Wolf (The Henchmen MC #3) (9 page)

And there it was: acceptance.

He knew.

He saw.

And he didn't shrink away; he didn't look at me any different.

He saw and he accepted.

His breath warmed my neck and chest, his arm was a comforting weight across my middle, his massive body beside me, curled toward me, offering protection.

And, again, the word flashed across my mind, it burrowed deep into my soul:

Safe.

I was safe.

So I read. And Wolf slept.

EIGHT

Janie

Wolf's body didn't move all night, my sleeping, stalwart protector. He drifted awake a few minutes after I finished the book, turning his face in toward my neck slightly and planting a soft kiss there. My stomach clenched at the normalcy of it, the casual intimacy, like he did it every morning. But then he rolled away casually, looking up at the ceiling for a moment. "Good book?"

I almost wanted to laugh. "Yeah," I said, smiling wide at his profile, a happiness inside me that felt foreign and almost overwhelming.

His head tilted in my direction, his eyes drifting over my face for a long moment and I watched as something strange happened, a shutter closed down over his eyes. While the honey-colored depths always hinted at a bit of distance, there had always been an openness there. Right then, it was gone completely. He shut down. He shut me out.

"Shower first," he commanded, bolting off the bed and making his way toward the door, Harley and Chopper jumping up to follow.

The door slammed and I sat up slowly staring at it. What the hell was that? Like, I got that he had walls. There was nothing about Wolf that suggested he had escaped from his past unscathed and completely well-adjusted. I mean he couldn't have a normal conversation for chrissake. Suddenly, I found myself wanting to know every detail. He implied he had done something bad, something that didn't help him, but had helped his mother. Did he do something to his father? Or his mother's boyfriend or something? I wanted to know. I wanted to know every gory detail.

I'd looked into Wolf. A year ago when Hailstorm decided to work with The Henchmen, I dug deep and tried to find more than the surface information we had already acquired about him. The problem was, his trail was almost non-existent. He didn't have any social media; he didn't seem to go online at all; he paid his bills in cash. Aside from a few arrest records- one for a drunk and disorderly that I found hard to believe. One, because he seemed like the kind of man too in control to get drunk in the first place and two, because, well, how much liquor would it take to make someone as massive as him drunk in the first place? There had been another arrest for aggravated assault when he was in his early twenties. It never went to trial and I knew enough about the crooked law enforcement in Navesink Bank to know that palms had been greased and paperwork and witness statements found themselves 'missing'.

I didn't like being blind. I was usually able to find out just about anything if I dug deep enough for long enough. But with him, I got nowhere. And now I was without the resources to try again to find out more about his family. His mother and especially his father. The only thing I knew about Wolf's dad was that he was a Henchmen under Reign and Cash's father and that the three of them had grown up tight as brothers.

I sighed, climbing out of the bed and shivering against the late fall/ early winter air, grabbing a fresh t-shirt out of Wolf's closet and making my way into the bathroom. I hadn't asked him what happened to my clothes. I don't know why that was. Especially my panties and bra. I made a mental note as I waited for the water in the shower to warm up and I unwrapped my arm, to ask him to return them. Or in lieu of that, buy me new ones. Because, really, it was too freaking cold to be walking around with a draft up your skirt.

I got out of the shower and opened the door to find Wolf standing there, completely overtaking the entire doorway. "Jesus," I yelped, flying back a foot, my hand going to my chest. "Just creeping outside the door?" I asked, feeling defensive.

He ignored me, reaching out to snag my wrist and pulling up my arm to inspect it. "No wrap today," he informed me, dropping it.

I searched his face for a long minute, both of us blocking each other's way. "Everything alright?"

"Fine."

I felt my lips quirk up, ready to throw his own words back at him. "Don't lie. You don't want to talk about it, don't. But don't lie."
Ha. So there!

I thought his lip was going to do the twitch thing, but all I found there was a firm line. "Woman..." he growled.

And, well, the impulse control thing failed me again.

"Alright," I snapped, shoving a hand into his chest. "I've had just about enough of your monosyllabic bullshit. I know you like to hide behind it and just shrug and go 'just how I am'. But I think that's cheap. I think you do it so you don't have to let anyone in. But I'm over it. Oh, and while we're on the topic of your linguistic skills, or complete lack thereof, 'woman' is not a complete sentence. You seem to think it relays some deeper meaning, but, newsflash, it doesn't. You're going to have to start using actual sentences with subjects and verbs. You get extra points for a good adjective or adverb here and there."

"You done?" he asked, one of his dark brows raised.

"Actually..." I started, still going full-steam.

"You're done," he corrected, pushing into the small room and leaving me no choice but to back up against the sink counter. I sucked in a breath as he just moved past me, reached in the shower to turn the water on, and went about things like I wasn't there. Meaning, he reached behind his back, snagged his shirt, and pulled it off.

I was totally going to lift my chin up defiantly and storm out of that room, slamming the door for good measure. Totally. That was the plan.

But, well, um... that didn't happen.

I stood there, eyes glued on his strong back, looking over the giant back piece inked there. I felt my mouth fall open slightly as I realized what the image was of: Michael Defeats Lucifer. The archangel Michael, sword raised, wings aloft, was standing on the body of a figure that was more man than demon. It didn't take a genius to know that had particular meaning to him, to his past, to whatever he had done to make his mother's life better, whatever man he had to defeat to make it that way.

He'd chosen wisely, championing himself as Michael in the image, the angel of protection. I barely knew him and that was what he felt like to me. I felt like he could swoop down and fight off any foe that I might be faced with. I felt like he was someone I could trust.

He waited, I guess giving me a chance to excuse myself. When I didn't, he reached for his pants and undid them, letting them fall down his legs, and I realized when I got the blinding image of his firm ass, that he was the kind of man who went commando. I felt my air get caught in my chest, my hand slapping down on the surface of the sink as he slowly stepped into the shower. I should have lifted my gaze. I knew it the moment his body shifted and he was no longer standing with his back to me, but his side. But the movement happened too quickly and I suddenly found myself no longer staring at his muscular ass, but staring at his hard cock. Yes, hard. He was hard. And, like the rest of him, big.

The breath I had been holding rushed out sharply, audibly, as a dozen different thoughts flashed to the forefront of my mind. My system felt drunk on an exotic cocktail of desire and fear. It made my leg muscles feel wobbly and my heartbeat feel erratic, speeding up one moment and slowing down the next. The swirling in my stomach was at once both exciting and nauseating.

"Two choices," Wolf's voice growled at me, making my head snap up guiltily.
God,
I had been staring at his dick! Jesus Christ.

"Two choices," I repeated, watching his face. It was still closed down. His tone was oddly empty.

"Come in or leave," he clarified and the words landed like lead in my belly. Because I knew I couldn't go in, no matter how curious I was, no matter how much a part of me wanted to. But leaving was equally unpalatable. But I couldn't just fucking stand there all day like a freaking creep either, could I?

"Right," I said, ducking my head as I nodded and moved to walk out of the room.

I closed the door on a quiet click and moved over to the side of the bed where my legs finally gave up on me. Okay. So... yeah. I just saw Wolf naked. I saw Wolf naked
and
hard. And a part of me really did want to strip down and step into that shower with him. A part of me wanted his strong arms around me again, wanted to feel his fingers on my skin, his lips on mine. I wanted to see if I could break down the barrier in his eyes and voice.

But that wasn't me. I didn't do things like that. And no matter how nice it may have been for him to hold me while he slept and I read, as new and novel as his kiss had been, that didn't change anything. I was still me. I was still full of nightmares and demons. I could never be the girl to strip naked and step into the shower with a man without fear, without memories rushing back and ruining it. What had I been thinking playing at trying to be something other than what I am? I needed to stop playing house and focus. I needed to get my life back on track, as empty and unpromising as the rest of it sounded.

There was no room in my universe for fantasy, hopes, and dreams.

I closed my eyes on the crushing, crumbling feeling inside as I felt those childish wishes slip away. Then I got my ass off the bed and got on with my day.

Wolf came out a while later after more primal animal sounds and slamming that I pretended I didn't hear. He made a cup of the coffee I brewed and shuffled around making food. I sat at the table staring out the window wondering how deep a sleeper he was, if I could slip out when the dogs and he were passed out. It was worth a shot.

The frantic pounding came at the door sometime that afternoon. It was a long ass day pretending it wasn't driving me ape shit crazy that we hadn't spoken so much as a word to each other since the bathroom.

Wolf flew at the door, blocking the doorway as he did. "Not now," he growled at whoever was there. There was a short pause, then, "Seriously?" he asked.

"I need Janie's help," Cash's voice reached me. It was his, but it wasn't. Because I knew Cash's voice and it was always almost lazily flirtatious, light. But his voice sounded tortured, crazed.

"No," was Wolf's typical one-word response.

If I hadn't been listening so aptly, I would have missed it. But as it was, there was no mistaking the sound of a gun cocking. Cash had a gun on Wolf? What the hell was going on? They were brothers in every way that counted.

"This is not a discussion. Lo is in the hands of some fucking psychopath and no one, not even those freaks at that camp of hers can find her. So I need
Janie's fucking help.
"

At that, my heart seized in my chest.
Lo.
Lo was at the hands of some psychopath? My Lo? My mentor, the woman who was like a big sister and mother and best friend to me all at once. I flew across the room, wrenching the door open.

"Who has her?" I demanded, hearing a bit of hysteria in my tone and not caring.

"Damian Crane," he told me, expecting the name to stump me, because he went on to add, "Her husband."

But, well, there wasn't a whole helluva lot that I didn't know about Lo. She was private; she never talked about her past, but I had done my digging and I knew. "Ex," I supplied.

"What?" Cash asked, brows drawing together.

"Ex-husband. She had a contested divorce that finalized a decade ago. He's her ex-husband."

"How do you know this shit?"

I looked off over his shoulder at the woods for a moment, surprising myself when I offered up the truth, "When I can't sleep, which is often," I started, "I go online. I look into stuff. When I was first at Hailstorm, I looked into the people. So... I know her name is Willow Swift. When she was eighteen, she married Damian Crane. They were married until she was twenty-seven though, obviously, she was not with him that whole time because she was building up Hailstorm at the time and no one there had ever so much as heard his name. I don't know why she wasn't..."

"He beat her," Cash cut me off, effectively stunning me into complete silence.

"What?" I asked, hearing the horror in my own voice.

"I found a picture. There were bruises on her arm. That, coupled with the article that said he was stabbed twelve times in his apartment..."

"Oh my god..." I whispered, feeling a little light-headed at the idea. I couldn't picture it. I couldn't imagine a young Lo, untrained, knowing nothing of all the self-defense she now did, cowering away from a man who raised his hands to her. No wonder she fought so hard to be so damn strong all the time. She never wanted to feel that way again. She never wanted to cower or fear a man again. She...

"Enough," Wolf said roughly, making my head snap up to find his gaze on Cash for a second before drifting over to mine, his face softening slightly.

"He has her, Janie..." Cash said, his voice a plea.

"I need a computer," I snapped, looking over at Wolf, not caring about the shaking in my voice. "Right now," I clarified.