Chapter 6

The beer and the beard made me do it.

-Raven’s secret thoughts

Wolf

“What are you making?” I asked her as I moved around the counter that separated her living room from the kitchen.

“Give me one of those,” she ordered, holding out her casted hand. “And Alice Spring’s Chicken. I actually do make this one dish. But, that’s really the extent of my culinary talents.”

“Smells fuckin’ awesome. Mig can’t eat.” I ripped open the box and handed her one before taking the case to the fridge.

She stopped me before I could make it all the way.

“You’re staying, right?” she asked.

Was that hopefulness I heard in her voice?

I nodded my head. “Sure am.”

“I got your favorite beer.” She pointed.

My brows rose.

“How’d you know that cheap beer was my favorite?” I challenged.

I knew how she knew. It was the same reason I knew she liked tacos better than fajitas. I also knew her favorite soft drink was Mountain Dew. Her favorite alcoholic drink was a glass of wine that was so sweet that it didn’t even taste like it was alcoholic.

She gave me a look.

“Your sister told me,” she said distractedly. “Although it’s not hard to figure out after watching you drink it every time you came over to your sister’s house, or when you went out to dinner with us.”

“Why’d you leave?” I asked her, placing the case into the fridge and grabbing a can before turning back to her to gauge her reaction to my question.

She grimaced and looked away.

“Why?” I asked again when she still didn’t explain.

“Everything good or healthy has a way of turning unhealthy around me,” she replied. “It was better to leave before it turned bad.”

I cracked the top on the can of beer and took a healthy swallow before placing it on the counter and walking to her.

She had her back to me, doing some weird shit with the chicken breasts in between a plastic bag with a rolling pin.

Placing one hand on each side of her hips, I waited until she finally sighed.

“It’s better this way, I swear,” she promised.

I waited until she growled in frustration.

“You, okay?” I said.

“It was because of you.”

My heart squeezed. “Why me?” I asked, lifting my hand to sweep some of the stray hairs that’d fallen from her ponytail off her neck.

I dropped my lips so they rested on the muscle of her shoulder, and she shivered.

Lips skimming her shoulder blade, I smiled when she finally replied.

“You make me do this.” She lifted her shoulders in a shrug.

“You’re not making sense,” I whispered against her skin.

She shivered.

“You. I left because of you. You have a son. You have a woman. You have a family. I didn’t like being there.” She cleared her throat and dropped the knife she was using to cut up the chicken. “You make me wish for things that’ll never be. It hurts to be around you.”

I inhaled deeply, then stepped back until our bodies were no longer touching.

I pulled the beer up to my lips, then drained it.

“You shouldn’t have left,” I whispered to her gratingly.

“Why?” she asked, perplexed.

“Because I didn’t want you to. I’ve been thinking about you since you were rescued.”

I hadn’t intended for those thoughts to ever leave the confines of my lips.

In fact, the last fucking thing in the world Raven needed right then was my fucked-up self in her life.

I’d always been trailer trash. A useless sack of bones—or so every single one of my high school teachers had informed me throughout my high school career.

The only thing that’d saved my life was enlisting in the Marines at the age of eighteen.

I’d met my wife the moment I got out of the Marines, ten years later, and had fallen in love with her—or the idea of her.

I should’ve never pursued her. Look where that got her. Six feet under, decomposing and feeding the worms due to my career choice.

I’d always been a selfish bastard, though.

Which was why I was about to do something the both of us might regret come morning.

My hand holding the beer can let it go, and it fell to the ground at our feet, clacking against the tiled floor like a shot resounding off the empty walls of a firing range.

Raven would’ve jumped and turned…if I’d let her.

Which I didn’t.

I held her still, immobile against the counter with not just my hands at her hips, but my pelvis against her backside.

“Wolf,” she whispered, panic starting to rise in her voice.

I placed my lips against the top of her head and inhaled deeply, taking in the hint of cucumbers and something else that I couldn’t quite place.

“Raven,” I whispered.

Backing up until a good four feet separated us, I waited for her to turn.

The moment she did, my breath caught in my throat.

My eyes ran up and down her body, taking everything in with one glance.

“Those shorts you were wearing earlier were fucking sexy as hell, but those jeans you somehow painted on are making it hard to breathe,” I told her, my eyes taking everything in at once.

She smiled timidly.

“These aren’t usually what I wear out,” she whispered. “Wolf…what are you doing? What are we doing here?”

I grinned at her.

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

She smiled softly, her face blushing a deep red before she shook her head and refused to answer.

“You don’t want to know what I want to do,” she challenged me, her eyes locking with mine. “You’d probably not appreciate it.”

“Try me,” I challenged her.

She licked her lips.

“I remember.”

My eyes slammed shut, and I shuttered at the remembrance of just what exactly she could ‘remember.’

“What do you ‘remember’?” I whispered gruffly.

Her eyes lifted from the contemplation of my chest, and she gasped for air.

“What you did for me. The night you found me. What you did. I remember. Everything,” she choked out.

My eyes closed, remembering the horror of seeing Raven that way, but also remembering how she felt in my arms as I carried her out of that nightmare.

Her eyes filled with tears as she relived the memories of that time.

“He tortured me. It wasn’t the same way as he tortured July, but he did it all the same,” she confirmed my worst fears.

“I sure as hell won’t ever forget that night,” I said gruffly.

She shook her head, refusing to give me any more information than what she already had.

I moved forward until there was only a breath separating her from me.

She leaned forward and rested her head against my chest, my heart thumping with the emotion of that night and this one.