Mated to the Alpha and His Beta (Lanie Stanton) novel Chapter 479

Chapter 479
Stella

Every hair on my body rose as a crackle of tense energy swept over me. I honed in on the sound of the scream, which I realized hadn’t been loud enough for anyone else to notice out here on the street, even those tuning in with wolf hearing. A ripple of anxiety ran along my spine as I stopped myself mid-run.

Someone had screamed from inside The Silver Crescent, but it didn’t seem to be causing a panic. I didn’t have to respond to it. I could keep on running my sad little self right on home and leave all those people to their own tragedies.

But I didn’t. I turned around and went back through the doors. I scanned the crowd. My senses were on high alert, tingling. For a moment, I was almost overwhelmed. I could draw on so many different talents, it was hard right this second to figure out which to use and how…without giving myself away.

No more screams had come, but there was a different kind of tension swirling through the air. Heat, but also cold. A smell like rich earth, but also like metal. Like the electric zap of lightning. I’d forced the hair on my head to stop floating around me in a cloud, but the hairs on the back of my neck were still twitching.

Aunt Selena was back in the center of the dance floor. The song had gone back to something uptempo, and she moved to the beat with such easy precision that I couldn’t stop the wave of jealousy poking at me with tiny kitten claws. She moved like she didn’t care who was watching her…but everyone was.

Every male was, anyway. Even the ones with other women. Their eyes followed every move she made, tracking her like she was prey. Almost in unison, they lifted bottles or glasses to their lips and drank, but on nearly every male mind was not the flavor of the alcohol but what it would be like to taste Selena’s lips…and other places.

A different sort of heat rushed into me, deep in my gut. I knew what sex was, not that my parents had ever talked to me about it. I’d carried the knowledge of how people joined their bodies for pleasure and procreation inside me, the same way I’d come into this world knowing so much else. But knowing how body parts could join wasn’t the same as having experience.

Watching my aunt dance, watching all these men stare at her, I began to get a better sense of how it all worked, only it wasn’t as fun as I’d expected it to be. In fact, the growing sense of friction emanating off the men in the room was twisting my stomach into knots.