“I spent time with your pack. These men respect you, but like children, they crave your respect. Your compassion. You are a father to them.”
“You should take care how you advise me to lead my pack. You are hardly in a position to talk about pack loyalty.”
“What did my father say!”
“That you’re a whore!” he yelled back. “He called you Poison Ivy and said you bedded with Fox. And here this whole time I thought I was protecting you from a man who would corrupt you.”
I struggled to stand and met his gaze. “He did corrupt me.”
Lorenzo gave a tight-lipped smile and shook his head. “The Packmaster’s daughter sleeping around. You shamed his standing in the pack that he couldn’t even control his own daughter from tempting his men. And to have lain with a man before your change…”
“I won’t lie and say that I didn’t have sex with Fox, because I did. But not of my own free will.”
My knees weakened and I knelt on the bearskin rug, overwhelmed with rage. I wanted to keep this part of my past buried and had never imagined revealing it to anyone.
Lorenzo knelt before me, his eyes startled. “Did I hear you correctly?”
I rested my hands on my thighs. “I grew up looking at Fox like an uncle. We had a rowdy pack, and he always watched over me. They often went out to the bars or restaurants, and as I got older, I wanted to join them. But they left me home with the children. One evening, everyone had gone out for a celebration, leaving the little ones behind. Fox returned and said something about the party being boring. He said he’d take me to town if I didn’t tell my father. I was young, and it sounded exciting to get out. But my father never allowed me to go anywhere on my own. Maybe a part of me rebelled with Fox’s offer.”
“That’s not healthy for a young Shifter. Children need to experience the world and mingle with humans to get used to them.”
I touched my braid and nodded in agreement. My leg ached, so I leaned on my right side and stretched out my leg. “I put on a nice dress, and we went for a drive. There was a full moon that night. I remember because it kept watching me through the dirty windshield of his truck.”
Lorenzo rubbed his eyes with one hand.
“Fox took me to a little diner and we had hamburgers. I can’t even remember what we talked about, but he ordered milkshakes to go. Then on the way home, he suggested stopping by the lake, so we did. I’d never been to the lake at night, and it was so beautiful. The way the moonlight shone on the water, the quietness. I sat down and drank my shake, making small talk. He kept telling me how pretty I looked—how I’d grown up to look just like my mother. Fox and my mother were pretty close from what I’d seen, so I trusted him.”
The fire crackled and I waited. Maybe I didn’t need to tell the rest of the story because it was self-explanatory.
“And?” he pressed in a gentle voice. When I didn’t answer, he reached out and lifted my chin with the crook of his finger. “Finish.”
I swallowed hard. “He tried to kiss me. Said he’d show me how to kiss a boy the right way. I pushed him away and felt teased about the whole thing because he kept laughing. He didn’t make it seem like I should have been scared of him—like we were just horsing around. Fox told me Shifters didn’t like shy girls and said they’d put their hands on me, like this.”
I placed my hand on my upper thigh and curved it between my legs. Lorenzo’s face hardened, the bones in his cheeks sharpening.
“Then something about it started to feel very wrong. I was na?ve, Lorenzo. Almost as soon as I stopped laughing about it, he pulled up my dress. When I asked him to stop, Fox pushed me onto my stomach.” I stopped talking as the moments flashed in my mind from years ago—my milkshake tipping over and soaking into the ground, the smell of dirt, my panties pinching my skin as they were yanked down, the sound of his heavy breathing. “I went home with a dirty dress and threw it away so no one would know. I was ashamed—afraid I might have tempted his wolf and it was my fault. After that night, Fox didn’t speak to me.”
Lorenzo’s eyes narrowed as he kept them centered on me. “Something isn’t right. If you didn’t tell anyone, then why did your father imply you slept around?”
My God, I couldn’t open up to him like this. It was too much. “Think what you want about me, but I’m no whore. Fox is the only man I’ve ever been intimate with.”
“You call that intimate?” he roared. Then he launched to his feet and paced toward the window. “You’re not telling me something.”
“I think I’ve told you more than enough,” I said wearily. “Rebecca is an interesting woman.”
He turned around. “What did she say to you?”
“Plenty, but not much after I saved her from having her throat torn out.”
Lorenzo slowly approached, taking a seat in his chair behind me. I turned so my feet were facing the fire and I looked at him.