Chapter 13 An Unhelpful Development #3
Lucien inclined his head. “Efficient.”
He left.
Ian stood beside my chair, and I looked up at him.
“You can be angry,” I said quietly. “You just can’t use me as the excuse.”
His gaze lowered to mine. For a moment, the wolf receded enough that I saw the man beneath all that brutal control. Tired. Guilty. Listening.
“I don’t know how to want to kill him only for myself,” he said.
That was too honest.
I looked away first. “Work on that.”
“I am.”
Unfortunately, I believed him.
Lucien returned less than five minutes later with a cream envelope pinched between two fingers.
No blood. No shouting. No signs Grant had been introduced to a marble edge by Aunt Linda, which was disappointing but probably best for everyone.
Lucien handed the envelope to Ronan, and Ronan offered it to me.
The envelope had my name on it.
Cass, not Cassie.
The nickname looked obscene in his handwriting.
Grant’s note was written in the same clean, ornate script he used on anniversary cards, apology flowers, and once, memorably, a therapy worksheet where he had described my “fear of vulnerability” in blue-black ink.
Cass,
Seeing you hurt has shaken me more than I can explain. I know I do not have the right to say that, but I am tired of pretending this weekend has not stirred up things I thought I had buried.
When I saw you in that bed, I remembered us.
Not the fighting. Not the pain. The real parts.
The way you used to look at me when you were trying not to smile. The way you used to get sharp when you wanted me and didn’t want to admit it. The way your body knew mine before either of us needed words.
I should not be thinking about that now, I know that.
Tessa is good. She is sweet. She loves me in a way I know I should be grateful for.
But seeing you here, seeing you hurt, knowing I might have lost the chance to say anything honest to you, has made me question whether I mistook peace for love and comfort for desire.
There was always fire with us. Too much sometimes. Maybe that is why I ran from it. Maybe I convinced myself that what we had was damage because it frightened me to want someone with that much force.
I have not stopped thinking about your mouth. I know how that sounds. I know it is unfair. But almost losing you has stripped away a lot of the polite lies I have been telling myself.
If you feel even a fraction of what I felt when I saw you again, you know this is not finished.
I need to see you.
Alone.
G.
For a moment, I didn’t hear the ocean. I didn’t hear the hedges shifting in the wind or Ronan speaking low to Lucien. I didn’t hear Sava’s bag close or the distant murmur from the west side of the resort.
I heard Grant’s voice. Not as it had sounded when we were good. That was the trick. Men like Grant didn’t come back wearing horns. They came back wearing the voice that had once made you feel chosen.
He was using Tessa’s sweetness as a complaint, my injury as permission, and our old sex as a key he believed still fit the lock.
My hand tightened around the paper.
Behind me, Ian went very still. The bond had changed. Until then, Ian’s feelings had reached me in hard shapes. Guilt. Rage. Restraint. The wolf’s brutal need to guard. The constant pressure of a man trying not to become the worst thing in the room.
This was…different. It moved through me hot and dark, not scattered, not wild.
Jealousy.
Ian’s jealousy didn’t feel petty. It didn’t feel like Grant’s old territorial performances, his hand at the small of my back when another man laughed too hard at something I said, his questions afterward that made my friendliness sound like betrayal.
Ian’s jealousy felt like teeth under skin.
A locked jaw. A wolf staring at the scent of another man on something that had no right to come near my hands.
And underneath that, worse because it was quieter, was hurt.
Not romantic hurt, nothing so simple. A deep animal confusion that Grant could write about my mouth, my body, old fire, and still be breathing in the same world where Ian had nearly destroyed himself for touching my hand without permission.
The feeling hit so hard I looked up. Ian stood beside the chair, his face utterly controlled.
His eyes were not gold, which was the strangest part.
His eyes were dark and steady, but every line of him had gone murderous.
The tendons in his forearm stood out. His shoulders looked too broad for the civilized garden around us.
His mouth was firm, almost cruel in its restraint.
I had known he was attractive, in the abstract. The way a storm was impressive before it took your roof. But I had not let myself notice him as a man. Not really. Not with the bite burning under my skin and his wolf between us like a loaded gun.
Now the bond put his jealousy inside me, and my body noticed everything all at once.