asshole.
I kneel on the ground before her and reach for her hands, being as gentle as possible. The girl’s a deer, wide-eyed and terrified, and I’m the big bad wolf. I just have to convince her I’m not going to eat her.
She jolts away from me, but I manage to clasp her small hands. Her skin is soft and smooth.
“Hey. Hey, you’re safe,” I say, pitching my voice in the most soothing tone I can muster. Considering I have a deep baritone that sounds like I’m talking through gravel, it’s a far reach for “soothing.” I’ve got the kind of voice that leads a pack of feral wolves, not a namby-pamby motherly tone.
She sucks in breath after breath, but her fingers cling to mine. That’s progress, right?
“I’m Ridge,” I say when she doesn’t reply. “You’re in my cabin in the mountains. I found you last night. You were hurt, and I brought you home to take care of you. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“H-how d-do I kn-know?” Every word comes out breathy, and on the heels of her statement, a crystalline tear crests over her lower eyelid and spills down her cheek.
My heart twinges in my chest. She’s fucking terrified, so full of abject fear that she’s desperate to escape. I can see in her gorgeous blue eyes that she fully expects I’m going to hurt her.
Just like the monster who marred her beautiful body.
“I can’t prove it,” I tell her truthfully, rubbing my thumbs over her fingers in what I hope is a calming gesture. “But I promise, I won’t hurt you. I only want to help you.”
We stare at one another for several moments. I keep rubbing the bend of her fingers and maintain a polite distance from her body so that I don’t overstep and make her even more frightened than she already is. She’s fucking beautiful, even with fear in her eyes and the pain etched on her face.
I want to destroy the person who turned her into this pitiful creature.
Finally, her shoulders slump forward, the tension in her body lessening by a fraction. She takes a deep, shaky breath and lets it out slowly.
I did it—I got through the panic.
“I’m sorry you woke up in a strange place. That was probably scary as fuck,” I say, trying to get on her level, to show with my apology that I get it. “Especially after whatever happened to you last night. How’d you end up in Devil’s Ditch? In the ravine?”
She blinks at me as if she’s trying to relearn English. As if my words don’t quite make sense, and she has to take an extra few seconds to sort through them as her brain comes back from whatever place it went to during her panic attack.
I don’t move. Don’t even blink. I just keep holding her hands, giving her the time and space she needs to answer.
Finally, her tongue darts out to lick her lips. She swallows once, then opens her mouth to speak.
But before she can say a word, several loud voices rise up outside the cabin. The girl’s face changes instantly, and she recoils into the couch cushions, her gaze darting toward the front door.
I sigh, the sound a mixture of irritation and disgust. I recognize the voice clamoring loudest over the dull uproar.
The front door bangs open, and my brother, Lawson, barrels into the house as big as a mountain and wearing his fury like a cloak. A handful of his cronies rush in behind him, until my living room is nothing but pissed-off shifter energy.
“What the fuck, Ridge?” Lawson snarls, pointing at the girl.
Too late, I realize I should have locked that fucking door.
6
Sable
For a moment, I got lost in Ridge’s honey-colored eyes. I woke up expecting to come face-to-face with Uncle Clint, but what I ended up getting instead was pretty much the complete opposite of the man who raised me.
When the dark-haired man caught me near the trees, I was so certain I was about to die that I fought with everything I had in me. But inside his house, something shifted in his demeanor.
His gruff voice managed to block out the fear, to shove away the rising panic so that I could focus on him and his calming words.
I started to calm down.
I started to feel… safe.
But I don’t feel safe now.
Nearly a half-dozen of the biggest people I’ve ever seen crowd into his living room, voices raised as angry, violent energy pours out of them. My terror