Scratch the Surface (Wolf Within) (15 page)

As I rushed for the bathroom, I glanced furtively down the hall, hoping I would not run into anyone.

Allerton’s door was open and so was Kathy Manning’s, but they were not walking down the hall so I supposed they were already downstairs.

Grandfather Tobias’s door was shut, of course, and so was Murphy’s. There was a light on, I could tell that much, and I tried the bathroom doorknob wondering if he were in there. It opened under my touch and I was able to lock myself in from both the hall and his room so I could pee in peace.

After peeling off my pajamas, I got into the shower. I washed my hair, but wished I hadn’t when my fingers inadvertently pressed the back of my head and an explosion of sick pain and nausea nearly caused me to puke. There was a lump the size of a robin’s egg right where the back of my skull had slammed into the wall last night.

I couldn’t help the half scream, half groan of pain that escaped me when I touched it, nor the string of obscenities that followed. It was either swear or vomit, and I didn’t want to puke on my bare feet.

The water was a tease. It helped when I was underneath it, but once I was toweled dry and wrapped in one of the waffle knit bathrobes, my head still throbbed.

Teeth gritted, I unlocked the bedroom side door. I could not possibly go downstairs in a bathrobe or even my damn pajamas. I had to get dressed and all my clothes were on Murphy’s side of the door.

He’d known for half an hour that I was in the bathroom. He could hardly have failed to hear the water or my muffled curses, so I wasn’t surprised to find him slumped on the edge of the bed, facing the bathroom door. He was fully dressed, but he looked as if he hadn’t slept at all. His eyes were puffy and dark circles underscored them, giving him an oddly appealing appearance, more fragile and vulnerable than I’d ever seen him.

I’d always considered him strong and confident, even during moments of grief when he thought about Sorcha. This morning he looked beaten down and weak.

His split lip was a little swollen. It would have been fine if he’d thought to put ice on it the night before but he obviously hadn’t. The abrasion on his cheek had spread into a subtle bruise the color of dusk—gray-black and almost invisible. Blood crusted along the cut edges. He should have put peroxide on it last night or at least washed it with antibiotic soap, but he hadn’t done that either.

His dark eyes held a sort of mute apologetic agony as he looked at me. In his hands he held the small red leather photo album. It was open to the page where Grey and I laughed on the beach in Rhode Island.

At last anger swelled inside me and spilled into my veins, igniting a protective fury.

“That’s mine,” I snarled at him. “I want that back.”

He saw where I was looking and without a word, his eyes huge, he held it out to me.

I snatched it away and a photograph fluttered to the floor and landed face up on the Oriental rug.

As I bent to snatch it up, I realized two things—it had not been a good idea to move so quickly, and the photograph was not from my album.

I saw vivid red hair and lots of green grass and it hit me that it was Sorcha’s picture.

I didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to confront her beauty and perfection and understand graphically why I didn’t now, nor ever would, measure up.

My outstretched hand froze and Murphy said, “Go ahead. You can look at it. It’s only fair. It’s Sorcha.”

Trapped, I picked up the photograph and, bracing myself, looked down at it.

Sorcha’s flame-red hair stood out like cloud around her decidedly plain face. Her chin was too pointy, her hazel eyes too close together and her cheeks were obscured by a battalion of freckles. Not a light dusting, but freckles upon freckles, a freckle free-for-all jostling for space and dominance.

I couldn’t believe it. She didn’t even have a nice figure. Too skinny and flat-chested. I honestly could not understand what a gorgeous handsome man like Murphy would see in her. Or why someone so plain wouldn’t go crazy with joy at having a man like him madly in love with her. Not just for his looks either, but for him, for the kind of man he was. It did not make sense, but then nothing did anymore. Nothing had for so long. What was one more inexplicable thing?

Her hair was gorgeous, that much was true. Auburn, the color of autumn leaves, thick and wavy.

Murphy waited for me to say something but I couldn’t find any words. I hoped my expression did not give away my incredulity.

“She wasn’t beautiful like you are, Stanzie, but she had something. Some sort of wild mystery to her. Men went crazy about her. Mad to solve the mystery. I wasn’t the first one, but I had enough to charm to get her to bond with me, I guess. She never got serious about anybody until...Colin Hunter.” Murphy managed to get the name out without hitting something.

I still didn’t say anything. I could not come up with anything.

He waited a moment, watching me stare intently at the photograph of that plain, freckle-faced, flat-chested woman and eventually said, “What are you thinking?”

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.”