You’ve got to be kidding! I didn’t ask for any of this!”
    “No, but we could have just let Victor keep
you,” Michael reminded her. “We didn’t need to rescue you… either
time.”
    Allison’s jaw dropped, and she started to
fly into an indignant rage, but she managed to suppress her rage.
He had a point. Instead, she dropped onto a cot and assumed the
same defeated position that Luke had been glowering in.
    “Logan, please lower the lights,” Michael
said. “I must rest. Stand guard until I awaken.”
    “Got it,” Logan said.
    Moments later the lighting dimmed to near
darkness. Allison leaned heavily against the wall, biting the
inside of her cheek and glaring at Michael’s bare torso lying on
his cot across the room. Soon, her eyelids grew heavy, and
eventually she drifted into a fitful sleep.

Chapter
Six

     
     
    The room was still dim when she came to, but
she noticed it was empty. Her brows furrowed, and she started to
call their names, but Michael emerged from the back room toweling
his hair with water droplets sliding down his bare midsection. She
noticed his wounds were completely healed.
    Allison’s eyes lingered just a bit longer
than she intended, and then she quickly turned her attention to the
moth-eaten blanket on her cot.
    “Well, look who finally woke up,” Michael
commented.
    “Finally? What time is it?” she asked.
    “About noon last time I checked.”
    “Noon! I’ve never slept so long in my life!”
she gasped.
    He shrugged and continued to rub his hair
vigorously with the towel before discarding it haphazardly across
the back of the lone chair that sat in the corner.
    “Pig,” she muttered, crossing the room and
snatching the towel from the chair and taking it into the bathroom,
which she was startled to see was nothing more than a shower stall
devoid of a curtain, a small, rusty sink, and a rather disgusting
toilet. She threw the towel over the top edge of the shower stall
and quickly withdrew from the musty room.
    “Don’t say a word,” Michael muttered.
    “What?”
    “I know what you’re thinking, Little Miss
Priss, and you can stuff it,” he grunted. “If our safe haven isn’t
to your liking, you’re free to go check into some upscale hotel
somewhere.”
    “How dare you,” Allison growled.
    “How dare me ?” Michael returned. “No,
no, no. How dare you ! I saw the way your stuck up little
nose wrinkled when you came out of the bathroom! We risked our
lives for you and all you can do is turn up that little nose of
yours!”
    “For your information,” Allison snarled,
approaching him aggressively, “that isn’t what I was doing! I was
actually thinking that I wished I could fix things up a bit and
make things more pleasant!”
    He lowered his head until his eyes were
inches from hers and said incredulously, “Oh, yeah, I’ll bet that
is exactly what you were