“But the families.” She rolled her head to the side, fixing him with an empty stare. “We can’t let them get wrapped up in this.”
“I know, which is the only reason why we’re continuing. Trust me, we’re of the same mind on this. We are on the same team. Don’t lose sight of that.”
Her fingers drummed a silent beat on her stomach, her teeth sinking into her lip. She wasn’t looking at him anymore, but at the wall behind him. “I thought I had it bad.”
“What does that mean?”
“I watched my mother die. I watched her waste away until she was practically a skeleton. It only took weeks, and I thought that was the worst thing that would ever happen to me. But then, I saw my father on life support, and I’ve seen him struggle to live ever since then. Stupid me, thinking that was the worst thing I would ever have to deal with. Who knows? Maybe it is. Maybe I’ll be lucky, and that’s as hard as things will ever get for me.”
She looked at the ceiling, a shaky sigh coming out through pursed lips. “I didn’t have to see either of my parents die the way he did tonight—so suddenly, violently, knowing there was nothing I could do to help, knowing I could’ve been in the car with him. I can’t imagine what they’re going through.”
The fact that she cared so much spoke to her empathy. No matter how hard and tough she tried to be, at her core, she was good and kind, sympathetic, able to put herself in the shoes of others and feel sorry for their pain.
Which was made what he was about to say so difficult to get out. “I know this is going to sound cold, but you have to disengage from this. You’re going to drive yourself crazy. Really, I’m only concerned with you now. It’s clear that what happened shook you up.”
She snickered. “Yeah. You could say that. You mean it did shake you?”
“Are you kidding? That was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen my fair share. It was so sudden, out of nowhere. They’d just had a nice dinner together. They were all smiling when they left the restaurant. It’s rare to see a family so happy together—or maybe I’m just jaded,” he added, laughing at himself a little.
“My family was happy. We used to like doing things together.”
“You aren’t that girl, the girl we saw tonight. That wasn’t you.”
“I never said it was.”
“No, but I know you’re putting yourself in her shoes, and it’s not doing you any favors. Listen, it’s not that I think you need to forget about her and shrug your shoulders and not feel anything. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t feel anything.”
He got off the bed then, going to hers and sitting on the edge. She didn’t move, didn’t even shimmy over to the side to make more room for him. What was he expecting? For her to hold out her arms, open her legs to accept him?
“How do you do this?” She scrubbed her hands over her face, groaning. “I mean, this is your job. This is your life.”
“For the record, I’ve never seen a car explode like that. That’s a new one for me.”
She lowered her hands, revealing her eyes. They were looking at him. “And you tried to protect me. What made you do that?”
“Instinct. It’s always my instinct to protect the people I’m with.”
Just like that, the light left her eyes, and he had the feeling he’d just failed a test he didn’t know he was taking. “I see. Yeah, that’s how you are. No wonder this is what you do for a living. It’s tailor-made for you.”
That was his chance. His opportunity to tell her the need to protect her was more than instinct. That yes, he would’ve thrown himself over anybody sitting in the truck with him, but with her, it was different. He needed to protect her even more than he needed to protect himself; the drive to keep her safe was what made him throw himself over her.
He could’ve said it. The moment to say it was right there in front of him, close enough to reach out and touch. Just like he could’ve reached out to her.
Cowardice held his mouth closed. He missed his chance and knew it might never come again.
“I have to wash my face.” She rolled away from him, wrapping her arms around herself as she scurried to the bathroom. There was nothing for him to do but curse himself.
Why hadn’t anybody ever told him that wanting a woman was one thing, but finding the strength to admit how deeply he wanted her was something else entirely?
Why hadn’t anyone ever told him it was possible for a woman to knock him sideways without even hardly trying?
He might’ve been able to prepare himself for this.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jenna woke up with her heart pounding in her ears, sweat making the thin cotton tank top cling to her skin.
The screams. It was the screams she couldn’t forget. No matter how many horror movies she’d watched—and she’d seen more than a few—there was no replicating a scream like that. She’d never heard anything like it before.
Horror. Terror. Disbelief. Anguish.
She stared into the darkness, her chest aching. Her heart was going like a speeding train. A few deep breaths managed to slow it a little. Her muscles were still tight, frozen, with sleep taking its time to let go of its hold on her.
She knew that if she closed her eyes again, she would go right back to that dream—a dream that was only a memory being replayed over and over. The way the truck shook, the way the cars on either side of Fred’s car rolled over. The shattering of glass, the blaring of car alarms all throughout the parking lot.
And what must it have been like for the people inside the restaurant? Just trying to enjoy a nice meal or to get through their shift in one piece. Maybe the server who’d taken care of the Harris family saw the explosion happen. What must that have been like too? Knowing they’d just had a conversation with the family, a family whose lives blew apart in a single moment.
Logan was probably right. She had to stop putting herself in their place, projecting her emotions onto them. She had enough problems in her life without taking on the problems of everybody around her.
Thinking of him made her turn her attention to him. Once her heart slowed down to a more reasonable pace, she listened. He would be snoring if he was asleep, no question. It wasn’t even the most unpleasant sound in the world—far from it, in fact. If anything, it was a reminder that she wasn’t alone. He was with her.
That wasn’t a bad feeling, not even a little bit.
Only he wasn’t snoring. Breathing, yes, but not snoring. Which meant he was not asleep. She waited a few minutes, staying as still as she could, hoping to hear those first few snores. Maybe she’d made a noise, cried out a little at the tail end of that terrible nightmare. Maybe she woke him up, startled him a little, but he was bound to fall back asleep soon.
“I’m awake, you know. In case you were wondering.” Even when he murmured, his voice was so powerful—a deep, bass rumble, comforting in its way.
“I’m sorry if I woke you up,” she whispered, staring at the wall.
“You didn’t. I wasn’t sleeping.” There was no telling how he felt about that, whether it frustrated him or not.
She rolled onto her other side, facing him. He sat with his legs stretched out in front of him, pillows propped up at his back. The laptop was on his legs, the glow casting his face in an eerie light. She hadn’t noticed that light before, the way it spread through the room, too mixed up, still half asleep.
“Are you okay?” She whispered, and she wondered why she was whispering. It just seemed like that was the thing to do in a situation like this. People whispered in the middle of the night.
“Define okay.” But he wasn’t mean about it. Tired, yes, and overwhelmed but not mean. Not nasty.
“Do you ever get—I don’t know—used to something like this? I know you said you’ve never seen anything like what we saw earlier, but still. There’s got to be a way for you to protect yourself from things like that. Mentally, emotionally. And don’t give me some crap about how you’re beyond emotions like it doesn’
t matter to you. I know it does.”
“Oh, you know?”
“Yeah, I do. You’re not cold and heartless. If you were, you wouldn’t be doing this for a living.”
“What else could I do?” he snickered. “When I first came home, I was too afraid to show my face. We all were. We had no idea how we were supposed to live in the world. There was no instruction manual, nobody to guide us through this new phase of our lives. In a way, it almost felt like I did when I was a kid, when everything started… you know. Changing.”
His mouth pulled up at the corners. “They didn’t cover wolf shifters in health class.”
“No, they talked about it with us girls,” she informed him. “I don’t know what they told you boys about, but we talked all about it.”
“Gee, if we hadn’t spent so much time talking about spontaneous ejaculation in the middle of the night…”
She burst out laughing, covering her mouth with her hand. “Seriously?”
“Of course, that’s one of the things we talked about.”
“No wonder they separated us. But I guess you boys wouldn’t want to hear about our women problems.” She didn’t know whether he could see her rolling her eyes, but that didn’t stop her from doing it.
“You see what I mean, though. There was no one to tell us what to do, how to deal with who we’d become. They left us on our own. Granted, we were never intended to be left on our own. We were supposed to be eliminated, put down like rabid dogs.”
“I’m glad you weren’t.” That didn’t even begin to scratch the surface, but she didn’t think she possessed the words to say exactly what she felt when she imagined him being executed. What would she have done in the world without him and the rest of his team? She would still be floating, anchorless, with no one to tell her that her fears were rational, that they too knew somebody was after them, somebody who intended to end their life.
“For the record, me too.”
“You could’ve gone any way you wanted to. You didn’t have to do this. Come on,” she sighed when he shook his head. “You’re wealthy. You’re the money behind the entire operation. Even I know that much. You wouldn’t have had to work at all. You could have lived in seclusion for the rest of your life if what really mattered was protecting yourself, but that wasn’t all that mattered, which I guess makes you pretty special.”
“You don’t have to sound so begrudging when you call me special, you know.”
“I wouldn’t want it to go to your head. Why did you do it? Really, what made you decide to live this life? Part of you wanting to hide from the world, the other part needing to—what? Be of service?”
“I guess you could say that. It’s always been something important—helping other people, protecting them if they couldn’t protect themselves. I guess that’s born in a person. It can’t be faked.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about. You could’ve been selfish—not even selfish, really. Not the way people normally mean it. You could’ve thought about yourself. You could’ve put yourself first. Nobody ever would’ve blamed you for that.”
“But what would my friends have done? My pack?”
She nodded slowly. It was like he couldn’t see the truth about himself. “You took their well-being to heart. You made their problems your problems. Not everybody would do that. Not even if they had the means to build a business the way you did. You’re unselfish. In our world, it’s rare to find a person who’s so unselfish.”
He looked uncomfortable, clearing his throat, his forehead creasing. She’d said too much. Men like him didn’t want to talk about the good things they’d done. He probably didn’t think there was much to brag about, which only made her like him more.
“Like I said, don’t let it go to your head or anything,” she added. That was always her way, wasn’t it? Trying to add a little humor to deflect from an uncomfortable situation. “You’re already tough enough to get along with sometimes. I don’t need your ego making it worse.”
“Cute,” he snickered, but at least he didn’t look pained anymore.
He tilted the laptop her way so she could see what he’d been looking at while she was sleeping. “I wanted to plot the rest of our route,” he explained. “And maybe plan out our lodging a little better. No offense to this place, but I wouldn’t mind an actual hotel.”
“Ooh, room service,” she sighed, smiling.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” he snickered. “What do I look like? A bottomless well of money?”
“Hey, I don’t get many opportunities to take a vacation. Not that I would consider this vacation, but you know what I mean.”
“I figured since we’d be in Philadelphia, we could actually stay someplace a little more comfortable.” The fact was they could’ve driven straight through to the city that night, but both of them had been too shaken up. Not to mention the fact that Logan needed to touch base with the team.
“That sounds nice—with or without room service.”
“I’m glad you approve.” He closed the laptop then, sighing. He sounded so tired. How long had he been carrying the burden of everybody he knew?
And did it have anything to do with Beth? She couldn’t get the girl out of her head—she didn’t even know what Beth looked like, though she could’ve looked her up. Somehow, that would have felt wrong. Intrusive.
Besides, she didn’t want to see the smiling dead girl in the wedding dress she would never get to wear.
And she certainly didn’t want to run the risk of seeing Logan at eighteen years old, smiling, in love, before life happened to him. Before loss, before betrayal. Before his future went completely off the rails, away from anything he could’ve imagined or dreamed of as a kid.
There would be no way for her to close her heart off, to protect herself in case the strange, unnamed energy between them turned out to be nothing, just a fling, or the sort of thing people fell into when they were thrust into a situation together. If she fell too far before that happened, it would be that much more difficult to go on once this was over.
She just couldn’t run that risk. Her heart couldn’t take it.
“I guess we’d better get some sleep.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed, peeling off his socks.
“You don’t sleep with your socks on?” she asked.
“No.” He looked like this was the craziest idea he’d ever heard. The man turned into a wolf at will, and he thought it was strange to sleep with his socks on. “They’re dirty.”
“So are your feet.”
“Not as dirty as my socks.”
“Don’t your feet get cold?” she asked as he slipped under the blankets.
“Nope.” He settled in on his right side, facing her. It was almost like they were sharing the bed, even with the nightstand between them.
“So strange.” But she was smiling, and she continued to smile as her eyes slid closed. There was no doubt her mindset had improved since waking up. She might actually be able to get back to sleep now.
“Sleep well, Jenna.” His voice seemed to come from far away, although she knew that was only because she’d already started to sink deeper.
What would it be like to hear that voice every night before she fell asleep?
Chapter Twenty-Three
“I could eat an entire cow.” Jenna crossed her hands over her stomach, groaning. “I’m so hungry.”
“I think the saying is ‘I could eat a horse.’”
“I don’t want to eat a horse. I want to eat a cow. Preferably cut up into pieces and cooked medium-rare.”
He snickered, though he understood her discomfort. They never did stop to eat the night before—there hadn’t been time when they were following the Harris family to dinner, and food had been the last thing on either of their minds when all was said and done.
But life went on, at least for the living. The needs of their bodies were bound to get in the way.
“We’ll stop at the first place we come to,” he promised as
his stomach rumbled. “Maybe they serve cow.”
“Hilarious,” she muttered, but he heard a smile in her voice.
The day was overcast, heavy clouds hanging low in the sky. It was Sunday morning, early, leaving little traffic to contend with. He hoped to be in Philadelphia within a couple of hours—even with the pitstop to eat, the drive was supposed to take no more than an hour or so. They wouldn’t be able to check into their hotel yet, not until the afternoon, but they could use that time to find Ed Carter’s home.
“He lives on the Main Line,” Jenna murmured, studying the map. “How nice for him.”
“I’ve stopped being surprised by the way these people live,” he grunted. “They made a lot of money. It is what it is.”
“Yeah, blood money.”
He took his time responding, knowing how it might sound if he blurted out the first thing that came to his mind. “You know, my family comes from old money. I mean, you mentioned it last night. You knew I was wealthy. And yes, I am—considerably less so after putting everything together for the team, but still. I have investments that do well. Anyway, I didn’t do anything to earn the money. What do you think about that?”
“Why do I feel like this is a test?”
“It isn’t,” he assured her. “I mean it. I’m just curious what you think about it—about my not having done anything to earn the money I now use so freely.”
“That’s your family’s concern, not mine.”
“What if I told you my great-grandfather ran what were essentially sweatshops? That’s how we started out. Granted, back then they weren’t called sweatshops. He oversaw teams of seamstresses, sometimes as many as three- and four-hundred girls at a time. This was back before labor laws, mind you. Before the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. But let me tell you, from what I’ve heard, a fire like that could easily have taken place in one of my great-grandfather’s factories. Easily. He made his money off the backbreaking labor of those girls—sometimes when they were as young as seven or eight years old. They would work fourteen or sixteen hours a day sometimes to process big orders that needed to be sent out to the stores. He took advantage in every way he could, always trying to turn a buck. Pretty soon, he built an empire, and let me tell you,” he added with a bitter smile, “he was none too happy when things changed, and he wasn’t allowed to hire children anymore, when he wasn’t allowed to work those girls until their fingers bled. He would even dock them their pay if they did bleed from too many pinpricks or an accident with the machine. If they got blood on the fabric, they didn’t get paid for that day.”
Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset Page 113