Chapter Thirty
Lying flat on her front, Emberlyn shifted her leg slightly on the mattress. ‘I won’t be able to fall asleep if you keep doing that,’ she slurred without opening her eyes.
Positioned on his side next to her, Ripper nuzzled her shoulder – one he’d deliberately bared by tugging her collar aside. ‘Why not?’
‘Because having someone knead my ass is somewhat distracting.’
He palmed it possessively beneath her long shirt. ‘It’s mine. I should be able to stroke it whenever I want to.’
Dear Lord. ‘It’s not a pet, Rip.’
‘But it’s a part of my toy, and toys are meant to be played with.’
She let out a soft snort. ‘Just go to sleep.’
‘Answer a question for me first.’
Emberlyn opened her eyes to find his gaze fixed on her. ‘Shoot.’
‘Why don’t you ever ask me anything truly personal? I nose into your business – past and present – all the time.’
She didn’t detect any hurt in his voice, only curiosity.
Still, she snuck her hand out from under her pillow to brush her fingertips over his chin as she assured him, ‘It’s not because I’m not interested.
I just know that your past has to be extremely hard for you to talk about.
’ Painful, even. ‘I figured that if you ever felt comfortable telling me then you would.’
He traced the dimple on her butt cheek, having apparently memorized its exact location. ‘Ask whatever you want to know,’ he invited.
Emberlyn bit her lip, conflicted. She had lots of questions.
And she wanted him to know, to feel, that she hadn’t kept them to herself so far out of disinterest. But she was leery of hitting a hot button.
‘Okay, but if you don’t want to answer then you don’t have to – I won’t be pissed or anything.
’ She paused. ‘Do you remember the time you spent Rabid?’
He hesitated only briefly. ‘Not a single day of it. I can recall flashes of this and that, but they’re dreamlike.
They don’t feel real. What I most remember is the feeling of .
. . simplicity. Human emotions are absent – there’s only primal instincts and urges.
You’re not you. You’re not anyone. You have no past, no future. You just exist.’
‘What about what happened . . . before?’
His gaze turned a little inward. ‘I can vividly remember my father battling another wolf; remember seeing him die. I remember my mother’s scream – there was so much grief and fury in that sound.
Then she was soon after dead, and a battle broke out around us.
I saw Logan on the floor, bloody and still. I thought he was dead as well.’
Pausing, Ripper brushed his lips over her bare shoulder. ‘The next thing I remember is waking up in the Watcher’s unit with people hanging over me, saying it was good to have me back.’
Emberlyn blew out a breath. ‘It had to have felt like you’d skipped four years ahead in a matter of moments.’
Nodding, he snaked his hand further up her shirt and swept it halfway up her spine. ‘My body didn’t feel like mine. It was older. Different. So was my voice – it had broken by that point.’
‘That had to have been so weird.’
He grunted. ‘Everyone was smiling, glad I was me again. But I didn’t feel at all like me, and I was still mentally stuck in that moment where I’d lost my parents.
’ He smoothed his palm back down to her ass.
‘The only thing that stopped me from being overwhelmed by the grief, discomfort and rage was seeing Logan alive.’
‘But then you also felt guilty,’ she surmised.
His eyelids lowered slightly. ‘What makes you think that?’
It was an obvious assumption to make. ‘You’re super-duper protective. He’s your younger brother. You’d just learned you’d been gone four years and he’d been relatively alone all that time.’
After a few moments, Ripper closed his eyes. ‘Yeah, I felt guilty as shit.’ Sighing, he rubbed the back of his head. ‘Logan sensed it. Told me it was fucking stupid. He didn’t hold it against me that I left him.’
‘Because you didn’t leave him, Rip. You thought he was dead. Nobody chooses to turn Rabid—’
‘I almost did,’ said Ripper, opening his eyes.
Emberlyn felt her brow crease. ‘What?’
‘I felt the pull to go back to Bloodhill. Like a birdsong. It called day and night. More than once I almost gave into it.’
‘So you could go back to feeling nothing again,’ she reasoned. ‘Makes sense.’
His brows flicked together. ‘Does it?’
‘Your world had imploded. It had gone to shit with the death of your parents, which for you felt like something that happened two minutes ago . . . and then on top of all that you had to process you’d been missing for four years.
There was so much you needed to adjust to.
It’s only to be expected that there were times you wanted to escape it all.
‘You didn’t escape it, though, Rip. You stayed. You pushed through it. You thrived. I mean, you’re Alpha of your fucking clan. An Alpha who’s massively respected and whose clan is tight. So don’t give your fourteen-year-old self a hard time – he doesn’t deserve that.’
His gaze softened. ‘Maybe not. He died, though, Em. Jax Stone didn’t come back from Bloodhill. This version of me did. It was why I didn’t care when people started calling me Ripper soon after. I didn’t feel the same person I was before.’
She stroked his jaw again. ‘I like this version of you just fine.’
Swallowing, he ever so gently bumped his nose to hers. ‘I never told anyone else that I’d felt tempted to go back to Bloodhill.’
Her chest went tight. ‘Thank you for trusting me with it.’ It was as humbling as it was touching. ‘If someone had told me six months ago that there would come a day you would trust me with anything, I would have snorted and insisted they were high.’
He slipped his hand beneath the curtain of her hair to cover her nape, the warm weight of his palm like a brand. ‘Back then, I didn’t know you. I also didn’t want to want you,’ he admitted.
‘Oh, I know,’ she said, feeling her lips hitch up. ‘I wasn’t too crazy about the fact that I wanted you, either.’
‘Why not?’ he asked, clearly offended.
‘I didn’t believe that anything would ever come of it, so it was just annoying.’
‘If we hadn’t become allies, I wouldn’t have gotten to know you; wouldn’t be in your bed right now. That pisses me off. I should have seen before now that a lot of the rumors about you are just that – rumors.’
‘You had a blind spot when it came to witches who aren’t so well behaved,’ she pointed out.
‘It’s gone now.’ His finger lightly tapped her lip. ‘I see you.’
‘You do.’ She felt her nose wrinkle. ‘I’m not sure I like it.’
A smile blotted his gaze. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
Emberlyn only hmphed.
He whispered his lips over hers. ‘Sleep, baby.’
She let her eyes fall shut. ‘Night.’ She groaned when his hand roamed to her butt once more. ‘Seriously, give my ass some peace.’
‘Tried. Can’t.’
‘Can’t, or won’t?’ she challenged.
‘Both. I mean, it’s right there.’
She inwardly rolled her eyes. This was what she got for accepting an Alpha in her bed and life. She really only had herself to blame.
Stalking into the consultation room the following afternoon, Ripper found Emberlyn stood at the altar, her gaze on an open old text – a grimoire, maybe?
He couldn’t tell. And if he was honest, he wasn’t trying to figure it out, distracted by the sight of her in a tan, V-neck dress with matching strappy heels.
When he’d declared that he’d make lunch – well, they’d already established that he liked feeding her – she’d told him she’d ‘go work on some potions’ while she waited. The scents of various herbs were strong in the air, giving him an idea of what she’d so far thrown into her bubbling cauldron.
Casting a quick look at the cat curled up on the stool near the fireplace, Ripper set his hands on his hips. ‘The basement door is jammed.’
Emberlyn slowly flipped the page. ‘Why are you trying to get into the basement?’ she asked without looking at him, her tone a little absent.
‘I can hear noise coming from down there.’ As if small animals were skittering around and wrestling or something. ‘I want to check it out.’
‘No need.’ An airy response. ‘All is fine.’
‘I want to check.’
‘Don’t bother.’ Pale-hazel eyes briefly slid his way as she opened a drawer behind her. ‘It won’t let you in.’
‘It?’
‘The basement.’
‘How can it not—’ Cutting himself off, he shook his head. ‘I don’t understand this house sometimes.’ It seemed alive to some degree. And it was definitely haunted.
Honest to God, he’d opened a particular door upstairs when taking a wrong turn looking for the bathroom a few weeks back and that door had slammed in his face while someone – or something – inside the room had hissed in warning.
When he’d told Emberlyn, she’d simply said, ‘Yeah, you don’t want to go in that room.
Best to pretend it’s not even there.’ Then she’d gone back to sipping her tea while reading a book .
. . like it was no biggie that not only was she clearly not alone in this house, but the entities weren’t all harmless.
Right then, having fished a pair of snips out of the drawer, she began making her way to the window.
That easily, his irritation leached away because . . . ‘I swear, watching you walk is straight-up porn.’
Emberlyn blinked, stilling. ‘That’s one I haven’t heard before.’
‘Only because no guy has dared say it out loud.’ They’d all been thinking it – he’d put money on it.
She shot him a playfully prim look and snipped a leaf of a potted plant on the windowsill. ‘You do a lot of things other men haven’t dared do when it comes to me.’
‘You like that, though.’
She huffed but didn’t deny it. As she returned to the altar, she held her hands above the cauldron and rubbed her palms together, letting tiny bits of crushed leaf fall into the brew.
He walked to the altar and sniffed. ‘What are you making?’
‘Potions for insomnia.’