ROMANCE: Mason (Bad Boy Alpha Male Stepbrother Romance Boxset) (New Adult Contemporary Stepbrother Romance Collection) (172 page)

He didn’t answer me again. I was getting frustrated. The anger bubbled up inside of me like a thick liquid, and I nearly choked on it. My eyes started burning and silently I cursed myself for being weak enough to cry about it. I didn’t want to cry about it. I didn’t want to cry in front of him, when he was so obviously in control of his emotions.

“We used to talk about a family, Reid. We used to dream of having kids, of having a future together. I knew when I married you that I wasn’t going to see you all the time. It’s a sacrifice I was willing to make. But I didn’t think that—“ I cut myself off because my throat had swollen shut. Tears spilled over my cheeks and I looked down at the floor.

“I didn’t think that I would never see you. You don’t even come home to me, let alone one day when we have children. If we ever have children. You don’t even want to touch me anymore.”

I looked up at him, giving him a chance to talk to me, but he still didn’t. I threw my hands up in the air and let out a sound that was lodged somewhere between a groan and a scream.

“And that in there?” I said, pointing in the general direction of the office buildings. “I don’t even know what the hell that was. I thought I knew you. I thought you had some sort of code of conduct, some sort of ethics, and you were ready just to kill someone.” If he wasn’t going to speak I was going to keep going enough for the both of us. My voice was raising, and I could feel the last control slip away. “I get that you kill on the battle field. But that’s murder.”

The word burned my mouth on the way out. I watched Reid, watched the aftermath of my words play out on his face. He looked shocked at first, and then his face changed, something between rage and disbelief.

“I don’t know how to live with that person, Reid,” I said, and the truth of what I was saying hit me at about the same time they hit him. I was surprised at what had come out of my mouth, but I knew it was true. “I can’t do this anymore,” I said softly, not looking at him. Because the truth was I couldn’t. I’d lived through a lot of days alone.

Reid took a breath and jammed his hands into his hair, making it stand up in tufts between his fingers. He paced the kitchen, holding onto his head like it was going to fall off, looking like he was fighting with something deep inside himself. I didn’t know what he was struggling so much with, I was the one that had just found out that the man I’d married was capable of ordering the death of a child without a trial.

But Reid really looked like he was struggling, wrestling with something unseen. I kept a close watch on his body, his muscles, his eyes, but there was no wolf threatening to rip out of him. It was different this time than it had been earlier. Whatever he was fighting with was solely human.

“Look,” he said finally. “I don’t know how to talk to you.”

I gaped at him, mouth opening and closing but I couldn’t find the words to say. When he saw my face, saw how it could have come across, he held up his hands, palms toward me, in defense.

“I mean, I don’t know how to tell you.”

“Tell me what?” I asked, feeling like he’d ripped the rug from underneath me and the topic I’d though we were one wasn’t really the topic we’d been talking about. Reid took a deep breath.

“I haven’t been completely honest with you.”

My head spun. What was he talking about? What could he be hiding for me? I laughed at my own thought, a manic kind of laugh. I was tripping out. He wasn’t home for most of the year, of course he could lie to me. All the time. The only side I saw of him was when he was home. And even then he was a closed book.

“About what?” I finally asked when he looked at me funny for laughing. He took two steps closer to me, closing the distance between us until his body was close enough to mine for me to feel the warmth that radiated off his skin. My breath caught in my throat at his closeness. He towered over me and he was all authority and power. I could feel the magic prickle along my skin, and I shivered. Reid wasn’t closet to changing, but the power that flowed out of him felt like it had the night he’d had a nightmare and he’d been so close to the change.

It made me wonder if he was losing control, or if he was finally showing me his true colors. And if he was, what else was there that I didn’t know about him?

When I looked into his eyes they were so green they were practically glowing, and I felt like they could suck me and I would never find my way back out. He looked at me with an intensity I haven’t seen in a very long time.

“Are you a soldier?” I asked, suddenly scared that when he left me he went to someone else. His face softened when I asked, like I was a child with a fear and I needed to be reassured that there wasn’t a monster under the bed.

“I am a soldier,” he said and something inside me released. I breathed out in relief. “But that’s not all,” he added and the release tightened up again.

He took a deep breath, and I got scared for the next words.

“I’m an Army Ranger.”

He looked unsure, like he didn’t know how I would react. I rolled the words around in my mind, trying to make sense of them. But it didn’t add up. The look on his face told me that it should be something big, that he expected a reaction, but I couldn’t find anything that would warrant that. Finally I admitted my ignorance.

“A what?”

He looked exasperated for a second. He’d scraped together all this courage to tell me something that I just didn’t understand.

“It’s an elite soldier… we go on special missions and we give ourselves up for our country completely.”

He blew out the rest of his breath and he looked like his description hadn’t been satisfactory to him. I pulled a face. I really didn’t get it.

“Is this a top secret thing or something?” I asked. He hesitated for a moment and then shook his head.

“So… it’s fine to know you’re a… ranger? It’s not something that you hide from the public.”

He shook his head again, slowly. I tried to put it all together in a picture, to match up the pieces to a puzzle.

“Why are you telling me this?” I finally asked. “And why haven’t you told me before? You lied to me, and I can’t even find a good reason.”

He sighed and hopped onto the counter, knocking his heels softly against the wood I a rhythmic thud. It made me feel tenser, getting more on edge.

“Because I’m already a monster, Allegra. I’m a werewolf. I don’t show you the ugly side whenever the wolf comes out, but it’s there. You know it’s there. Even if you choose not to see it.”

I sank down onto the floor, my back against the opposite counters to Reid. I was dimly aware of the height difference, of the fact that I was lowering myself and he was higher up. The Alpha and his submissive. But I was tired. Tired of this life that suddenly didn’t make sense, tired of the part that just wasn’t human and I still didn’t really understand.

“I didn’t want you to see the rest of me. One part of me is a monster, I have to live with that. I can never get rid of the wolf. But the human side of me, I wanted at least one half of me not to be a monster. And I couldn’t even get that right.”

He hung his head like he was ashamed. I stared at my hands in my lap.

“What happened in the office… do you do things like that when you’re on duty?” I asked. I knew that I shouldn’t have, because I had a feeling what the answer was going to be and I knew I didn’t want to hear it. But I had to ask it, because I had to hold on to the fact that he could still have said now.

When he looked up at me, his eyes were a light green, something that looked like it was on its way to changing color, and I knew his wolf was back. The silence that hung between us, so thick I was drowning in it, was the answer he wasn’t giving me.

I shook my head.

“I can’t do this,” I said, standing up. I walked past him.

“Allegra, don’t,” he said, but I kept walking, out of the kitchen and through the rest of the house. He’d lied to me, but that was okay. That I could somehow forgive. My problem was why he’d done it. And the fact that he didn’t feel like it was wrong to be a monster. Even that would have been forgivable. No, the only thing that he regretted was that I thought he was a monster.

And that wasn’t acceptable to me.

Chapter 7

Reid

The pain that came with her four words ‘I can’t do this’ was excruciating. I’ve been shot, I’ve had broken bones, shrapnel wounds, concussions. I’ve had everything. And then taking into account the shift from man to wolf when it was full moon and the beast was drawn out of me. All of that hurt a considerable amount, but it was part of who and what I was. I could heal.

But losing Allegra, that hurt. That was the kind of pain I wasn’t used to. And the kind of pain I never wanted to feel again.

I met John in the woods just after sunset. When I saw him, I shifted back into human form from the wolf body I’d used to cover the distance quickly. The transition was painful and it wasn’t supposed to happen this soon after the initial change, but I needed to talk. When John saw me force the shift he did, and I knew that it hurt him, because it hurt me. He was my second. Well, my third, as Allegra had pointed out. She was the second now, apparently. And he felt what I felt.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said to him when we were sitting between the trees. We’d positioned ourselves between the undergrowth so that being naked wouldn’t be awkward when we talked. It wasn’t strange for either of us, but somewhere it became weird.

“I don’t want to lose her. I know it was wrong to lie to her, but I was trying to protect her, you know?”

John shook his head in dark and I could see his face, grim and serious. He looked the way I felt.

“You can’t hide your animal from her, Reid. She’s married to you. If you wanted to protect her from you, you should never have made her your wife. By saying ‘I do’ the wolf has assumed her as his mate. And you’ve let her into that position where she is vulnerable but powerful. And then you took it away from her because you’re scared.

“She’s just a human,” I said, rubbing my face with one hand. “She will never be able to carry the power that a wolf would in the same position.”

“Chandra’s a human too, and we’re fine. She knows who I am and what I can be, and we’ve made peace with it. Hiding it is just going to make her feel like you don’t trust her, and you’re going to slowly lose control over your own wolf because your mate can’t be there for you.”

Was that what was happening? Lately I’ve been feeling worse, like I could never really separate the man and the beast. But no, I wouldn’t accept that.

“My pack is there for me,” I finally said. “They can fill in the gaps. That’s what’s been happening so far, right?”

When John didn’t answer me, I suddenly felt like I’d had it all wrong, like I hadn’t noticed what had been going on, and for some reason I’d missed the imbalance of our pack.

“We’re not what we should be and you know it,”  John said. “We’re the smallest pack in the world and we’re all crippled because our women are home and yours is out of the loop. What we achieve on the battle field is because of the magic, yes. But it’s also because we’re damn good soldiers. We can do it because regular humans can, not because we’re preternatural.”

I took a deep breath and nodded.

“I have to get back and talk to her,” I said, getting up. John got up too and winced. I knew his body was aching. Mine was too, and he borrowed me some of his power when we shifted because he was the first wolf beneath me in the hierarchy. Otherwise I would have drawn from Allegra.

“You know, next time you want to talk about your love life, let’s grab a drink at the pub like regular people, okay?”

Then he disappeared and I was left alone, realizing how much of my wolf dominated my life and I hadn’t noticed. The wolf had been taking over without Allegra, and I hadn’t stopped it from happening because I’d been away from home.

I needed to fix it with her. I needed to talk to her, get her to stay, and start including her in my life. Maybe that would save the marriage that had started slipping through my fingers bit by bit. Maybe it was all I needed to pick up the pieces.

When I came back home the smell of ham hung in the air. She was making a pasta dish, my favorite. I took it as a good sign that she was cooking to please me. When I came into the kitchen she stood in a cloud of steam, mixing the contents of a pan on the stove.

“Can we talk?” I asked her, and leaned my hip against the counter. She was to my side. I wasn’t facing her, and I didn’t have my back to her. I needed to be open enough to listen, but careful enough to protect myself.

“Okay,” she said, not even looking at me, and I took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” I said. She looked at me then, because I don’t think she expected it. She looked like she wanted to say something but then she turned her head back to the pan and kept mixing.

“I know I should have told you. I was wrong. I was trying to protect you, and all I ended up doing was hurt you more.”

I kept quiet, hoping she would fill the empty space with words, and she did.

“I don’t understand why this is happening now. Now that I’m threatening to leave. If I didn’t say anything, would you have carried on the way that you are? Would you ever have told me if I could handle this?”

Would I have? Probably. I had problems but I was set on keeping them my own.