Chapter 26
26
MARI
The man I loved hurt after the death of his friend, and he refused to let me help him. He’d barely spoken to anyone except for Miller since Brandon had bled all over the cabin floor that night. When he came back… we all saw a part of Robe I knew he’d never want exposed. The man had too much pride and ego invested in his infallible status. That didn’t mean I’d back down. I simply had to find a way around his stubbornness.
I slipped my arms around Robe’s waist. “Take me for a walk?” I knew he wouldn’t let me go alone, and today I didn’t want to be without him.
His spine stiffened. “Will can take you.”
“No,” I murmured firmly, squeezing around his stomach as I pressed my head to his back. “I need you. Please.”
His head turned to one side as he scanned the inside of the cabin without speaking. Blood still stained the scrubbed futon, though Alan and I had managed to remove all other remnants of Gideon’s violence from the house. I knew they had plans to burn the evidence. We just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
Miller and Jon were nowhere to be seen. Alan left for the city a day ago. Will sat at the small kitchen table, eating cereal for lunch while staring at the wall.
“All right,” Robe conceded. He unwound my hands from his waist, turning to face me. The lines in his face had deepened in the wake of his tragedy. “Where do you want to go?”
My heart still burned with the vision of Brandon’s body tucked between the two large men while they tried to save a life taken by another.
“Will showed me a waterfall,” I said shyly, thinking back to our afternoon in the meadow, lying side by side. “I thought maybe we could see where the river goes, if that’s… safe?”
Robe stilled, then nodded. “It’s safe. We’ll be back in a few hours.”
Will raised his free hand in a thumbs-up, still eating from the spoon in the other.
“Thank you,” I whispered, finding my hand enclosed in Robe’s. “Can we go now?”
“May as well.”
He drew me out the door after bundling me in boots, a scarf, and a thick jacket that looked like it might belong to Miller. A beanie plopped onto my head, and he fussed, tugging it over my ears until he smirked at me. I held up floppy arms in the borrowed jacket, and Robe folded the sleeves back to create bulky wristbands. It fit, kind of, if I slouched into the excess of puffy material. I followed him along the same trail Will and I had taken on our picnic, though instead of the high path where the trail split toward the waterfall, we took the lower fork.
The dappled light deepened as we walked. A late chill obliterated the warmth I’d misperceived from my sheltered spot inside the kitchen. It swept over me, seeping upward from the ground instead of the frigid wind’s tendrils that made their way beneath my borrowed jacket and assaulted my cheeks.
The forest closed around us until the spaces merged between the trunks. Robe stopped where the evergreen foliage crisscrossing above us broke off, exposing a curve in the river’s bend. The water twisted, flowing in a declined stage before it tumbled over the edge a second time. I bumped into him and then stepped around to stand by his side, watching the water rush along its busy path.
“How are you feeling?” I asked, tracking a stray leaf that tumbled along, refusing to float on the top like anything in a bid for survival. The leaf bobbed, disappearing for a moment before resurfacing farther down.
“You brought me out here to ask how I’m feeling?” Robe turned sideways toward me, his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets.
I shrugged. “I thought you might answer me if we were away from the house.”
He snorted. “You don’t know me very well.”
I raised both eyebrows and faced him in full, ignoring the beauty of the river for a moment. “You brought the body of a man you loved all the way down the hill after looking after him as he died in your arms three nights ago, then disappeared into the night and sought vengeance for his passing. And you haven’t said a single word about it since. No one has.” I watched him, pleased when he didn’t look away. “I could put money on the assumption that if I don’t ask you how your mental health has been since you tried to commit murder, no one else will. Am I wrong?” I challenged him.
Robe considered me, drawing one hand from his pocket to skate his fingertips over my cheek, tucking my hair behind my ear. “No. You’re not wrong.” He paused for a second and stepped a little closer. “Are you going to ask if I killed him?”
I blinked. “You’re avoiding my question.” My heart hammered a wild staccato in my chest.
“So are you.” He coiled my hair around his fingers, bringing me closer. “I didn’t, though not for lack of trying. Blackthorne still breathes. For now.”
“Thank you,” I whispered. I heard the words Brandon had uttered before he died. We all did. “I’m glad you came back safe.”
Something had happened to put him off his goal. Robe didn’t strike me as a man who gave up on a task without resentment over his failure. Either Gideon was gone, or something had reduced his ability to carry out the vengeance he sought that still burned dark in his eyes when he returned.
Either way, relief swamped me.
He hadn’t died or been the one the boys had dragged into the house, unconscious and bleeding. I’d seen enough of that since arriving in the cabin to last five lifetimes.
Robe hummed, dipping his head. “I like having you in my home, Mari Merripen, with your British accent riling up my boys. I like what you make me feel too. It makes… everything worthwhile.”
I stared as he lifted his gaze, focusing on something I couldn’t see. He was so damn complicated, all soft edges and hard muscle underneath, or maybe he reversed that and twisted those characteristics around. The forest shifted around us with renewed life, so different from the haunted stillness I tore through in muted desperation months ago. Bird noises filled the silence, reminding me we weren’t alone.
“Did he kiss you?” Robe asked abruptly. “Will, when he brought you out here.”
I paused, recalling the way he’d arced over me, his fingers on my pulse. Strawberries . He’d been so damn close.
“No.”
Robe nodded. His gaze dropped to my mouth, and he pulled me into him until my world filled with his leather-and-smoked-whiskey scent. I sighed when he curved his hand around my jaw, tipped my head back, and covered my mouth with his.
His kisses were usually rough, but this time he gave me a chance to catch my breath and hold it rather than steal it away. My head still swam at his closeness, his mouth gentle against mine, offering gratitude. I kissed him back, letting my tongue seek him out, rather than the other way around. My sighs were lost in the whispering brook as he held me close, wrapped in his arms until the light changed and dusk fell.
Then he walked me back to the cabin with one arm wrapped around me the entire time, as though he would never let me go.
* * *
I woke beside the ghosts of two of the most extraordinary men I’d ever met. The large bed grew too big, too empty without them in it, and I took no luxury in spreading my arms out to either side. Jon spent the night with me, though I recalled a brief kiss from Robe when I opened my eyes at dawn to find him gone.
My legs ached. Fluid soaked my thighs, reminding me of the mini orgy I participated in the night before. Rather than embarrassment, my cheeks flamed with the need to feel Robe inside me again, and soon. Jon’s hands playing with my body, easing each fragment of anxiety as it arose, blew me away but felt so right at the same time.
When I emerged from Robe’s room for breakfast the day after I’d decided not to count sunrises and sunsets anymore, five sets of eyes stared at me, and I knew something more than our nocturnal activities had changed overnight.
Alan placed a mug of tea in one of my hands and a piece of toast in the other. He bent to kiss my forehead, then the corner of my mouth, unshed tears glistening in his sapphire eyes.
Shock bounced off my tarnished armor as I stared around the room. Will wouldn’t look at me, and even Miller’s glare had decreased its usual degree of animosity.
“What’s going on?” I inhaled the black chai that Alan seemed to favor, its aromatics a calming agent as a familiar dose of panic edged in to haunt me yet again, and managed a single sip.
Robe crossed the room to stand in my space, much as he had that first day. Instead of a shot of arousal that set endorphins roaming free in my body, trepidation curled there.
“I need you to tell me who hurt you, and who you are—were—to him.”
But he already knows.
I blinked. My secret was the unspoken truth we’d lived with these last months. I could say the words, but caution at his harsh tone stalled me. Whatever had passed between us the night before made zero impact on the stone sentinel standing before me now.
I held to my prior conviction, my chest rising with shallow, rapid breaths. “I can’t tell you.”
I got past this. You bastard, you healed me. Don’t throw me back into that void.
Robe plucked the tea and toast from my fingers. I gaped as he leaned over me, broad arms braced on either side of my body, caging me against the bar top. A frisson spiked through me at the return to day one, like he’d just stripped away every inch of the trust and love we developed.
What I gave to him and every man here.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
Apparently he decided on his lonesome that the time for slow movements and gentle touches was done. An emotion that had nothing whatsoever to do with panic built in my throat, threatening to overwhelm me.
“Tell me, Mari,” he growled.
“Why?” I whispered, inhaling the scent of him, tucking it away in my memory. After all this time, why?
We both knew who’d hurt me. I didn’t need to say it, didn’t want to fall back into that darkness they helped me escape. My breath hitched, and I knew.
They were sending me away.
Not home, because I didn’t have one of those, not anymore. No, he couldn’t send me home…
Because home was here. With him. With them all.
A hot flush prickled over my skin in a shiver that went straight to my heart when I could have sworn that it would never work again. My time here had meant so much more to me than the best sex of my life. When I arrived in the house, I thought I wouldn’t be able to have that again either.
A sense of loss swept over me, but Robe’s voice anchored me to the present.
“Because I want to know I’m going to kill the right man for you.” His rasp slid over me in a sinful, beguiling caress. His gaze darkened, filled with the heavy promise of his words.
He meant it.
And I didn’t know what that meant to me.
My mind flitted back to the hands pawing at me, fingers pinching and pulling, tearing unknown secrets from my body and then trashing them alongside the remnants of my dignity as the pinches became slaps and the pulls became beatings.
The shiver evolved into a rage of tremors that racked my body.
Somewhere above me, Robe swore. His arms wrapped around my shoulders, crushing me into the safety of his chest, but it only served to exchange one cage for another.
I squeezed my eyes shut, reliving each moment over and over, my nights with Robe and Jon colliding into my past. Breath pulsed from my lips in an uncontrollable rhythm. Nothing made it into my lungs as I pushed at him, desperate for control.
Alan dancing with me around the bar.
Will’s peace in the forest, a palmful of sweet offerings and dark promises.
Miller teaching me to knock Robe on his ass for the first time.
But the memories that had become a mantra now failed me. Invisible hands plucked at my body, filling my head with their harsh words?—
Jon’s steady hands on my body.
Robe’s mouth on mine as he slid inside me.
The fight to reclaim my treasured memories as my own and keep them separate from the mess of before bent my body double of its own accord. I retched my single mouthful of Alan’s lovely black tea onto the cabin’s floorboards.
Voices murmured above me. Familiar hands, kind ones, not the hooked claws of my nightmare memories, stroked damp hair back from my face. A warm cloth cleaned my cheeks. Cool water pressed to my lips as I straightened.
The glass trembled in my grip, water sloshing to either side in its effort to escape its enclosure. Enormous hands folded around mine in the gentlest touch, their firm grip dropping a blanket of calm over me. I stared up into Jon’s golden gaze, all too aware of Robe’s presence at my back.
Rage and calm.
Safety and sweetness.
The two enormous men crowded my space, but rather than eliciting new fears from my addled brain, their combined presence soothed me.
Fully letting go of my fears for the first time, I leaned back into Robe’s arms and smiled at Jon. “Thank you.” I sipped the water, then swirled it around my mouth to remove the sharp tang of a shattered life that remained.
Alan passed me a bowl of chocolate mints with one hand while cleaning up my mess with a rag held in the other.
“You don’t have to do that,” I protested, grabbing for the cloth.
“Mari, let me,” Alan murmured.
His tone, devoid of his usual contagious excitement, stopped me. Something more than our friendship lingered in his eyes, a gentle warning not to push. I bit my lip and nodded.
Jon released my fingers to bring his to my cheek, making sure the motion remained within my view the entire time. He traced over my cheekbones, trailing where we both knew the faintest echoes of bruises once blossomed beneath my skin, even if they had healed months ago now. Long fingers stroked the length of my throat and back, concern filling his amber eyes.
I held his gaze and inched my way forward to press my cheek into his open palm. Fire lit in his face, and I reveled in his approval. Jon lifted my hair to tuck a flyaway strand behind my ear.
Robe’s arms slid around my waist, pulling me back to him. “You know we share everything here, Mari,” he murmured, his lips brushing my ear. “And we want you, need to protect you. Even if you don’t want… all of us yet.”
But you will.
The unspoken promise hovered between us, winding around everyone in the house in a bond deeper than any I had ever experienced.
Movement shuffled in my periphery as I became aware of three more sets of eyes feasting on the vision of us connected. Every one of them held desire in his face, all aimed at me. And Robe. And Jon.
Even Miller, though his ever-present anger raged beneath the surface of his forced blank expression, a facade that he thought hid his roiling turmoil but actually exposed his need at the same time, even when he hated himself all the more for the perceived weakness.
I should have run from him. Robe. From them all, once upon a time. Now. My past and present mashed together in a heady swirl that left me swaying on my feet. I should have torn from his arms, screaming bloody murder. I should have protected my abused, healed body with my fists and all the skills Miller had instilled in me, one bruise at a time.
I did none of those things.
The weight of their need spun the room in a dizzying maelstrom. Robe’s shoulders curved around my smaller frame. I sank into him and smiled deliriously at Jon, the glass slipping from my grip to shatter at my feet. My body followed in a graceful collapse as my knees buckled.
Two pairs of arms encompassed me, and I let myself fall.