Seduction (The Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow) (5 page)

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“Umm, to bed. Why, you wanna join me?” he said as he grinned wickedly. He looked thoroughly disreputable with his perfect white teeth glinting in the dim light.
 

I glared icy daggers at him. How dare he show up here, unwanted and uninvited and then crack a sick joke like that?

Roan took in my stiff posture and sighed deeply. “Aspen, I live here. I have ever since I finished my military service over a year ago. Didn’t your mother tell you?”

Chapter 5

~Aspen~

“What the hell are you talking about, Roan?!?” I said as I shook with a combination of anger and fear.

“I live here, Aspen.”
 

Roan’s voice was quiet as my eyes frantically searched his face for signs of deception, but there were none to be found. His face was completely devoid of emotion. I’m sure mine was plastered with incredulity.
 

There was no way this nightmare was actually taking place! It must be Roan’s idea of a sick joke.

“Oh no! No way! My mother never told me that you were finished your military service, Roan. She also never mentioned that you lived here either,” I said as I eyed him angrily, “So therefore, you
must
be lying because there is no way in hell that my mother would have withheld information like
that
from me.”

Roan looked calm, his face an unreadable mask, as he shrugged his shoulders and looked down at me with his hands in his pockets.
 

This
was not
happening.
 

Furious, I pushed past him and stalked down the hall like a mad woman. My hands were shaking as I turned the knob and threw open the door to his old bedroom. It was the only room in the entire house that I’d avoided like the plague since I’d been home, and I sucked in my breath as I stood in the open doorway.
 

Roan’s things were
everywhere.
 

No, no, no, there was no freaking way that he lived here.
It couldn’t be true!
This was some kind of elaborate hoax. It had to be.
 

 
By coming back into my life without any warning and then feeding me this story about living in her house, I knew that Roan was only trying to torture me further. It wasn’t good enough for him that my mother was dead, he really wanted to shove me over the edge into Crazy Town.
 

He must have set up this fake bedroom while I was sleeping, because there was no other explanation that I was willing to accept.
 

He could have done it; he could have drug all this stuff over here in an attempt to torment me further. There was just
no way
that he had been living here at my mother’s house for more than a year and I’d never known about it.
 

“It can’t be true,” I kept repeating under my breath as I walked around the bedroom, picking up his possessions and looking for any indication that the items were recently placed there.

Roan followed behind me and was currently leaning against the doorway, with his tattooed arms crossed over his chest. His handsome face was plastered with a look of satisfied, smug amusement.

Roan’s bed was rumpled and unmade. His dirty clothes were haphazardly tossed in the hamper, with a pair of jeans hanging over the side. His deodorant and his canister of shaving cream were on his dresser, along with a handful of spare change. There was even a shadowbox hanging on the wall with his military medals carefully mounted inside it.
 

Swallowing hard, I opened his dresser drawers with manic ferocity, hoping to find them empty. But all were stuffed full of jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, socks and underwear.
 

I threw open the closet door so hard that it hit the wall and bounced back. His hunting rifle was leaning in the corner and his running shoes and boots littered the closet floor.
 

Whipping around, I spied his open laptop sitting on his bedside table. Next to it sat a half full glass of water and his black leather jacket was carelessly tossed on the bottom of his bed.
 

I stood in the middle of the room, my back to him, as the realization slowly dawned on me.

OMG, he lived here
… and my mother hadn’t told me about it.
 

How could this be?
How could my mother have withheld this information from me? Why wouldn’t she have told me something
this important
? She must have known how I’d feel about him living here after everything that had happened between us.

I felt a new sense of betrayal wash over me. How could my own mother have deceived me? And why?
 

My head spun with questions and recriminations as Roan silently watched me from the doorway.

“I’ve been here for days. Since the funeral, in fact. If you do live here, and I’m not saying you do, then where have you been? And why weren’t you at my mother’s funeral? The whole pack was there but I never once saw you in the sea of faces,” I said haughtily, unable to turn around and face him.

“I
was
at your mother’s funeral, Aspen,” he said softly, “I figured that you’d had enough to deal with and it would be best if I stayed out of your way for a few days. So, I left Spruce Hollow on pack business right after the service.”

I held my breath as he spoke, willing his words to be untrue.

“Frankly, I’m surprised that you didn’t open my bedroom door and figure out that I was living here long before I returned home tonight.”
 

When I didn’t answer him, he continued. “When I got back home and found you sleeping and surrounded by a pile of my old letters, it kind of surprised me. I mean it’s not like you ever bothered to write me back, is it? Nope, not once. So why would you bother to keep my letters for all these years? Seems a little strange to me, don’t you think, Aspen? Something obviously made you think about me tonight and I figured maybe this would be a good time for us to talk. So, I waited for you to wake up …and here we are.”

I was filled with dread as I turned around and looked at him. Roan’s mouth was set in a half smile as he took in my face. It pissed me off and my eyes glared venom at him
. I just wanted to slap that smile off his stubbled face!
 

“So, I guess we’re roomies, then,” he said as he tried to hide his laughter in a cough.

Oh, no. Hell no.
There was no way on earth that I was going to spend one single night in the same house as the man who’d used and abandoned me all those years before.

“I don’t know how you managed to worm yourself back into my mother’s good graces again but you don’t fool me, Roan,” I said sharply, my eyes icy and cold, “I’m packing my stuff and leaving this fucking town tonight. My mother’s gone now and there’s nothing forcing me to stay here. I have a life, in Springbay.
That
is my home now. To hell with the realtor, I don’t care if I ever sell this damn house, it can sit here and rot with you in it for all I care.”

“I see. So, we’re going to do this the hard way then, are we? Why not, Aspen? The entire thing’s been hard. Why stop now?” He said angrily as he ran his hands through his short hair.

“Get. The. Hell. Out. Of. My. Way. Roan,” I hissed at him as he stood in the doorway and effectively blocked my furious retreat, “I don’t know how much simpler I can put it. I don’t want to be here with you. I just want you to leave me alone.”
 

Roan stood in front of me, his large frame and crossed biceps firmly obstructing the sole path to my escape.
 

Meeting up with him again, under these nerve wracking circumstances was almost as bad as the day he’d left Spruce hollow. The only difference this time was, Roan was here to witness the effects of his torture.
 

My tenuous grasp on propriety was quickly threatening to fall by the wayside as I blew out a hard puff of air and started pacing his room like a caged animal.

“Please Roan, you need to move. I want to leave, get out of my way for the love of god!”

His face remained cold and unreadable as he watched me. I could quickly feel my anger slipping through my fingers like fine grains of sand, leaving only panic and fear to remain. I needed to get away from him before I started bawling like a baby.

Desperate, I rushed the door, trying to push past him but he easily stopped me. His strong hands wrapped around the tender flesh of my upper arms as he held me away from his body and looked down at me.

“It’s going to be okay Aspen. I know you’re confused and very angry right now. You have every right to be. But I can’t let you leave. I’m sorry.” His eyes seemed sympathetic as he looked down at me but that only fueled my fire.
 

I didn’t want his pity!

How could my mother have lied to me about this? She’d known how I’d felt about Roan. She’d held me and comforted me when I’d cried heartbroken tears after he’d left. She’d told me that she understood what it was to lose someone you cared about. For god’s sake, she would make me hot chocolate and toast with butter when I would get Roan’s letters in the mail and hide in my room, for days at a time, bawling my eyes out.
 

I yanked my arms free and, surprisingly, he let me go as I started pacing back and forth in his bedroom again with my face cradled in my hands.

“Please Roan, please. Just let me go. I need to leave. I can’t stay here,” I said, my voice breathless and insistent. I was on the verge of hyperventilating with panic.
 

I could feel hot tears pricking at the corners of my eyelids and couldn’t even look at Roan for fear of weeping like a blubbering idiot.
 

No, don’t cry! Don’t you DARE cry in front of him! Suck it up, you big sissy girl!

“Is this how worked up you were, little girl, the night you trashed my room? Remember that night? I remember it very well. It was the last night we saw one another before I left Spruce Hollow. I remember how you didn’t really know or understand the facts, yet you still flipped out like a lunatic, destroyed my room and then tried to run away. Remember that night, Aspen?” he said as he calmly took in my manic pacing back and forth across his bedroom.
 

Roan irritated the hell out of me.
 

How come I felt like a hamster on a wheel, with my heart nearly pounding out of my chest and he looked so calm and collected, his face an impassive mask of tightly controlled emotions?

“You’re not going anywhere, Aspen. You can’t drive your car anyway,” he said suddenly as he uncrossed his arms and stalked into the room, effectively unblocking the door.

“What?? Why not? Omg, what did you do to my car, Roan?” I screeched at him.

“Let’s just say that I had a look at it while you were sleeping, ” he said as he walked past me and stopped at his dresser, “and don’t think of leaving the house and trying to hitchhike back to Springbay or something equally stupid like that. I’ll hear you leaving and will drag you back here by the hair if I have to. You’re not going anywhere, Aspen, not until we have a nice long talk about everything that’s happened between us in the past few years,” he said as he casually pulled his shirt up over his head, threw it in the clothes hamper and rifled through his top drawer.

I was furious at him, but my eyes couldn’t help but roam over his perfectly chiseled body. I followed the corded muscles in his abdomen until they disappeared down into the waist of his jeans. I even found myself briefly wondering what he would look like completely naked?
Oh my god, Aspen, pull yourself together!

Lord, why did Roan have to be so damn attractive? It was distracting and very unfair, given the circumstances.

Shaking my head to clear the confusion that Roan had a tendency to inspire, I pulled my gaze away from his half naked body and tried to hone in on my anger instead.
 

“What the hell is wrong with you, Roan? What did you do to my car, cut the brake line? You won’t be satisfied until I’m dead, will you? You want to force me to live here with you and torture me to death until I’m insane, is that it? What, tell me? What the hell do you want from me? I just want to go back home. Please Roan, let me go. I don’t want to be here with you. I just want to leave!”
 

That did it.
 

That little speech was enough to push me over the edge and make me lose what tenuous control I had over my emotions and I started to cry.
 

It was too much for me to handle. My mother was dead and Roan was living in her house! It was literally my worst nightmare, come to life and there was no way that I could stay here in the same house with him. He couldn’t make me. I was an adult now and he couldn’t boss me around anymore!
 

With that thought on the fringes of my psyche, I turned and bolted from the room and ran down the hall as fast as my feet could carry me.
 

Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far.

Roan took off after me and tackled me before I even reached the living room. We landed in a heap on the floor with me laid out flat on my stomach and him, bare-chested and on top of me with one arm around my torso. Shrieking, I tried to push myself up from the floor and get away but he reached around and yanked both my arms back towards him and pinned my wrists behind my back.