He grimaced. “One thing I’m used to, it’s responsibility. You deal with it. No one else is going to.”
Zoe shoved her hands in her pockets, knowing she shouldn’t ask the next question if she wanted to keep them impersonal, but driven by a need to know. “Ava said you pretty much raised her and your brothers.”
Tyler grunted. “No one else was going to,” he repeated, but something cold had crept into his voice. “Our father left and our mother was useless.”
“My sire was banished too.” Zoe scuffed her toe over an old oil stain on the cement floor. “I don’t really remember him.” She’d been raised more as part of the pride litter than by her actual parents, but with Landon as her partner in crime she hadn’t felt bruised by the lack.
“Our father wasn’t banished. He left,” Tyler said harshly. “Just decided he didn’t want his responsibilities anymore and walked away. Headed for greener pastures.”
Zoe struggled for something to say that wouldn’t sound patronizing. He would be proud of you? Because how could he not be? Tyler was an amazing man. He was tempered steel tested by a lifetime of burdens. He was the man every father hoped his son would be, but she didn’t think saying that would help. She didn’t want to imply that Tyler needed his father’s approval. He was better than that.
And besides, who was she to talk? She avoided responsibilities like the plague and she was an old hand at greener pastures. She knew better than most that they were almost never green.
Arriving in a new pride wasn’t easy as a nomad. She and Landon had visited their share in their years of wandering before they’d come to Three Rocks.
Zoe cleared her throat self-consciously. “Can I ask you something?”
Tyler shrugged consent, his focus centered on the parts in his hands.
“That first day, when Landon and I arrived here at Three Rocks. The old Alpha Leonus and his thug Kato tried to gang up on Landon, but you didn’t let them. I would have fought with him. I remember how surprised I was when I didn’t even have to shift. But Leonus was even more surprised than I was when you stepped in, like you’d never interfered before. I’ve always wondered why you didn’t. And why, that day, you did.”
Tyler’s hands stilled on the engine components. “Why do you ask?”
Because that was the moment I started falling in love with you.
She shook her head, in denial of the thought. This wasn’t love. She wouldn’t let it be. She hadn’t needed a hero then, but having him step in with his armor shining had linked them somehow.
“I have a theory about why you didn’t,” she said. “Landon’s always had big sweeping ideas of changing the whole world, but you strike me as more focused. Ava… Michael… You only fight personal battles. I think Leonus was betting on you not lifting a finger for a stranger, but for some reason that wasn’t a good bet.” Zoe wet her lips, unaccountably nervous. “I guess I was just wondering if that reason had anything to do with me.”
She was able to ask only because he wasn’t looking at her. When he raised his eyes to hers, the words turned to sawdust in her mouth.
“Doesn’t that make me less noble? If I wasn’t doing it for the justice of it, but only to get laid?” Tyler slowly advanced on her, and Zoe found her feet retreating without any direction from her brain.
“But you didn’t get laid. If you were only doing it so I’d feel indebted to you, why didn’t you ever come to collect?”
“Isn’t that what I did last night?”
“You waited over a year to claim your prize? I don’t think so.” Her back bumped against an SUV with the side paneling shredded by some lion’s claws.
Tyler kept advancing until his chest brushed hers, using his superior height to loom over her in that way that never failed to make her internal organs melt like butter.
“Why, Tyler?”
He bowed his head and buried his nose in her hair, inhaling deeply next to her ear and then whispering the words into it. “I didn’t want you to get hurt.” He rested his hands on the SUV on either side of her so his forearms brushed the sides of her waist. “I’ve had this compulsion to protect you since the second you walked through that gate.”
“I don’t need you to protect me.”
“I need to. You belong to me, Zoe. And you drive me mad when you put yourself at risk. I thought I could control it. I thought if I didn’t give in to it that I would stop wanting to claim you, but it never worked.”
Her breathing accelerated, fueled by the mix of arousal and panic his words inspired. “I don’t want a protector.”
“Tough,” he growled against her ear, his body leaning into hers until she could feel his strength pressing her back into the door panel. “We don’t always get what we want. I wanted to be free of my obligations and leave here for good, but I stopped thinking that way the second I realized you were mine to protect.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” she said, her argument slightly less effective due to the breathy gasps that were all she could manage with his hands sneaking under her shirt to her braless breasts beneath. “You can’t be both the big, strong protector and the no-strings lover. It doesn’t work that way.”
He lifted her, guiding her legs around his hips and pinning her hard against the SUV. “We both know no strings was never an option.”
His mouth slammed down on hers, driving any protest she might have made out of her mind. He consumed her with the kiss. He shrugged out of his coveralls, and Zoe lowered her legs long enough to help the stiff cloth drop to his ankles. As he kicked it off, she quickly stripped out of her own jeans and T-shirt. Then he fell back on her in a hungry frenzy. His hands were filthy with engine grease, but Zoe didn’t care. She wanted them on her everywhere, smearing tracks of dark grease across her skin.
Tyler was forceful, commanding. He spun her away from the side door and bent her over the table he’d been working at earlier, her ass raised like a gift. He nudged her feet wider and stroked a calloused hand over the curve of her buttocks as Zoe gripped the table for balance. She felt his thick cock probing at her entrance, impossibly hot like all the heat in his body was being redirected there, and then he plunged inside and she screamed raggedly as sensation ratcheted to an unbearable pitch, her cries echoing hollowly in the garage bay.
He drove into her again and again, hard enough that the heavy table began scraping across the floor with each pounding thrust. Zoe held on tight, aware of nothing but the knot of pleasure building in her blood. Tyler reached around and found the heart of the knot, rotating a single finger on her clit. The knot unraveled like a slingshot, flinging her into the stratosphere as her climax shook her body, and Tyler rammed into her one last time, holding tight and deep as he came hard inside her.
As she floated back to her body, Zoe concentrated on the sound of their uneven breathing. Everything else was too big, too much to contemplate.
Whatever this thing was between them, it had just gotten a hell of a lot more complicated.
Chapter Nine
Zoe snuck into the back of the mess hall, hoping to go unnoticed at Landon’s mandatory defense summit. Flying under the radar wasn’t something she had much experience with, but she’d been practicing it diligently for the last forty-eight hours. Ever since Tyler tossed no-strings out the window.
She’d fled the garage, throwing some lame excuse she couldn’t even remember over her shoulder. Tyler hadn’t stopped her, either smart enough to know she needed space or cocky enough to be certain she was coming back.
The world felt like it was squeezing in around her like a vacuum pack, sucking all the oxygen out of her lungs. She’d needed some breathing room. Some time to evaluate. Just a few minutes when her hormones weren’t running on overdrive and insisting she absolutely must stay with that walking aphrodisiac of a lion. She couldn’t think when she was with him.