He ate another cookie before getting up to make himself dinner.
ADAM SHUT DOWN THE BOND BETWEEN US UNTIL IT was nothing more than a gossamer thread.
"I'm sorry," he murmured against my ear.
"So sorry.
F--" He swallowed the obscenity before it left his lips.
He pulled me closer, and I realized we were both sitting in the gravel driveway, huddled next to the truck.
And the gravel was really cold on my bare skin.
"Are you all right?" he said.
"Do you know what you showed me?" I asked.
My voice was hoarse.
"I thought it was a flashback," he answered.
He'd seen me have them before.
"Not one of mine," I told him.
"One of yours." He stilled.
"Was it bad?" He'd been in Vietnam; he'd been a werewolf since before I was born--he'd probably seen a lot of bad stuff.
"It seemed like a private moment that I had no business seeing," I told him truthfully.
"But it wasn't bad." I'd seen him the moment that I'd become something more than an assignment from the Marrok.
I remembered feeling stupid standing on his back porch with a plate of cookies for a man whose life had just gone down in the flames of a nasty divorce.
He hadn't said anything when he answered the door--so I'd assumed that he'd thought it stupid, too.
I'd gone back home as fast as I could without running.
I had had no idea that it had helped.
Nor that he saw me as tough and capable.
Funny, I'd always thought I looked weak to the werewolves.
So what if I still flinched if he forgot and put a hand on my shoulder? Time would fix that.
I was already a lot better: daily flashbacks to the rape were a thing of the past.
We'd work through it.
Adam was willing to make allowances for me.
And our bond did its rubber-band thing, which it did sometimes, and snapped back into place, giving him access to my thoughts as if my head were clear as glass.
"Whatever you need," he said, his body suddenly still as the evening air.
"Whatever I can do." I relaxed my shoulders, burying my nose against his collarbone, and after a second, the relaxation was genuine.