Scratch the Surface (Wolf Within)

by Amy Lee Burgess

  I blurted the first nice thing I could think of and it was a damned good thing I’d had at least two minutes to reflect. “Her hair’s pretty.”

  Murphy laughed. It was subdued, but a laugh nonetheless. He probably was insulted. “I told you she wasn’t beautiful like you.” He made my so-called beauty sound about as appealing as moldy bread in comparison to her goddamn wild mystery.

  Now I was more jealous of this dead woman than ever. Plain as hell and still I couldn’t compete. I was about as wildly mysterious as yesterday’s newspaper.

  I handed Murphy the photograph and went to the dresser and picked up my brush. I completely forgot about the knot at the back of my skull and ended up dropping the brush on the floor and having to cling to the edges of the dresser to keep from collapsing into a puking ball of nausea.

  “Stanzie, are you all right?” Murphy was beside me in an instant, his voice full of concern and fear.

  When he tried to touch me, probably to help hold me upright, I flailed away from his touch. He was such a liar. Such a two-faced bastard. What did he care if I was all right? Who was the one who’d frigging shoved me headfirst into the wall to begin with?

  Reproachful and guilty, he retreated a few steps, but still hovered as if he were afraid I would fall down.

  “Are you all right?” He sounded scared.

  I rode out the last of the wave of nausea and took a deep breath. “I’m fine.” It wasn’t precisely a lie so much as a wish.

  “When can we get out of here?” he asked, his voice rough as if he’d smoked a pack of cigarettes the night before.

  I shook my head then, and when another wave of nausea enveloped my skull, I wished I hadn’t.

  “Have you looked outside?”

  I heard him move to the window, part the curtains then swear in Irish.

  “Besides, we came here so I could talk to Grandfather Tobias and I haven’t talked to him.”

  For the very first time, I wanted to talk to that man. Everything was so fucked up between Murphy and me because we’d come here, so now I was damned if I wouldn’t talk to that old man.

  I took out the first things that came to hand from my suitcase—the jeans from the day before, an eggplant purple v-necked wool sweater and a new pair of panties.

  “Stanzie, I’m sorry,” Murphy whispered as I limped back toward the bathroom with my clothes. There was no way I was dressing in front of him even though he knew my body intimately.

  I didn’t answer him. I just closed the door.

  * * * *

  Pain must have showed in my expression when I came into the bedroom because I couldn’t even get to the dresser to find my brush before Murphy said, “You need your head looked at. You hit the wall pretty hard. I’m scared.”

  “I’m not going outside in this ice storm to find some emergency clinic and I’m sure as hell not going to wait hours at an ER. I’ll be fine,” I argued even though sick flashes of nausea kept stabbing at me and the back of my head felt exquisitely there as if I’d never known I’d had a back part of my skull except intellectually.

  “You don’t need to,” he countered. “Allerton’s a doctor.”

  That idea was too much. I turned around with a careful slowness that was not lost at all on Murphy and said, “He’ll want to know how I happened to hit a wall with my head, Murphy. What am I supposed to say? I don’t want him knowing what happened.”

  Murphy was in enough deep shit with Allerton as it was, thanks to last night’s brawl with Colin Hunter. He surely didn’t need to add to it with me bleating about how he shoved me against a wall later in the evening.

  Murphy’s face got very white and his eyes darkened. “I don’t need your protection, Constance! Not now, not ever!”

  I stood there feeling like the world’s biggest fool for a moment. Waves of hot and cold washed over me and I felt so small and so stupid.

  I put down the brush and started for the door.

  “That came out too harsh,” Murphy said.

  “I understand,” I half whispered. “You don’t need anything from me. I get it.” I turned around again and I could see the shame in his expression.

  I looked at the floor, unable to face him, and fixed my gaze on his boots.

  “It’s funny, Murphy,” I told him as I stifled bitter laughter, “you’ve given me and my wolf so much the past two months and I’ve given you...shoes.” I did laugh then, but it was more of a sob. “Kinda lopsided, isn’t it?”

  “I love it when you give me shoes.” His voice was full of warmth, but also shaky, as if he were having trouble finding the words. “I pretend not to notice the new pairs, but I always do. It’s one of our rituals, Stanzie.”

  Yeah, right. It was just me trying to indulge my shoe fetish vicariously through somebody else. It was me being selfish. Take, take, take, that’s what I did best.

  “Let’s go find Allerton,” Murphy suggested as the silence stretched unbearably between us.

  “No,” I said. “I can do things on my own. I’ve been leaning too much on you.”

  “Stanzie,” he whispered, but he let me leave the room alone.

  * * * *

  “Mild concussion,” diagnosed Allerton. We were in the small conference room with the door shut. I sat on one of the chairs facing away from the table while he peered into my eyes with a penlight and probed the back of my skull with surprisingly gentle fingers.

  “You haven’t been sick?” he asked for the second time and again I shook my head.

  He drew one of the other chairs away from the table so it faced mine and sat.

  Even though he wore a pair of sharply creased jeans and a brown v-neck sweater, he still looked polished and intimidating, as if he’d stepped out of a higher-end clothing advertisement in a men’s magazine.

  “Care to elaborate on how you came to suffer this mild concussion?” His dark blue gaze bored into mine and I was powerless. I’d never met anyone with half his presence.

  Still, I tried to resist. I maintained a stubborn silence for about thirty seconds before he said, “Does he hit you often? Liam?” There was such anger and steel in his voice, I shuddered.

  “He didn’t hit me. He’s never hit me. You don’t understand.”

  “Try me. Tell me what happened? For instance, how did you do this?” He reached out a finger to gently touch my cheek, and at first I didn’t understand but then I remembered the scratch.

  “My wolf,” I said, hating the fact that I sounded like every woman everywhere who’d ever been in denial about her abusive partner. “She gets angry sometimes when she can’t think of words for things and she believes her head is full of her anger and doesn’t have room for the words, so she—”

  “Scratches at her head,” finished Allerton. He looked like he actually might believe me. “Liam told me that. I remember now. But your concussion, Constance, was not caused by your wolf, was it?”

  “I hit my head against the wall. Murphy pushed me away from him, but he didn’t mean to hurt me.” My explanation sounded lame but it was the truth, damning as it might sound. “He was upset last night, Councilor.”

  “Jason.” He sounded almost impatient with me. “Don’t you think it’s time you called me by my first name? You are my Advisor, after all. That affords us a certain familiarity.”

  I took a deep breath. “Jason, it sounds like I’m defending him, but I’m not. It was a stupid accident. I knew better than to touch him when he was feeling vulnerable. He thought I pitied him.”

  “I’m not pleased with him,” Allerton stated, his mouth grim. “I know it wasn’t easy for him to confront Colin Hunter, but it’s been over three years and he has you now.”

  “Me?” I couldn’t help but laugh a little. “I’m not anything to him like she was. You can’t compare us.”

  “I’m not comparing you, I’m merely pointing out that he is not alone anymore and he has to let go of a past that is as dead as she is.”

  I shuddered again and wrapped my arms around
myself. He frightened me with his intensity and I was very glad he wasn’t angry at me.

  He got to his feet and moved toward the door. He paused and said, “If you weren’t offering him pity, what were you offering him?”

  “Love, actually,” I admitted because the man saw right through me anyway.

  “He really can be an incredible idiot,” murmured Allerton before he opened the door.

  Chapter 9

  I must have fallen asleep. I’d gone upstairs after Allerton left the room and lain down on the bed because my head hurt. I could smell Murphy’s cologne in the pillow case where I buried my head and it was oddly soothing.

  The next thing I knew Murphy stood there next to the bed and the shadows had shifted in the room because the sun had moved in the sky. I’d been asleep for hours and, from what I could hazily tell, it was nearly nightfall.

  “Councilor Manning is going to have a fit if you don’t come down and eat dinner with us, you know,” Murphy told me the minute he was aware I was awake. “She’s been baking bread all afternoon and a cake too, I think. Plus she made some sort of gourmet dinner the spare three seconds between. You hungry?”

  My stomach growled at the thought of bread and cake and a smile twitched the corner of Murphy’s mouth.

  At some point during the day he must have showered and shaved, and he was dressed in a different pair of jeans and one of the cashmere sweaters I’d given him for Christmas—the beige one with the navy blue accents at the collar and cuffs.

  I slid off the bed and went to the mirror above the dresser to peer at myself, careful to avoid brushing against Murphy. I looked like hell.

  With a sigh, I picked up the brush and tried to calm my wild blond hair. On the plus side, the knot on the back of my head no longer seemed so exquisitely there. On the minus side, Murphy wouldn’t stop staring at me and his expression was somewhere bad between frustration and shame.

  “I’m on everybody’s shit list today,” he remarked without a trace of a smile.

  “I told Jason the truth about what happened.” I sounded defensive, and sighed.

  “Jason?” Murphy cocked a sardonic grin at me as his eyebrows raised halfway up his forehead.

  I flushed unaccountably. “He asked me to call him Jason.” The brush trembled in my hands as if I’d done something wrong, perhaps betrayed Murphy somehow.

  “Well, he sure as hell hasn’t asked me to do that,” drawled Murphy. “But then I’m not in line to be his next mistress either, am I? Kathy Manning look out, Constance Newcastle is up and coming.” His voice dipped derisively on the last word of the sentence and I could feel the hot blood of shame burning my face. How could I have been so dumb, to have missed the truth? I’d never felt as though I were a real Advisor and if Murphy was right, I wasn’t.

  “Kathy Manning is Allerton’s mistress?” My mind boggled for a moment, but then I was frequently slow on the uptake. Now I started playing back moments that had passed between them and I could see it. I could definitely see it. And, if that part were true, then, of course, the other part was too—the part where I was next.

  “But Allerton has a bond mate,” I protested, even though I knew, and what’s worse, Murphy knew, that meant next to nothing.

  Murphy’s lips drew back into one of his sardonic sneers. I hadn’t seen one of them directed at me in months, not since we’d bonded. One night could change everything, though. “A lunatic bond mate, sure. You don’t know that? He hasn’t tried that line out on you yet? About how his bond mate went insane after the death of their stillborn son and since she’s got all the money in their relationship, he considerately didn’t sever the ties but instead has climbed to practically the top of the Great Council, taking understanding mistresses along the way to ease his suffering and loneliness? And now you’re the next one in a long line.” Murphy still smiled, but it was the kind that was cold and sharp as a knife in the ribs.

  “No, that’s not true. That’s not the truth!” I struggled to breathe but it felt as if there were a twenty pound weight on my chest slowly crushing me to death.

  “Why don’t you ask Kathy Manning? She knows she’s on her way out. You can see it all over her face when she looks at you.” Murphy grinned at me and, for a moment I allowed myself to believe I was having a nightmare but I knew damn well I wasn’t.

  Every second I’d ever spent alone with Allerton flashed before my eyes. Where I’d once seen fatherly concern, now all I could see was patient lust, going as far back as the investigation into Grey and Elena’s deaths when he’d singlehandedly saved me. Not just because he’d thought something strange was going on in the Pack, but because he’d wanted me and he’d set me up so I’d owe him and be obligated to him.

  The money in my bank account he’d said I’d earned as an Advisor was really just payment for services yet to be rendered. I somehow doubted Murphy’s bank account had swelled as much as mine, and I had been too stupid to see it for what it really was.

  I bowed my head as both shame and self-loathing swept over me.

  Now it was clear why Colin Hunter had been so arrogant to Murphy. He’d been laughing at him and so had the rest of my former pack. No wonder Murphy had been so humiliated.

  I chewed at my lower lip and turned back to the mirror. I had to do something with my hands so I started brushing my hair again. I couldn’t even see myself in the mirror because of the goddamn tears.

  A terrible thought tore a devastating hole inside me. I felt panicked and trapped and wanted to run away but I couldn’t even move.

  “Will I have to shift with him too? I will, won’t I? Sleep with him and shift with him, and I don’t want to do either. I’m scared to shift with other people. He’ll make me, won’t he, and my wolf doesn’t know his and I don’t know what she’ll do. She’ll want the words for things and maybe his wolf will want to do other things. I don’t even know how to ask him not to make me. Oh God, how could I be so stupid as to not even think I’d have to pay for the things he’s done for me? He sat there with me yesterday and told me how much money he’s putting in my bank account and I thought it was because I was his Advisor, but we were having two different conversations, weren’t we? I don’t understand how I could have missed it, but it’s all there when you point it out to me.”

  Tears of shame and humiliation poured down my cheeks and I couldn’t breathe. Through the watery prisms of my tears, I saw Murphy’s expression change and all the sarcastic anger was gone and, for a moment, he was the man I thought I’d known.

  I dodged past him and locked myself in the bathroom. I had to get a grip and to think, and what I didn’t need was any more confusion and false friendship.

  “Please, Stanzie,” he called through the door. “I’m the idiot, not you. I’m frustrated and pissed off at myself and I used you as target practice. Please come out and let me talk to you face to face. I can’t stand this. I don’t know what broke between us but I want to fix it.”

  “Why? Because Allerton told you to?” I whispered through the crack in the door. I was pressed against it, my palms splayed out on the wood, my cheek mashed to it and I thought he might be in the exact same position, our hands and bodies reaching out to each other through the barrier of the door, but I was damned if I’d open it. Damned.

  “No,” he said with a groan.

  “Is Kathy Manning his mistress? Don’t lie to me, Murphy.”

  Murphy swore under his breath. “Yes, she is, but that doesn’t mean you’re next on his list. I’m just...I’m jealous, Stanzie, don’t you get it?”

  “Jealous. Fuck you, Liam. You fucking liar.”

  “Liam,” he whispered. “Since when do you call me Liam?”

  “Since I don’t know who the fuck you are.”

  I heard him leave the room and waited a few moments before I went to the sink and splashed cold water on my face. The tears had stopped, burned away by fury, but now I was numb.

  I put on makeup and jewelry, avoiding the necklaces and rings Murphy had pu
t in my Christmas stocking, and went downstairs.

  * * * *

  The three of them were in the Colonial dining room. A gleaming oval table of mahogany was set with off-white place mats and the Blue Willow dishware from the night before. Taper candles flickered, casting circular shadows on the ceiling above. A small crystal chandelier was set on the dimmest setting, barely illuminated.

  Councilor Allerton got to his feet when I entered and gallantly pulled out the chair next to his for me.

  I sat, acutely aware of his hands hovering near my body as he pushed the chair in, then he sat and poured me a glass of red wine. The wine goblets were thick pebbled glass, cobalt blue and expensive.

  “I hope you’re feeling better, Stanzie.” Kathy Manning beamed at me as she passed me a platter of roast beef. All the pieces were perfectly sliced, pink and juicy. I took one and passed the platter to Allerton, who took three before passing the platter to Murphy. Their eyes did not meet. Allerton was solicitous to me, but for Murphy he had nothing but cold contempt.

  Bowls of mashed potatoes, French runner beans and gravy traveled around the table. Homemade bread was piled in silver baskets lined with white cloth napkins.

  I took some of everything but couldn’t eat. My throat felt about as narrow as the eye of a needle. I wanted to drink the wine but thought that would choke me too.

  I played with my food instead of eating it and nobody said anything. We sat there in silence broken only by the sounds of silverware striking china.

  “When can I see Grandfather Tobias?” I asked after I’d given up all pretense of playing with my food and pushed my plate away.

  Allerton eyed it and then raised his gaze to mine. “You’re not hungry, Constance? Does your head hurt?”

  No, just my fucking heart, I wanted to say, but I didn’t.

  “My head’s much better,” I said instead.

  “Then why don’t you eat?”

  “If you don’t like roast beef, there’s some seafood casserole left from last night. I could heat it up for you?” Kathy Manning gave me a sympathetic smile.