J.R. Ward the Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8 - J. R. Ward [523]
As he took form in front of the apartment building, he thought of the night he had gone to find her after her father’s death. He’d been a reluctant, unsuitable savior, tasked by his friend’s last will and testament to see her through her transition—when she hadn’t even known what she was.
His first approach hadn’t gone well, but the second time he’d tried to talk to her? That had gone very well.
God, he wanted to be with her again like that. Naked skin on naked skin, moving together, him deep inside of her, marking her as his.
But that was a long way off, assuming it ever even happened again.
Wrath walked around to the backyard; his shitkickers were quiet, his shadow large on the frosty ground beneath his feet.
Beth was huddled on a rickety picnic table he’d once sat on himself, and she was staring into the apartment straight ahead just as he had when he’d come for her. Cold wind blew her dark hair around, making it seem as if she were underwater and swimming amid strong currents.
His scent must have carried over to her, because her head snapped around. As she looked at him, she sat up straighter and kept her arms locked around the North Face parka he’d bought her.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“Marissa told me where you were.” He glanced at the apartment’s sliding glass door, then back at her. “Mind if I join you?”
“Ah…okay. That’s fine.” She shuffled over a little as he came to her. “I wasn’t going to be here long.”
“No?”
“I was going to come see you. I wasn’t sure when you were going out to fight and thought maybe there was time before…But then, I don’t know, I…”
As she let the sentence drift, he got up on the table beside her, the supports squeaking as the thing accepted his heft. He wanted to put an arm around her, but hung back and hoped the parka was doing its job to keep her warm enough.
In the silence, words buzzed in his head, all of them of the apologetic variety, all of them bullshit. He’d already said he was sorry, and she knew he meant it, and it was going to be a long time before he stopped wishing there were more he could do to make it up to her.
On this cold night, as they sat suspended between their past and their future, all he could do was sit with her and stare at the darkened windows of the apartment she had once lived in…back before fate had put them together.
“I don’t remember being especially happy in there,” she said softly.
“No?”
She swept her hand across her face, clearing wisps of hair from her eyes. “I didn’t like coming home from work and being there alone. Thank God for Boo. Without that cat? I mean, TV only does so much for a person.”
He hated that she had been on her own. “So you don’t wish you could go back?”
“Christ, no.”
Wrath exhaled. “I’m glad.”
“I was working for that leering asshole, Dick, at the paper, doing the jobs of three people, getting nowhere because I was a young woman and the good old boys didn’t have a club—they were in a cabal.” She shook her head. “But you know what the worst of it was?”
“What?”
“I was living with this sense that there was something going on, something important, but I didn’t know what it was. It was like…I knew the secret was there, and it was a dark one, but I just couldn’t reach it. Nearly drove me mad.”
“So finding out you weren’t just a human was—”
“These last months with you have been worse.” She looked over at him. “When I think back over the fall…I knew something was wrong. In the back of my mind, I knew it, I could absolutely sense it. You stopped coming to bed regularly, and if you did, it wasn’t to sleep. You couldn’t settle. You didn’t really eat. You never fed. The kingship always stressed you, but these last couple of months have been different.” She went back to staring at her old apartment. “I knew it, but I didn’t want to face the reality that you might actually be lying to me about something