A slow smile spread across his face like a wildfire, melting away the goosebumps.
“What kind of story?” he asked.
We were totally on the same page. I had to take a deep breath before I pinned him down on the step. But then I’d never hear what happened today and we’d burn our dinner.
“Tell me what you have planned. Not just with the pack, but for yourself. You always think of everyone else before yourself.”
Shadow didn’t answer right away. “We’re going to fix everything here, then I’ll get in touch with my old clients. Build a new house.” Again, he was putting everyone before himself. It was completely admirable, but I was familiar with this pattern. I’d done it for too long and eventually I didn’t know who I was anymore.
“When the moon wanes, it’s a restorative time. Time to put down roots, fix what’s broken. My pack can’t be strong unless I have a foundation. Lead by example.” He laced his fingers between mine and squeezed my hand. “It’s the perfect time to take a mate, lay down some roots. That’s what I want.”
He swallowed hard and waited for my response. “Your clients will be happy you’re back. And I can’t wait to help you with the new house.” My heart was pounding. The rest of it....I knew I had to say something, but the threat of fucking everything up beyond recognition was too much to risk.
“It will be your house too, Trina.” Shadow rested his forehead against mine, tracing the outline of my lips so lightly those goosebumps came rushing back. “I want you to be my mate.”
I gasped, pulling away from him. Sadness and confusion cracked Shadow’s face like I’d slammed my hand against a pane of glass. “
What does that mean?” I knew damn well what it meant, so I had to be more specific. “I know it’s a wolf thing. But I’m not a...it’s...I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s okay. I do.” He attempted to smile. “It is a wolf thing, but it’s more than that. When I’m with you, I feel complete. All our lives we look for the piece of ourselves that we aren’t born with. The other part of our soul. And when we find it, we promise that person forever. Because without that piece, we can never be the same.”
My eyes burned. The sentiment was so beautiful, but that wasn’t the reason I was about to cry. “We’ve only known each other a week.”
“It doesn’t fucking matter. As soon as I saw you jump into that fighting ring, I knew you were the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. My heart can’t tell time, Trina. It knows two things: never and forever. Weeks, months—that’s something that humans came up with.”
“However we measure it, our time together has been nothing but adrenaline and infatuation. Don’t get me wrong, I love every second I spend with you, but this isn’t a relationship. Yet. With the world raining down around us, it’s exciting to cling to each other. But what happens when you really get to know me, Shadow? What if this feeling doesn’t last?”
Shadow’s body rose as he took that all in and fell as he digested it. “You forget I have a head start—”
“I know. But you must be seeing me through different eyes now. It has to be different as man as it was a wolf.” I stood and flipped the burgers over, putting my free hand up in the air when he tried to interject. “We couldn’t argue when you were a wolf. It was like you were watching a movie. It wasn’t a relationship.”
“We could’ve argued. You knew I didn’t get along with Major, and you had no idea what our relationship was like as men.” Shadow walked over to me, and I did my best not to shrink away from him. That wasn’t my intention. I didn’t want him to go, but I needed to get him to slow the hell down. “I’ve never felt so strongly about a woman before. Human or wolf. Trina, it’s you.”
I had felt this way before. Or so I thought. Truth was, I’d never felt this way about Ryan. This was so much more. Everything with Shadow had been so amplified that he’d taken over my whole life. “Then we’re in no rush.” I wrapped my arms around him. His heart was pounding. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Shadow
She said no.
So it wasn’t a never no. But it was not right now. And not what I wanted to hear. Trina doubted me, and I needed to make that shit go away. Right now.
“What’s the difference?” I asked. Trina took the food off the grill, some of it falling into the dirt. She put the plate down on the top stair but wouldn’t meet my eyes. All the breakthroughs she’d had with her guilt about the accident had disappeared, replaced by the shy, unsure woman who didn’t believe she deserved to be happy. It broke the last piece of my heart. “You want this, Trina. Stop punishing yourself.”
“It’s not about that—"
“Then what is it about?” I cut her off. “Ryan wouldn’t want you to be miserable. He’d want to see you living the life that he can’t. Stop fucking wasting it.”
Her mouth dropped, eyes wide and unblinking. She took several deep breaths before she was able to speak. I shouldn’t have said it, but it needed to be said. She was letting her demons eat her from the inside out. I knew the shelter was part of her therapy, but it was fucking time for her to come out of her shelter and live her life again.
“I’m sorry if I can’t snap out of it for you. These feelings didn’t come with an expiration date. Do you think I want to feel like this? Like there’s a tornado brewing inside of me just waiting to destroy everything it touches? I’d do anything to make that go away. And don’t you dare try to tell me what my fiancé would’ve wanted.” The words were like shots from a gun, and it was possible that she may have hit me harder than I struck her. I’d asked her to spend the rest of her life with me and she referred to another man as her fiancé. He might be dead, but fuck, I hated this guy right now. For being able to give Trina something I couldn’t, then taking it all away and keeping it out of my reach.
“What do you want, Trina?”
Fuck. I made her cry. She’d rather break down than tell me what she wanted. She should’ve known I’d move heaven and earth to give it to her, whatever it was. That’s why I was so angry; I thought she knew that and she didn’t.
“I want...” She had to pause and catch her breath. Tears dripped down her flushed cheeks. The force field she’d put up around herself was impossible to penetrate. I couldn’t get any closer to her right now. She hugged herself. “I want to be happy. I want all the things you don’t think I do. To be normal. I want a brain that isn’t constantly playing tricks on me, thinking the boogeyman is around every corner. One that thinks everything that’s good is too good to be true. And most of all, I want you to want me. Not because you need a woman to show off to the rest of the pack. I’m not sure I understand the reasoning behind that, but I’m not gonna lie, Shadow. It makes everything between us feel cheap.”
Force field be damned, I was going to take a sledgehammer to the wall Trina was trying to put up between us. “I’m thirty-five years old. I’ve been with a lot of women—'
“That makes me feel even more special.” She shied away from my touch with a sad chuckle.
I caught her by the shoulder, and made her turn around to look at me, taking her chin in my hand so she had to look in my eyes. “Are you going to give me a chance, or are you going to shoot down everything I say?”
Her body relaxed, and I took it as peace offering. “Let’s try this a different way then. You make me absolutely insatiable, Trina. All I want to do is to make you happy. I want it more than my own happiness. When I see you crumble like you just did a few minutes ago, it’s worse than six months in captivity, beaten and starved. I can’t fail you. I will do whatever it takes to make you believe me. Every plan I’m making in my life includes you, and if it doesn’t, it’s not worth doing.”
“Nights like this make me happy.” Trina’s smile wobbled, her green eyes blurred through a wall of tears. “I love the way my breath catches in the top of my chest when I see you get out of the truck. I spend the entire day waiting for you to come back to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do, but you’re the thing I’ve been missing. Someone to sit on the stoop and eat...now cold hamburgers with me.” She laughed, and I knew I hadn’t lost her.
“Last night was one of the best nights of my life. But.” She drew a deep breath. I knew it was coming. “The pack makes you a different man than the one who takes me out to dinner and sleeps with me on a blow-up mattress on the floor of an animal shelter. What the pack does to you, to us, scares me. Shadow the man owns my heart. Shadow the wolf” –she shrugged away from my fingers, letting her head fall— “I need some time to get used to. I’m willing to be anything you want me to be, but I can’t be your mate yet.”
“I want you to be my mate.” I sat down on the stoop, reaching into the plastic bag of hamburger buns. I fixed a plate for her without having to ask how she liked them. I’d made a point while I’d stood guard over her in wolf form to take in as many details as I could remember so I could surprise her with them later. “And I’ll wait for you to come to me, as long as it takes.”
She bumped against me, hot dog already in hand, and laughed. “I’m here.”
I took a bite of the food in her hand. She squealed before taking it away from me. My girl was back, happy and carefree. I might not know much about post-traumatic stress disorder, but I knew I wanted to see Trina happy. “When the time comes, you’ll know exactly what I mean.”
Trina swallowed hard, nodding. “I will.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Trina
I was an absolute fool. The tornado I described to Shadow swirled inside me, destroying everything I’d worked so hard to build. It reduced everything to rubble. There was no predicting when it would strike, and no getting out of its way. It was a lethal force of nature.
Shadow didn’t run for cover. He braced himself against the storm and he weathered it. Now he sat next to me, eating his cold dinner, doing anything he could to get me to smile. Why the fuck did I insist on pushing this man away? Just to see if I could break someone as badly as I’d broken myself?
To the tornado, it all made sense. As scary as the pack stuff was, I wondered how much worse it could be than what I had now.
“I’m sorry.” I broke the easy silence as we cleaned up for the night.
“About what?” Shadow set up the blow-up mattress. I couldn’t believe this man still wanted to sleep with his arms around me after our argument. I’d expected him to haul ass out of here. There was even a piece of me that wanted him to.
“I said some horrible things earlier. You’re promising me more than I can give to myself and it scares the living shit out of me.”
“I know.” Shadow motioned for me to sit down in front of him, turning me so my back was to him. He kneaded my shoulders, unknotting the muscles in the back of my neck. Heaven. “Let me do it for you until you can do it for yourself.”
I bit my lip to hold in the moan. This was exactly what I needed. All of it. “Let me explain—"
“Trina, you don’t have to explain yourself.” Shadow cut me off but kept working. My head fell back as his thumbs traced my spine down to the top of my jeans. His fingers were warm against my skin when he slipped underneath my sweatshirt. I knew in a couple of strokes my bra would be unhooked and the sweatshirt beside us on the floor. That wasn’t a complaint.
“Please. Let me try. If I can explain it to you, maybe I can make sense of it myself.” I turned around to face him. Nestled in the heat between his thighs, I was home. “Sometimes my grief is like an out of body experience. I watch myself do hurtful things and there’s no way to stop them.”
The next part was going to sound absolutely crazy, but Shadow said he wanted to be with me forever. He had to know all of me. I couldn’t hold anything back. “
It’s almost like I’m two different people. The girl who’s devastated that she destroys everything that’s good around her, and the tornado who thinks things are better that way. I don’t know how to make them both happy at the same time.”
“Which one do you want to be happy?” Shadow asked. No judgment. If I was scaring him, he had the best damn poker face I’d ever seen.
“The sane answer is the happy one. But the tornado’s been my best friend for a long time. I don’t know what my life would be like without it anymore.”
Shadow nodded.
“So if you kick the tornado to the curb—” he raised his hand when I raised my eyebrows. “Hear me out, Trina. I’m not making fun of you. Your pain is real. I like that you call it the tornado, by the way. It’s the perfect description. It’s going to be hard to abandon those feelings. Like you said, you and the tornado have been through a lot together. It’s comfortable. Not letting the tornado take your energy away from you and twist it into something negative is going to feel like another death. Of course it’s going to be hard to adjust. Happy is scary because it’s so hard to find and so easy to lose. You know that. But fuck, it’s worth it.”
I could hardly breathe for a whole new reason, something I was completely unfamiliar with. “You get it,” I whispered. Covering my face with my hands, I wanted to contain the sob. Shadow had reduced me to a quivering mess of happy tears. “I thought if I said it out loud, I’d understand. But you just made why I do it make sense and that’s something no person or medication or therapy could ever do for me. Thank you.”
I slid my fingers down my wet cheeks. Shadow had never looked more beautiful than he did right now.
Gently pulling my fingers away from my face, Shadow kissed each fingertip. “Congratulations,” he said between kisses. “You kicked the tornado’s ass.”
“No, you did.” I spread my fingers then leaned in to kiss him, my hand still between our lips. It wasn’t the easiest kiss, but nothing good came easily. The tornado tried to creep back in, it pulsed in a deep corner of my brain, but I ignored it.
Take that, tornado!
We parted enough that Shadow wasn’t fuzzy. I dropped my hand to his heart. “I love you.”
For a second, I thought Shadow might cry. “I love you too, Trina.”
I thought the last kiss was the best one ever, but this one blew it out of the water. “You know what?” I asked, my lips moving against the stubble of his cheek. He shook his head. “I’m going to let you.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Shadow
Watching Trina blossom into the woman she wanted to be wasn’t a perfect journey, but now when she stumbled or the tornado reared its ugly head, we could talk about it. I could catch her before she fell into the abyss, and she’d let me. It made all the difference in the world. I didn’t know it was possible to love her even more. The barriers between us fell and we could be one.
Almost all the barriers fell. As the moon gained strength, so did my wolf. It had been a long time since I’d gone through a full moon cycle as a human and everything was off. Now I was the one holding back, trying not to scare the hell out of Trina with the real me.
“What’s going to happen tomorrow night?” she asked. Hell if I knew, but I was glad she asked. She must have so many questions about me being a wolf, and the shift had freaked her out last time. This time she’d be prepared. “How long will you be a wolf?”
“Usually only a day.” My mouth was practically watering at the thought of sinking my teeth into Ryker’s neck. I’d have to snap it. A bite would never take a wolf as strong as him down. “It won’t be that much different than last time. I’m just going the other way.”
“Much different for you.”
“You met me as a wolf. That shouldn’t bother you.”
“But we do things I’ll never do with any of the guests at my shelter.” Trina swatted me. “I’m going to have to buy a six-pack to deal with this shift.”
“I know.” I slipped my arm around her waist. “It was the first thing I tasted after six months. That’s how I knew you were the right woman for me. You were beer flavored.”
“I don’t drink so much anymore, now that I’m with you. Sam Adams ha
d been my rebound man. He’s taking news of the breakup well, even though we’re going to stay friends.” She tipped her face up to accept a long, hot, non-beer flavored kiss. “So when you say you’re usually only a wolf for a day, have you ever stayed wolf for the whole month? Before you got captured, of course.”
“Not since I was a teenager. Our bodies were going through so many changes it was harder to control then.”
“I see.” Trina bit her lip. “You have trouble shifting when you’re horny.”
I burst out laughing. “Pretty much.”
“Well, Mr. Channing, I think we should make sure you don’t have any pent-up desire left in the tank. I don’t think I’d be able to forgive myself if you couldn’t shift for a whole month because I left you wanting more.” She ran her finger down the middle of my chest, settling on my growing erection. “You’ve certainly made me insatiable.”
“I’d hate to leave you with a craving you can’t satisfy.” That wasn’t going to happen because Trina was sinking down to her knees, gazing at my crotch like she’d just come downstairs on Christmas morning.
Christmas with Trina. I couldn’t wait. It would almost be better than this blowjob. But I’d be a fool not to live in the moment. She’d unzipped my jeans and pushed them down my legs, followed by my boxers. She pumped the shaft in her hand, massaging my ass with the other. Shit, I had to steady myself with my hands on her shoulders, fingers sliding into her hair. I guided her as she wrapped her mouth around my cock, licking and sucking slowly, savoring me like it really could be a month before she had a chance to do this again. She palmed my balls in her other hand, taking me as deep as she could in her mouth, clamping down on my shaft. Her slow movements were ecstasy and torture at the same time. I was dying for her to touch me everywhere, but I’d miss her touch as soon as she was done.
Her Captive Wolf (Sawtooth Shifters Book 1) Page 13
