She gave herself another gift: she leaned forward and kissed him back, touching his lean cheek with light, tentative fingers, and let herself trust in him.
He pulled back and growled softly, “Okay, Alice, fair warning. That’s as good as I’m ever going to get. You should know, most of the time I’m actually a bit of a shit.”
She shocked herself by bursting out laughing.
He gave her a lopsided grin. “Go get ready for bed,” he told her. “I’m going to get my kit. I’ll be right back.”
She watched him walk to the door. When he unlocked it and made as if to walk out just in his t-shirt, she asked, “Aren’t you going to put on your coat?” The temperature outside had to be subzero by now.
The glance he shot at her was icy pale but burning hot. “I could use a blast of cold air right now.”
Her breath shuddered in her throat.
Me, she thought. He means because of me.
He pulled open the door. As he went out a sword-like thrust of wind screamed into the apartment. She shot off the couch and retreated to the relative warmth and privacy of her bathroom.
After inspecting her hollow-eyed face in the bathroom mirror, she brushed her teeth and took a quick five-minute shower to wash away the grime of the city. Her lemon-yellow, thigh-length nightgown and dark blue robe hung from a hook on the bathroom door. She slipped them on and walked out of the bathroom.
Fifteen feet away in the living room, a white-blond wolf lay facing the bathroom door with his head on his paws.
She lost her breath.
He was enormous, easily twice the size of a mundane wolf, heavily muscled across the chest and rib cage with long, strong, powerful-looking legs. His eyes were the same icy pale blue as they were when he was in his human form. As she stared at the wolf, his tail waved gently. Despite his ferocious appearance and intimidating size, somehow he managed to seem diffident.
Gideon said in her head, I thought it might be a good idea for you to meet the wolf this way before you went to bed. I don’t want to scare you if you get up in the middle of the night. I don’t have to stay this way if it’s not all right.
All right? He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, and the most dangerous. She fell to her knees and held out a hand. “You’re gorgeous,” she told the wolf. “You couldn’t be more perfect.”
The wolf’s eyes brightened. He stood—good night, he kept going up and up—and padded over slowly. She realized he was giving her time to change her mind.
She didn’t change her mind. As soon as he came close enough to touch, she ran a light hand over his thick pelt. It felt soft and luxuriant, even springy under her palm. He side-stepped closer, nosed at her hand and licked her fingers with such open affection, she laughed again in surprised delight.
She gave herself another gift, threw caution out the window and hugged him. She felt the careful shift in his body as he leaned against her just a little, not too much, and he put his head on her shoulder. She rubbed her face in his fur. He threw off heat like a radiator. His big, warm presence filled places inside of her she hadn’t known were empty.
“Thank you for staying,” she whispered.
I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, he said quietly. He nuzzled her. Go to bed now. You’re safe.
Something coiled tight inside of her unwound. She sagged against his powerful, sturdy body and nodded. Then she climbed to her feet, passed her hand over the wolf’s head in one last caress, and went into her shadowed room to climb into bed.
Exhaustion swirled around her as her head hit the pillow. She heard quiet sounds as Gideon moved through the apartment, and she knew he was checking the windows and doors.
She thought the wolf might have padded into her room to touch the index finger of her out-flung hand with his cold nose, but she might have been dreaming at that point. In her dream, the wolf rested his head on the edge of the bed and gazed at her with a devotion she would have believed impossible before that day. Then someone turned out all the lights in her head, and she slept.
Waking wasn’t a good experience. It came hard and fast. She surfaced out of a nightmare with the chill of clammy skin and the wicked whiplash of wind snapping just outside her bedroom window.
She had kicked off all her covers and curled into a tight ball. She forced her muscles to unclench. She rolled to look over the edge of the bed at the floor. No wolf. Of course he wasn’t there. He would be in front of the fire, where he said he would be.
The blurry letters on her bedside clock read 3:23 am. The room felt empty and cold, the shelter from the storm all too insubstantial. Her nightmare had been full of dark, wet knives, and she missed him. She just missed him.
She didn’t give herself time to fight the impulse. She slipped her glasses on her nose, grabbed the top blanket as she climbed out of bed and walked into the living room.
There she found everything in the world. Warmth and light from the fire flickered over the massive body of the wolf that lay on the floor stretched out on his side. His clothes were folded in a neat pile nearby, his holstered gun resting on top. His half-closed eyes shifted but he held still as she lay down on the floor behind him. She set her glasses on the nearby coffee table, dragged the blanket around her and curled shivering against the wolf’s broad, warm back.
Gideon’s mental voice rumbled quietly in her head. Bad dream?
“Yeah,” she whispered. She rubbed her face in his fur.
The powerful muscles in his back tensed. Is it all right if I change?
She nodded. “I can’t remember the last nightmare I had,” she said. “I’m not usually a needy person—”
Hush, sweetheart.
The wolf rolled on to his stomach. He shimmered into the change. Whatever else she had meant to say flew out of her head as Gideon’s massive, nude human body lay stretched out before her. Gold light played over the broad muscles of his long back and spilled into the graceful hollow of his lower spine, his buttocks and strong, heavy thighs. He was lean everywhere, the taut covering of his tanned skin rippling over the flex of thick muscle and fluid shift of bone as he came up on his elbows to look at her.
The expression on his hard, lean face was serious, concerned. Her throat closed on a lump as he rolled over and gathered her against his chest. “I’m glad you’re not a needy person,” he murmured. His voice rumbled against her cheek. “But I want you to need me. Don’t apologize or prevaricate. Just need me.”
“It’s so scary,” she breathed. “When I ate lunch yesterday, I didn’t know you existed.”
He cradled her head in one hand and leaned over her. His pale gaze glittered like aquamarines. “Yesterday is gone. Who we are to each other today and who we will be tomorrow—those are the things that matter.”
She read the lines and marks on his harsh face with the tips of her fingers, and stroked down the long, strong column of his throat. A heavy, hard length grew against her thigh, and it felt strange and new, but at the same time so familiar and necessary.
She looked at him in naked bewilderment. “I don’t understand how any of this happened,” she said, through trembling lips. “We haven’t even kissed yet. I mean, we have, but not really.”
A fine tremor ran through the big hand that cradled her head and his face flushed with raw, sensual hunger. He closed his eyes and growled, “Your last few days have been so hellish. I’m trying to be so goddamn careful and give you what you need—”
She touched his mouth in wonder. She thought, I dreamed that a wolf came to my bed and watched over me while I slept. There was an epic story in those silent eyes, of mountains that had been crossed and a world that had been fought, and countless years that had been spent in service and in solitude. And there was a promise in that wolf’s eyes, a promise from an old warrior soul that knew what it meant to dig down deep and hold true to what he claimed no matter what.
She heard herself ask, “Did you come into my bedroom earlier?”
I dreamed a dream of passion,
devotion and loyalty, and a promise that meant everything—
The shaking in his hands increased. He whispered against her fingers, “Just to make sure you were okay. Whatever you want, whatever you need. Tell me and I’ll give it to you.”
Everything.
And for one shining moment, her world became simple and clean and good again.
“I need you,” she said.
She felt the breath leave his body. His eyes opened, and the expression in them blazed. How she could have ever thought those pale blue eyes were icy, she would never know. They burned with a pure, steady flame.
Her hands slipped away from his face as he brought his mouth down on hers, and the warm impact of his lips caused her eyes to flutter shut. She was cradled from behind and caressed from above, and all the while she knew that the heavy, hard weight of him hovered over her, balanced for the moment but ready to fall. Her hands landed on the heavy, wide arc of his collarbones and slipped down the expanse of his pectorals, while her mouth formed a soft ‘o’ of surprise for how good it was, how incredibly good—
—and he took that as his invitation to slip inside. He curled his tongue between her lips with a sensual gentleness that spoke of infinite care and deep emotion.
She learned something from his kiss and took it to heart. This man felt things he never spoke of verbally. Instead he said them with his body and his eyes, his mouth and his hands, and in that moment as she kissed him back, she made a silent promise to him to learn the language he spoke so that she heard everything he had to say to her.
Then his language changed and became harder, more demanding. He spoke of need too, as he drove his hardened tongue into her mouth and shoved a heavy thigh between her legs. His massive body became a silent shout of urgency. He rocked his hips against hers, massaging the hot length of his cock against the arc of her pelvis, and the shudder of his breath blasted against her cheek as he cupped one of her breasts and fingered her erect, aching nipple through the thin nightgown.
She caught fire. It ran shining like liquid mercury through her veins. She arched into his touch and groaned as she gripped the back of his head. Her hands slipped against the short corn silk of his pale hair.
“Tell me to stop, sweetheart,” he muttered against her cheek. “Just say the word if we’re going too fast.”
His body said something else though, as he ground harder against her.
It said, please, please.
She stroked the wide arc of his back as she whispered in his ear, “You are my mate. I could never say no to you.”
His head reared back. He stared at her in astonishment.
For one terrible moment, dread darkened her vision and her heart gave a sickened lurch. She thought, I cannot be so wrong. I cannot live with it if I am so deluded.
The joy that came over his face was so incandescent, it blinded her. “That’s what it means,” he said. “True north.”
She broke into a bout of reactive shivering. “What?”
He leaned on one elbow to caress her face. “When I looked at you for the first time, the world changed. It all but knocked me off my feet. I’ve been thinking it was like true north had shifted, the magnetic pull from the one direction you use in navigation, but it’s more like the primary force from your card spread. I’ve been trying to figure out what it meant. All I knew was that it was you—you had become my true north, my primary force. Just like that, from one moment to the next.”
She closed her eyes and swallowed hard as the world came back into focus. “Yes, that’s what happened to me too.”
He bent down to nuzzle her neck. “It reminds me of a quote from a French philosopher. ‘The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.’ Do you know it?”
She wound her arms around his neck, and she let her frightened heart find ease and grow full of him. “I do now.”
I dreamed a dream of incomparable rarity and loveliness.
Then I woke to find it true.
Chapter Six
Sacrifice
Gideon stared at the woman in his arms. She was so gorgeous it took his breath. He had thought her beauty was understated and intelligent, but right at that moment she was so flagrant with color and voluptuousness he could only gaze at her in passionate awe.
Her cocoa-and-cream skin turned a deep rich gold in the light of the fire, and her vivid eyes shone blue and green. Those fabulous gold-tipped corkscrew curls spilled extravagantly over his hands, and her pale yellow nightgown moved like silk against his overheated skin. Her breasts were full and generous, and the dark areola of her erect nipples pushed against the thin material.
He imagined watching her grow older, a pale sprinkling of frost touching those curls, the laugh lines growing at the corners of her eyes and that delicate, sensitive mouth. The images in his imagination drew him at a fundamental level. She could only become lovelier to him as he grew to know her with the intimacy of the passing years.
He bent his head and caressed the slender arc of her golden neck with his lips. He felt the sigh of pleasure that shuddered through her, the sexy shift of her body molding to fit his, and oh holy gods, he was the one who did that to her, great hulking brute that he was. The wonder of it closed his throat.
He knew too much about how to kill and hardly anything about how to live in peace. Hell, he hardly knew how to stay indoors for any length of time. She was too good for him, too refined. She put cloth napkins on her table, read books of poetry, and taught small children. The quilts she created were works of art that nurtured the soul.
He put bullets in clips to load his guns, and read files on unsolved crimes and treatises on war. He taught recruits how to wait, how to obey orders, and how to kill, and he played chess because it was a battle of wits that kept his mind sharp.
He put his forehead to her breast. His hands fisted in her nightgown.
He needed to come home but he didn’t know how. He hadn’t even known where home was until he looked in her face for the first time. He needed to be welcomed, but he wasn’t sure he deserved it.
She had fled her bedroom and her nightmare with a look of surprised horror. But he knew the nightmare she’d had. That nightmare was an old acquaintance of his. The details might change, along with the faces of the victims, but the story remained the same. It was a tale of a fire so dark it burned the soul black.
He was that nightmare for some people.
She stroked his hair. “Gideon?”
Christ, now he was responsible for putting that uncertainty in her voice, right at the time when she should be drenched in the knowledge of how lovely, how desirable he found her. He struggled to tell her something, anything, to let her know it could never be anything wrong with her. It was all about what was wrong with him.
He whispered, “I want to be a good man.”
Her hands stilled. Then she brought them under his jaw to coax his head up. She searched his expression, her beautiful gaze troubled. “Why would you think you’re not a good man?” she asked in a gentle voice.
“I’ve spent almost a hundred years in the army,” he said, his voice strangled. “I’ve seen things. I’ve done things you can’t imagine. I don’t ever want you to be able to imagine them. You deserve someone so much better than me, someone finer who knows how to live your life.”
“How do you know you’re not that man?” she asked. She reached up to kiss him, the delicate curve of her lips caressing his. “The heart has its reasons, remember?”
A tremor ran through his body. “You don’t know, you don’t understand.”
“You’re right, I don’t,” she told him.
Alice stroked his face and passed a hand down the broad expanse of his back, trying to soothe him. This was the same distress that shook through him earlier at the dining table. It was hard to watch him suffer, especially when she wasn’t sure he realized how much he was hurting. “I can’t possibly understand.”
“I chose it,” he said. “I thrived in the army. I was good at it.”
r /> He would have been. She could see it. Strong, responsible, stable, reliable as the earth. He would have been the first in battle and the last to pull out, and the need for all of that would have been so self-evident to him, he never would have seen it as sacrifice. True nobility never recognized itself.
She might have acknowledged him as her mate yesterday, but it was in that moment that she fell in love with him.
She said, “I am a person of faith, Gideon. It got rocked a little yesterday, but it is back on solid ground now. I do not believe that we would be mates without also being right for each other. The fates or the gods, or whomever it was that created the Wyr to be what we are, would not have been so cruel.”
He muttered, “I don’t have your faith. Not after all the atrocities and ugliness I’ve seen. Wickedness and inequities exist; nightmares are real. And the gods allow all of it.” He met her gaze. “But I do know one thing—you’re the purest gift I’ve ever been given, and I’ll do anything to keep you safe and be worthy of you.” He closed his eyes and turned his face into her palm.
She bit her lip. She could almost see the barrier that surrounded him. He wanted and needed to be with her, but somehow he was still closed off, and she knew she had not quite gotten through to him, not all the way, not yet.
Maybe it would just take time to let the reality of what had happened to them sink in. But maybe…
“You’ve got to remember, we met when I was having a really off day,” she told him. “Because most of the time I’m actually a bit of a shit, too.”
His startled gaze snapped up to hers, twin aquamarines frozen in the firelight. She flicked a finger at his nose and rolled her hips at him.
The corners of his sexy mouth began to curl up. He came on top of her more fully, and she parted her legs, knees bent to cradle him with her whole body. It was so good to feel him grip her by one thigh and anchor her down that she moistened for him in a liquid gush. The heavy length of his cock lay against her entrance. He pressed at the place where she was so sensitive she could feel his erection pulse, and she knew in that moment the invisible barrier was gone and he was right there with her, body and soul.