When did you become so wise?
"If you can walk," he said, avoiding her question, "your injuries must be healed."
"Healed." She breathed the word, exhaled it, savoring a taste she had not expected to sample again. "Is it possible?"
"Your legs held you up. Your muscles must be weak and thin, but they work. Can you feel them?"
"Yes." Wonder in her eyes, she ran her hands down her body from waist to thigh. Her nightdress molded to the shape beneath, and Morgan clenched his teeth. "I can. It hurts."
The pain must be great, but she bore it without complaint. Pride swelled his heart to uncomfortable proportions. "I only know a little about such injuries, but I have seen men who have not used arms or legs for many months, and they can get well if they do not give up. It will continue to hurt, after so long. The wolf will help. It was the wolf that healed you."
She met his gaze. "But I… I haven't Changed in years."
"Your body doesn't forget. Just as your muscles don't forget how to stand. They will learn to walk and then run again." He stared into her eyes. "You are brave enough to do it, Athena. You always have been."
She pulled herself up to lean on the pillows, carefully flexing her knees. "But if all it needed was courage, then why did it take me so many years to find it?"
Ask Ulysses, he wanted to tell her. He is the philosopher—he and Caitlin. "What were you afraid of?" he asked.
"I—" She closed her eyes, and he could feel her traveling back over the years, to that snowy mountainside long ago. "I don't know. I believed the doctors. I believed Niall."
Niall. Morgan bit back a snarl. "He kept you in that chair."
"No! No." She shook her head, refusing to hear anything against her brother. "Nothing is that simple. He did everything for me."
"He did not understand the wolf," Morgan said. "Neither did you."
The confusion in her eyes cleared, and a new energy coursed through her. Morgan could see it, radiating from her body. "I believed the wolf was gone forever. I made myself believe it." She looked at him in such a way that his throat closed up and he couldn't have spoken had he wished to.
"It wasn't only the wolf inside me that made this happen," she said softly. "It wasn't a miracle. It was you. Your inspiration, your belief in me… even your bullying. You were an example I had never found anywhere else."
He jumped to his feet. "You give me too much credit."
"I don't think I do. You are so much more than you know, Morgan."
"And you know nothing of me."
"Then tell me." She leaned forward, deliberately working the muscles of her legs. "If you have suffered… I want to help you as you have helped me. I owe you so much. Let me repay at least a little."
He started for the door, and stopped. Every nerve burned with conflicting urges. Run. Stay. Avoid her at all costs. Take her. Possess her. Make her yours forever.
"There are many who care about you, Morgan," she said behind him. "You do not want to owe anyone… and you don't want anyone owing you. Do you think I have not seen that time and again in my work?"
"Among your charity cases?" he snapped. "Those who are too weak to survive on their own, and too proud to admit it?"
"The circus needed your help, and you gave it. You could have left, but you stayed. You had no reason to encourage me, yet you did. I cannot understand you, Morgan… and yet, somehow, I do."
"You are a child."
"I had a father who loved me, and a brother who protects me even when he is too diligent. Perhaps I let myself be protected. But who protected you?"
"I don't need protection."
She paused, and he thought he had driven her from the subject. But she was not finished.
"You lost your family when you were young," she said. "But you have a new family now. Caitlin, and Ulysses, everyone in the circus. They are all your friends. And Harry regards you as a son."
He couldn't bear it. The bit of conversation he had heard between her and Harry, when he had left the bags by the door—that had been more than he wanted to know. And yet he had envied their easy intimacy, the affection between parent and child. His last conversation with Aaron Holt had been… best forgotten.
"What was your father like?" she asked.
He turned on her. "He was a dreamer, a wastrel, a man who could not care for his family." He closed his eyes, seeing the haggard, agonized, pleading face that bore so little resemblance to the man he had known in boyhood. "He left my mother…"
Too hard. Too much. "I went looking for him," he said. "To bring him home."
"Did you find him?"
She seemed to sense the enormity of what she asked, for her voice had grown very small. He smiled brutally. "I found him."
"You hated him," she whispered. "Oh, Morgan—"
Was that pity in her eyes, her voice? Was she reaching out, her fingers poised to stroke his cheek, pat his hair as if he were a disconsolate child—one of her precious, pitiful orphans?
He moved faster than human eyes could see and grasped her about the wrist.
"Don't pity me," he growled. "Don't you dare pity me."
He crouched over her, his legs to either side of her hips, pinning her arms to the bed. Athena understood, oh, yes, she knew—but she was calm, unafraid.
He did not want her fear. He wanted… he wanted…
"Morgan—"
He silenced her once more with his lips.
Chapter 15
Athena knew better than to show fear. The wolf was in Morgan's eyes, in his need, and she knew she had pressed too quickly.
But she needed, too. She needed to understand him, and now—as he kissed her with a harshness that swiftly transformed into a hungry caress—she realized she needed something far more physical.
The very physical desires she had denied herself, knowing that no man would be able to satisfy them even should he wish to bother with a cripple. The entirely selfish fulfillment that benefitted no one but herself.
Now she had begun to want—not dream, not wish, but actively seek what had not been within her grasp until this moment.
That frightened her as Morgan himself could not. Her legs had begun to waken from their long sleep, but she hadn't reckoned how every other part of her would so brilliantly come alive at his touch.
It had happened before, with him, but not like this. His fingers tangled in her loosened hair, fiercely holding her still as he kissed her with all the thoroughness she had imagined in her waking dream downstairs.
But his anger, his seeming ferocity, was as much a facade as his ordinary human shape. Even now his hold on her was tender as that of a she-wolf carrying her pup in jaws that could crush bone.
His mouth formed her name against her lips, and he released her arms. She left them where they were, though she felt far from passive. Her instinct was to reach for him and pull him down, down, into herself.
But he must feel in control. She sensed that the way she sensed the crushing sorrows of young, unwed mothers or the anger of men who could not find work to feed their families. In such cases she knew how to respond—how to give, heal, mend—but now she must find her way like one blind.
One blind who had just begun to see.
Morgan nuzzled her ear, hot breath sizzling against the cool flesh at her hairline, and did something indescribable with his tongue. She gave a brief cry of surprise. He kissed her again, first on the lips and then on her forehead, her eyelids, her nose, her chin. Each kiss was little more than a breath, yet charged with such potency that she could not mistake it for anything like a brotherly salute.
No sooner had she recognized the utterly erotic nature of the caresses than he surprised her again. His tongue swept down the angle of her jaw, from earlobe to chin. It was as if he were sampling her before beginning his feast, a promise of more to come.
More than what had transpired in her bedroom, or even in her dream. It could go so much further, if she dared let it. All she need do to stop it was tell him "no."
He pressed his mouth to the underside of her jaw, where the pulse beat very fast, where she was most defenseless. She bent her head back and closed her eyes. He nipped her here, there… love-bites that she vaguely thought must be common among his kind. Their kind.
Then he began to unbutton the top of her nightdress.
She held her breath. One button undone: he peeled back the two seams and kissed the space between. One more: another kiss. The third button lay nestled in a valley of flesh. The last ended just where her breasts pushed up so shamelessly against the sheer linen.
Needles of sensation prickled in her belly and nipples. When he got below the buttons, he wouldn't be doing what an importunate suitor might have done, if she had suitors. She had no illusions about his intention.
Why? her much-abused common sense cried. Why here, now?
Why not? Did you expect avowals of love, a slow and formal courtship that any normal woman might prefer? Are you normal? Is he?
Might this not be your only chance to know what it is to be loved?
He laced his fingers through hers and pulled her arms above her head. He did not hold her there. Instead, he let his hand slide down her body, grazing shoulder and breast and hip without lingering, coming at last to rest on the juncture of her legs.
Her legs, which were no longer dead weights but strange appendages not yet sure how they belonged to the rest of her. They would not yet obey her, but they could feel.
She felt the heat of his palm through the lawn of her gown. She felt him begin to slide the fabric up her thighs, inch by inch, from the middle of her calf and higher. She felt the draft of cool air lick at her bared skin as his tongue had licked at her ear and chin.
Then his hand was on her, nothing between.
He brought his face close to hers. His lungs worked like those of a man who had been running many miles without rest. Her nostrils drew in scents that belonged only to him, unique and intoxicating, wolf and human. Damp, heavy locks of his hair curled under her jaw and into the cleft between her breasts.
"You feel so much for others," he whispered hoarsely in her ear. "But do you feel for yourself, Athena?"
He moved his hand under the bunched cloth of her nightdress. His fingertip just barely—or so she thought—brushed the small, tight curls at the tops of her thighs.
She had read of electric shocks and had imagined what they must be like. But that was scarcely an adequate comparison when he touched the most private place beneath that downy shield.
He had asked if she felt for herself. No answer was necessary. Pleasure like pain danced and burned with each small rotation of his finger, wringing gasps from deep in her chest. Standing on her own feet, walking, running again… all that was nothing compared to the ecstasy that reached into the very center of all she was or could ever be.
Was this it, the thing women spoke of in veiled allusions and whispers when men were safely out of hearing? The thing that made sharing a man's bed more than a duty and a way of making children?
Morgan. He touched her again, and her voice lost its way somewhere between throat and tongue.
To feel… to feel so gloriously was worth any price. To feel this at Morgan's hands, with his body stretched out above her was a miracle she did not deserve.
But what did Morgan get for himself? He had started this to silence her—to prove something to her, to himself, that he was master of his own fate and hardened against any sentiment she could offer. Yet his attempt at mastery had become a giving—of pleasure, of new feelings and wonder such as Athena had never known.
Did he realize what he did to her? Was it part of his game? Or was it as real and sincere as the renewed wholeness of her body?
He was no fool, and neither was she. The exact nature of the physical consummation between man and woman was but a vague idea in Athena's mind, but it must be connected to the way he touched her, the way her body responded and grew moist and warm and wanting. She could understand, now, how women bore children outside the bonds of marriage.
But Morgan's skilled fingers were not the organs capable of planting new life in a woman's body. Children—good heavens, children—she had dismissed that future as completely as she had one that freed her from the chair.
Children, marriage, physical love. Suddenly all three had become solid and tangible, vivid landscapes she could see through an open window instead of hazy specters glimpsed in a fog of resignation.
Morgan had made them all possible. He alone. He gave and gave, without knowing how much, and now he gave again. She knew in her heart that he wouldn't force himself upon her, risk getting her with child. God forbid that he should create such an unbreakable tie between them.
But if he thought of her—of her reputation, which he had seemed to ignore in Denver—and of the future he would alter forever if he continued—then how could she accuse him of such a sensible selfishness?
No. If he had meant to prove his independence, his indifference to human tenderness, he had chosen the wrong way. He gave unstintingly, denying himself the kind of fulfillment men must derive from such a joining. And she could not bear the thought that he had nothing but the dubious comfort of knowing he could make her feel.
That was when she realized she had fallen in love with him.
The notion was so blindingly obvious that she was briefly numb to sensation. Everything froze—lungs, heart, even her ability to hear and see.
She loved Morgan Holt. It wasn't mere attraction for one like herself, one who could understand. It wasn't some sort of rebellion against the life she thought she had chosen after the accident. It wasn't even this, this marvelous thing he did with his lips and his hands.
And it was not at all what she expected love to be. She had thought it beyond her reach, an emotion connected with gallant, handsome, courteous men who had wealth and presence and would never look twice at a woman in a invalid's chair. Men like her brother and his associates, the husbands and fathers of her society friends.
Morgan was not gallant, or courteous, or even handsome in the way of those men. He was bad-tempered, gruff, impolite, indifferent to propriety, and far too plain-spoken. It was rare that he considered the feelings of others as he ought… as she tried to do.
But his was a breadth of soul, a tormented devotion, a passionate loyalty that could not be bought but, once given, was eternal. He had decided soon after their first meeting that she belonged to his small circle of family and friends. She knew he would never let harm come to her, and that he would fight to the death on her behalf.
All that he gave, having nothing but himself. But he felt. He felt as deeply as anyone she had ever known.
How could she make sense of this emotion, this knowledge of what he meant to her? She saw how much she had taken from him, and was ashamed. She did not take without giving back.
She must give to Morgan—help, and succor, and healing, if she could. Even love, if there was any chance in the world that he might accept it. But there was a more immediate gift within her power to bestow. A small, temporary gift that mattered less to her than to her society, but might begin to repay the debt she owed him.
If she had the courage.
Morgan stroked her with gentle pulses, and she momentarily lost the power to consider such abstracts as courage and selfishness. Light-headed, she arched up, up, her spine curving as if to bring every inch of her body into contact with his. Higher, higher, unfurling wings to carry them both into the heavens.
It was coming, the moment of perfect freedom. No more chair, no more waiting, no bondage even to the earth. Just one more stroke, one more caress, and she would prove… prove to herself, and everyone…
Morgan stopped. Athena opened her eyes with a wordless protest, but the look on his face kept her silent. She heard the thump of footfalls running up the stairs a second after he did.
Niall. She barely had time to pull her nightdress over her knees before he burst through the door.
"My God," he said hoars
ely. "Athena." His gaze fixed on Morgan. "You damned bastard—"
"Niall!"
Athena's cry might as well have been a whisper. It did not penetrate Niall's rage. He could see nothing but the man who had despoiled his sister.
Morgan Holt. The cur crouched over her on the bed—her bed—an ugly snarl on his face as if he would defend her against her own brother. Defend her, by God, when he had stolen what little of value she had left.
Niall clenched his fist and dove at his enemy. Morgan sprang up and met him in midstride. Niall felt his fist connect with flesh and bone, heard the satisfying grunt of pain as Morgan staggered and fell to his knees with the force of the blow.
But he did not remain down. He stood again, shaking blood from his split lip, and braced his legs apart. Niall obliged him with a second strike directly to the jaw. Morgan's head snapped to one side.
"Niall, stop it!"
He was aware of the motion at the edge of his sight, a figure in pale linen lurching toward him with an awkward gait. Confusion stopped him from hitting again, though Morgan remained stubbornly on his feet. If one of the whoreson's circus friends had come to help him…
A hand caught at his arm. Athena's face swam into focus.
"Niall!"
Athena. He blinked. She could not be here. She was on the bed. But the bed was empty, coverlet and sheets rumpled but unstained. The hand that gripped his arm with such frantic strength was slender and feminine.
She was standing—leaning her weight against him, but on her own two feet. Shock reverberated through Niall. He had come into the room expecting the worst, and finding it… but he had not been prepared for this. Not Athena able to stand, to walk, to participate willingly in her own ruination.
He met her gaze, a strange, cold calm muting his rage to a dull throb behind his eyes. "How long?" he asked in a soft, reasonable voice. "How long have you been lying to me, Athena?"
A vise made of five steel fingers caught him about the throat. He clawed at an arm roped with muscle, implacable in its grip. Vision narrowed to a pair of slitted amber eyes and a mouth full of bared white teeth.
TO CATCH A WOLF Page 21
