Like that should make it better?
“I took it the way you take a dying man’s last request. He wasn’t dying. But he was gone. And the one piece of him he had left was this thing he’d built to make sure no other child on this ranch died the way Maren did.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
“No.”
“Children went into those trucks, Garrett.”
“I know.” His voice has changed. Not defensive. Not the alpha trying to justify anything. Just a man with his arms around a woman, saying the words into the top of her head. “I know whatwent into the trucks. I didn’t know what happened at the other end, and I didn’t try to find out. I have to carry that. Always. Because forgetting would mean I really am the kind of monster who’d do that.”
I press my face against his chest.
I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to hear him sound like a person with a wound that makes sense, because then he becomes someone I have to reckon with instead of someone I can hate from a distance. And the distance is gone.
“My wolf chose you,” I say. I don’t know why I’m telling him this. “The first time I watched you ride to the stone. My wolf chose you then, and I’ve been fighting her ever since.”
“I know the feeling.”
“No. You don’t understand what it means for my wolf to choose someone. I’ve been a wolf more than I’ve been a human my entire life. I trust her more than I trust anything. And she chose the man who did what you did, and I can’t — I can’t reconcile that. I can’t make it fit.”
His thumb stops moving. His hand flattens against my back.
“Maybe it doesn’t have to fit yet,” he says.
“That’s a coward’s answer.”
“Probably.”
I almost laugh. Almost. The sound catches in my throat and dies, but it was there, and the fact that Garrett Forrester almost made me laugh while I’m lying naked in his arms in the forest is so absurd that I file it underThings I’ll Pretend Never Happened.
The heat is dropping.
I feel the fever break. The tide pulling back, leaving me on the shore with the full clarity of what I’ve been doing washing over me.
Last night and this morning. In the forest. With him. His hands on my body. His mouth on my skin. His cock inside me,the knot locking us together while I made sounds I didn’t know I could make and said things I didn’t mean to say. And then I let him touch my hair and hold me.
The clarity is unbearable.
“The heat’s passing,” I say.
He knows. His body is responding to the change in mine, the urgency in him dropping, the wolf’s manic drive easing. But something else arrives with the receding heat. Not relief.
He doesn’t want this to end. I can feel it.
I sit up. Pull away from his chest, his arms, his warmth. The air is cold on the skin where his body was.
“I need to go.”
“Briar—”
“The heat is over. This is over. Whatever this was—” I wave a hand at the trampled moss, the evidence of a night’s worth of what we did to each other and with each other. “It was biology. My body needed something; you were here. That’s all.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
I stand. My legs are unsteady. Too much exertion, not enough food. The heat’s departure has left my muscles wrung out. I need clothes. I need a shower. I need to put space between this man and me before the clarity finishes arriving.