by Tera Shanley
Naked as the day she was born, she sat and listened for any movement outside the door. Would Grey remember last night? Would he regret touching her?
A small pile of clothes lay on the corner chair and she slid out of bed. She smiled, picking up the UFO T-shirt and holding it up to herself. All of the sizes were close enough to hers to fit her comfortably. She picked up the bra and panty set and would have smiled with relief if the split in her lip wasn’t trying to reopen. Dark green. Did he like that color? Would he like it on her? Her stomach fluttered at his thoughtfulness. Even if Wolf had misbehaved the night before, Grey still cared for her.
She inhaled and her happy moment was gone. John. She could smell him faintly. If his smell clung to her stubbornly after soaking in his dirty shirt for so long, what would she smell like if she claimed a mate? Would she even smell like herself anymore? It wouldn’t be so bad if she smelled like Grey when he wasn’t around. She shook her head and sighed. Grey could’ve claimed her last night and she wouldn’t have done anything to slow him down. His wolf chose not to make love to her, so what did that say about his intentions? Maybe he really didn’t want her for a mate anymore.
She turned the shower on and bravely looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes had dark purple smudges underneath them, and she brought a gentle finger up to them and then to her swollen nose. “Well, that’s new.” She was fairly sure that in a few days she would have every color of the rainbow on her body.
She smelled different and looked different and some fundamental shift inside of her was different. Would she ever be able to recover her old self? Or if not all of her, at least the parts that she had liked? That Grey had liked?
She showered, forgoing conditioner to spend all of the hot water on aching muscles. When she was finished, she toweled off, dressed in the clothes he had picked up for her and then brushed through her hair as best she could one handed. She’d have to take it day by day and look forward to little things. Like using both arms again.
“I look like a human again at least,” she muttered. “If you ignore my skin.”
The smell of bacon wafted under the door and she inhaled the tantalizing scent. She opened the door and Grey stood there, leaning against the frame and looking every bit the young god in his fitted T-shirt and jeans that hung from his trim hips just so.
Scratching his lip with the side of his thumb, he said, “I talked to Wade and Brent this morning. They already left. Dean told them to visit Alexis before going back home.”
“Why?”
“We think everyone found out about you through her. They’ll talk to her alpha about laying down an order to keep her trap shut from here on. Anyway, Wade and Brent will be caught up with that for a while, so it’ll just be you and I for the return trip home.”
Clearing her throat, she stepped out of the bathroom in her new clothes. “Thanks for getting these for me.” His slow, hungry smile was mesmerizing. Maybe he didn’t even remember their midnight romp under the sheets. How was she supposed to bring that up? She had to tell him, but damn it all if she knew how.
“I’m ready. We can get on the road right after breakfast.” She sat down and opened a Styrofoam container with pancakes and scrambled eggs in it. “How far is the drive? The trunk didn’t have a window seat and I don’t exactly remember getting here,” she said between bites.
“It’ll probably be a day’s drive,” he said, handing her a cup of orange juice. “Hey, I got you something.”
She froze with a bite of eggs halfway chewed in her mouth and her heart hammered away behind her aching ribs. Was this another trick?
A look of confusion crossed his face. It hurt. “Did you think I meant your ring?”
“Well...” she started. No, she hadn’t thought that. There were certainly worse fates than being married and mated to Greyson Crawford, super werewolf. The ring hadn’t even crossed her mind, but Wolf was apparently capable of giving the gift of intimacy and snatching it away again. Anything he said, she second-guessed after last night
He stood and set a bottle of pills on the table. “I grabbed some painkillers from Wade before they left so you would be more comfortable on the way home. They might make you drowsy, but it’s all he had left.” He picked up the keycards on the table. “I’m going to go check us out. I’ll be waiting out front with the truck when you are done.” He opened the door, hesitated. “Morgan, I’m not trying to force your ring back on your hand.” He looked at her a moment longer and then shut the door behind him, leaving a tiny black hole of despair in his wake. Of course, she’d hurt him again.
Her appetite lost, she grabbed her few belongings and ambled out front to Grey’s truck. He wouldn’t even look at her as she slid into the passenger side of the bench seat. After the first hour of silence, Grey turned on the radio, which provided the soundtrack to her withdrawal. Morgan stared out the window quietly for most of the trip home. Sometimes she would turn, wanting so badly to say something to make it better, but no words could fix the ache of the months before. If last night was any proof, their relationship had crumbled without her there to tend it.
She wanted to tell him how sorry she was but didn’t know how to apologize for all of the mistakes she had made with him. That conversation needed to happen, but not while she was loopy on pain meds and definitely not when she was an extremely recent kidnapping and abuse victim. And definitely not when she couldn’t be sure if he even remembered their shared intimacy the night before. Good glob, they were a mess.
Miles passed by, she became more and more agitated as her panic mingled with drug-induced drowsiness. Just say you’re sorry. Say it! The apology stayed lodged stubbornly in her throat as she finally gave in to the meds and fell into an uncomfortable sleep against the window.
Grey’s phone woke her up a couple of hours later. A green sign reading Wichita Falls, Texas, flew by. They were getting closer to home, and to the people that in the darkest moment of her life she’d thought she’d never see again.
“Hey,” Grey answered his phone.
“Hey, when are you coming home?” a female voice asked.
Morgan tensed but had trouble making out the woman’s voice over the sound of the radio. An ugly feeling moved inside of her, and she tried to keep the heat that crept up her neck from reaching her face.
“I’ll be back in a few hours. Why? What’s going on?”
“Nothing, I was just getting bored waiting around for you. I think I’m going to order a pizza for us when you get here. What kind do you want?”
Grey laughed. “You know what kind.”
“Disgusting. I’m getting meat-lovers instead.”
“You at least have to try anchovies at some point, and good luck on getting someone to deliver out there. Pizza man Mark quit, and no one else is willing to make the drive.”
Grey smiled at the road and Morgan’s wolf stirred, pushing, burning envy through her veins. She didn’t like the comfortable way he talked to this woman. Things weren’t perfect with them, but he was hers. Or at least someday, maybe he would be.
Stupid. Of course he had moved on. Did she really think he would wait around on her forever? He had a woman waiting for him to come home. This woman was planning a dinner for them. He’d touched her last night, body and soul, and acted like it never happened today. And now he was going to drop Morgan off and go home to this other woman. The rest of her brittle world threatened to cave in.
“Hey, I have a confession,” the low feminine voice came over the phone speaker. “I was kind of using pizza as a way to butter you up.”
Jealousy reared its ugly head and Morgan took a swan dive right off of the green serpent’s nose and into the waters of pessimism and accusation. She threw a dirty look at the radio’s volume dial but refused to turn it down. She had more pride than to be so obvious with her eavesdropping.
“Oh, yeah?” Grey asked. “What do you want this time?”
“Can I stay over for a couple of days?�
� the woman asked.
Grey laughed. “Okay, for that request I definitely need anchovies on the pizza.”
Blood roared in Morgan’s ears, the rhythm keeping pace with her racing heart. That woman would be staying in his apartment with him. She couldn’t listen to the rest of the phone conversation as he said his good-bye. She couldn’t hear anything but fury bucking off any rational part of her brain that told her to settle down. She gripped the seat, pressing fingers into the fabric until her nails ripped tiny holes into it.
Grey sniffed the air and jerked his head toward her. So she smelled angry. So what? He had practically thrown another woman in her face.
“Who was that?” she snapped at him.
He looked completely baffled. It took him several moments to recover, head swinging back and forth between the road and her enraged face. Shaking his head, he closed his eyes tightly for a moment and then focused on the road again.
“So let me get this straight. You left me, a few hours after you gave me that damned bunny and accepted a ring from me. Left me,” he bit out, “for reasons that you never fully explained and that I’m still confused about. I gave up time with the pack so you could spend time with them. You didn’t return my phone calls, but you managed to find time to return the flowers I sent for you and Lana. All you left me with was I need time, and I wasted every single day since hoping I would turn around and you and Lana would magically be back in my life again.” He looked at her with cooling eyes. “And then you get jealous of what? The prospect of me moving on? You don’t want me, but you’d have me forever miserable and wanting you?” His voice was loud and filled the truck, but he didn’t seem to care. He sighed loudly, like he would never in a day in his life understand women. “Marissa says hi. I’m assuming you missed that part of the conversation?”
“Marissa?” Morgan stared at the road, replaying the conversation in her head in the context it was meant to be in. “I think I overreacted.”
“You think?”
“I guess I don’t understand. Why would Marissa be staying at your place?”
“You spend as much time with the pack as I do, and you don’t know that she hangs out at my place most days?”
“No. I noticed that she is gone a lot when I’m there, but I didn’t know where she was, and the pack has been considerate not to talk about you around me. I couldn’t really handle any news on you,” she admitted. “I didn’t ask questions about you or what you were doing, because I knew if I started I wouldn’t ever stop obsessing over where you are or what is going on in your life. Who you were seeing.”
He sighed. “Marissa comes over to my place most days because of Jason and Logan. They fight over her and it makes her uncomfortable. When she was Changed, she went through something like you went through.” He gave her a loaded look. “She doesn’t like boys paying unwanted attention to her all of the time.”
“But you’re a boy.”
“Yeah, but there’s no threat from me. She is like my little sister, and my mind is made up on someone else. When I’m around, she doesn’t have to worry about their attention, and when they’re at Dean’s house, she comes to my place. Dean approached me last week about her switching packs because it’s getting so tense over there.”
“Switching packs? Rachel wouldn’t ever go for that. Marissa is like a daughter to her.”
“Switching to my pack,” he clarified. “Rachel was the one who brought it up. If Marissa lives with me she would still be close enough for Rachel take her to school and Marissa could still spend the amount of time at Dean’s property as she does now. And I can protect her,” he added quietly. “Dean has an entire pack to keep happy. He can’t play mediator for another ten years until she chooses a mate and the feud ends. It’s too much tension for too long.”
Grey was building his own pack, and Marissa would be the first one in it. Morgan’s gut wrenched at the thought that she wouldn’t be his first.
How would he and Marissa fit comfortably into that tiny apartment of his? And how did Rachel think the forty-five-minute commute to his apartment in the city and then to Marissa’s school were doable for carpooling?
“Please don’t be mad about it,” he said. “We haven’t decided for sure yet. We haven’t even talked to Marissa about it because Dean and Rachel wanted me to make my decision first.”
“Have you already decided?”
“Yeah, I think so. She has become like family to me, and honestly, Morgan,” he looked at her pleadingly, “I think I need this. I think Wolf needs this. Since you guys left… I can’t keep freefalling like this forever. I need…something.”
He looked back at her, then at the road, and back at her again. She knew he was hoping to see any kind of understanding there, but all of this new information was a lot to take in.
Why was she crying? She felt like every time she was around him, her heart was raw and open. For someone who prided themselves on not being a crybaby, every time she turned around she was this newly emotional creature.
The Dallas skyline eventually topped a hill. That sunset, in its array of colors shining through the buildings, was something she hadn’t even known she’d missed.
“You want me to drop you off at your place or Dean’s?” he asked. After so long in silence, she jumped at the sound of his timbre.
It probably wouldn’t be healthy for Lana to see her in the multicolored state she had recently adopted, but she wanted to hold the child so badly it was an ache.
“Dean’s place. I want Lana back, but first, can you take me by a store? I need to get some makeup.”
After they stopped at a pharmacy, she managed to cover the bruising on her face fairly decently by piling it on in the rearview mirror of Grey’s truck. Lana would at least recognize her. Probably.
Grey helped her out and walked her to the front door. Pausing atop the stairs, he said, “I don’t want to upset Lana. I should leave before she sees me.”
“A lot has happened on this porch, hasn’t it?” she asked, leaning against the door frame, not ready to say good-bye. She’d met the pack here, been turned by Alexis here. She’d seen Grey’s wolf for the first time on these scuffed wooden boards.
He ran his hands through his hair but didn’t answer. Instead, he pressed a long kiss onto her forehead. “You know where to find me,” he told her as he ambled down the porch stairs.
“Grey?”
He turned around, waiting.
“Thank you,” she said.
The smile that ghosted his face was the saddest she’d ever seen. “Anytime.”
Anytime. He said that word with such sincerity and conviction that she knew it was true. For the rest of her life, he would find a way to protect her. He would always find her.
He didn’t look back as he drove away. She waited to see if he would, and just like that, in a moment of clarity, she knew what she wanted. Her becoming silver wolf hadn’t disabled them. Her fear of their overwhelming bond had. Their journey hadn’t been pretty or enviable. It had been work, and blood, and tears, but at the end of that could be a happiness so blinding her heart would never see anyone but him again.
She’d have to work hard to make it up to him and gain his trust again, but she would do everything in her power to give him happiness like he so selflessly gave to her.
Their futures were linked, as their wolves were. A wolf as calm and white as snow to balance the wolf as volatile and black as night.
Chapter 10
Bunny killer, yes. Public indecency, yes, but not on purpose. Trespassing, with vigor. Accomplice to the murder of an entire pack, probably. Stalker? Morgan sighed and tapped her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. Just add it to her tab.
Grey looked delicious. There was no reason in the world he should have missed her watching him from the driver’s side of her truck, except the man seemed to be working out some demons. The loud crack of an ax biting into the wood he was maiming echoed through the meadow his spr
awling log cabin was nestled into. His shirt was in a fortunate pile off to the side and his muscles stretched and moved under his skin as he worked. His biggest scars were new and angry, and they made him look dangerous. And yummy.
She had to stop stalling. As enjoyable as it was to watch him work, she would either be busted shortly or spontaneously ovulate. Or both. She stifled a shiver. He could say no. They had a history together so deep it had created them both. His love for her had turned her into the same kind of monster he was, but her need for independence had created a canyon between them. Her wolf stirred with eagerness to be near her mate. She had to do what was best for both of them. She needed him back.
She pressed her foot on the gas slightly and his head jerked in her direction. His eyes were so golden they looked yellow from where she picked her way down the dirt road to his house.
He smiled. Just a small one where the corners of his mouth turned up, but it was one of her favorites. A smile he only gave to her. She waved but her heart skittered. He could still say no. Sure, she was the silver wolf. Sure, she was, unfortunately, the most sought-after female of their race. And sure, Grey still reacted to her physically. But she had put him through the ringer in the past months. The decision was all on him, and if he said no, she had nobody to blame but herself.
When she came through the clearing, her eyes widened in wonder. She leaned forward to take in the full expanse of his log cabin. No, his log mansion. Definitely not what she had expected to find when she went sniffing around his old apartment looking for him. He’d been living just across Dallas pack borders the entire time. She had been Changing and hunting with the other wolves right next door to him and hadn’t even been aware.
The house was beautifully built but blended in with the landscape so harmoniously it was as if it had been there for a hundred years and stamped its image permanently on the woods in ways beautifully inoffensive to nature. The size of the house was overwhelming. Or maybe she was just used to living in her cramped matchbox house in the city. A huge front porch led up to the door and the railings had animal motifs in the same style as the box Grey had given her when he’d proposed. Back when everything was simple and easy. He must have carved these as well.