Lover Unleashed

appeared to care about. And she had a feeling it was going to be a while before the leaking stopped—an inner artery had been nicked and this was the blood of his heart, spilling out of him, covering him.

“I’m so sorry,” she croaked. “I don’t know any of the whys . . . but I know that you didn’t deserve it. And . . . and it’s not your fault.”

His hands uncupped himself and he stared downward. It was a long while before he spoke, and when he did, his words were slow and considered . . . and as ceaseless as his quiet tears. “I wish I were whole. I wish I could have given you young if you’d wanted them and could conceive them. I wish I could have told you that it killed me when you thought I had been with anyone else. I wish I had spent the last year waking up every night and telling you I loved you. I wish I had mated you properly the evening you came back to me from the dead. I wish . . .” Now his shimmering stare flipped up to hers. “I wish I were half as strong as you are and I wish I deserved you. And . . . that’s about it.”

Right. Okay. Now they were both tearing up.

“I’m so sorry about Payne,” she said hoarsely. “I wanted to talk to you, but she’d made up her mind. I tried to work with her, I really did, but in the end, I just . . . I didn’t . . . I didn’t want you to be the one to do it. I would have rather lived with the horrible truth on my conscience for an eternity than have you kill your sister. Or have her hurt herself even more than she was.”

“I know . . . I know that now.”

“And to be honest, the fact that she is healed? It gives me the cold sweats because of the near miss we had.”

“It’s all right, though. She’s okay.”

Jane wiped her eyes. “And I think when it comes to . . .” She glanced over at the wall that was draped in a buttery yellow candlelight that did nothing at all to soften the sharp spikes and even sharper implications of what hung there. “When it comes to. . . things . . . about you and sex, I’ve always worried that I might not be quite enough for you.”

“Fuck . . . no . . . you’re everything to me.”

Jane put her hand over her mouth so she didn’t lose it completely. Because it was exactly what she needed to hear.

“I never even got your name in my back,” V said. “I thought it was stupid and a waste of time . . . but how can you feel like we’re mated without it—especially when every single male at the compound has been marked for his shellan?”

God, she hadn’t thought of that.

V shook his head. “You’ve given me space . . . to hang with Butch and fight with my brothers and do my shit on the Internet. What have I given you?”

“My clinic, for one thing. I couldn’t have built it without you.”

“Not exactly a bouquet of roses.”

“Don’t underestimate your carpentry skills.”

He smiled a little at that. And then grew serious once again. “Can I tell you something that I’ve thought every time I’ve woken up next to you.”

“Please.”

Vishous, the one who always had an answer for everything, seemed to get tongue-tied. But then he said, “You’re the reason I get out of bed every night. And you’re the reason I can’t wait to come home every dawn. Not the war. Not the Brothers. Not even Butch. It’s . . . you.”

Oh, such simple words . . . but the meaning. Good lord, the meaning.

“Will you let me hug you now?” she said roughly.

Her mate stretched out his massive arms. “How about I hold you instead?”

As Jane leaped forward and dived into him, she countered, “It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”

Instantly, she became fully corporeal without any effort at all, that magical internal chemistry between them calling her into being and holding her there. And as Vishous buried his face in her hair and shuddered like he had run a vast distance and was finally home . . . she knew exactly how he felt.

With his shellan flush against him, V felt like he’d been blown wide-open . . . and then stitched back together.

God, what Butch had done for him. For them all.

The route the cop had gone had been the right one. Horrific and terrible . . . but the absolute right one. And as V held his female now, his eyes searched the space where it had all gone down. Everything had been cleaned up . . . except for a pair of things that were out of place on the floor: a spoon and a glass that was mostly empty of what had to be water.

It had all been an illusion: Nothing had in fact cut him open. And how’d you like to bet Butch had left those two things front and center so that when V woke up and looked over, he’d know the means that had taken him to his end.

In retrospect, it seemed so fucking dumb . . . not the session with the cop, but the fact that V never really thought about the Bloodletter and those years in the war camp. The last time that piece of the past had come up at all had been when Jane had first been with him—and then it had only been because she’d seen him naked and he’d had to explain.

My father didn’t want me to reproduce.

That was pretty much all he’d had to say. And afterward, like a dead body that had rolled over faceup in still water, that shit had sunk down again, resettling on the sandy riverbed of the very core of him.

BJ, or Before Jane, he’d only ever had sex with his pants on. Not from shame—or at least that was what he’d told himself—but because he simply hadn’t been interested in going there with the anonymous males and females he’d fucked.

AJ? It had been different. Naked was more than cool, likely because Jane had kept a tight head at his revelation. And yet as he thought about it now, he’d always held her at arm’s length, even if she’d been in his arms. If anything, he’d been closer to Butch—but that was male-to-male, which was somehow less threatening than male-to-female.

Shades of Mommy issues, no doubt: After everything his mahmen had pulled, he simply couldn’t trust females like he could his brothers or his best friend.

Except Jane had never betrayed him. In fact, she’d been willing to battle her own conscience just to save him from the unspeakable act his twin had been demanding.

“You are not my mother,” he said into his shellan’s hair.

“Damn right.” Jane pulled back and looked him right in the eye—as was her way. “I never would have abandoned my son. Or treated my daughter that way.”

V took a long inhale, and when he let the oxygen out of his lungs, he felt like he was expelling the myths by which he’d defined himself . . . and Jane . . . and their mating.

He needed to change the paradigm.

For them. For himself. For Butch.

Christ, the expression on the cop’s face when things had been going down here had been beyond tragic.

So, yeah, it was time to stop using outside shit to self-medicate his emotions. The extreme sex and the pain had seemed like excellent solutions for a long time, but in reality, they had been concealer over a pimple: The ugliness had stayed within him.

What he had to do was deal with the inside crap so he didn’t need Butch or anyone else to break him down just so he could let things out. That way, the kink could truly be only for pleasure with Jane.

Check his shit out—looked like he was finally prepared to try a psychiatric version of Proactiv.

Next thing he knew he was going to be on TV, staring into a camera and saying, “All it takes is a little dab of Self-awareness . . . and then I rinse with the patented Defining Yourself Wash, and my mind and emotions are clean and glowing—”

Okay, now he was really losing his damn marbles, true.

Stroking Jane’s soft hair, he murmured, “About . . . the things I have here. If you’re game, I’m still going to want to play . . . if you know what I mean. But from now on, it’s just for fun, and only for you and me.”

Hell, they’d had a shitload of good, leathered-up, freaky sex in this place, and he was always going to want