gold in them brightened. “You best friends with the bear who abducted you now?”
“No,” she bit out, maybe a little too quickly judging by how Ember’s eyes widened slightly. She shook her head. “I’m not… but he didn’t hurt me. Okay? He didn’t lay a finger on me. As soon as he cooled down, he realised his mistake. He was sorry about it. He’s sorry about everything he’s done wrong and maybe if you gave him the chance, he would apologise about it.”
“Oh, so he was the perfect gentleman?” Cobalt arched a blond eyebrow at her, ignoring Ember as she wrapped her hands around his arm, clutching it through his black cable-knit sweater, trying to make him back down. “He kidnapped you. He took you hostage to upset us all.”
Holly kept her mouth shut when words bubbled up, ones about the fact Saint hadn’t really meant to take her. He had wanted to take Ember. Telling Cobalt that would only push him off the rails.
“Cobalt.” There was black magic in Ember’s whisper, a spell that seemed to blunt the edge of Cobalt’s mood as he looked at his mate.
He sighed and backed off a step, and then another, giving Holly space.
When he was in line with Ember, he turned and raised his hands, framed her face and murmured throatily, “I just keep thinking about… What if he had taken you?”
Holly was relieved she hadn’t mentioned that had been Saint’s plan now.
Cobalt dipped his head and captured Ember’s lips, his kiss sweet at first, but as Ember tiptoed and pressed her hands to his chest, it turned passionate.
Feeling that the two of them weren’t going to stop anytime soon, Holly backed towards the door, surrendering to her growing need to be alone with her thoughts.
Ember cracked her eyes open and looked at her as she kissed Cobalt, worry in her gaze.
Holly shook her head and smiled. “I’m really tired. Just want to be alone for a bit.”
Ember looked as if she might try to convince her to stay in the cabin, but Cobalt growled against her mouth and pulled her closer, banding his arms around her curvy waist. Distracting her friend.
Holly hurried from the cabin, grimaced as the cold hit her. She rubbed her arms through her long-sleeved T-shirt, trying to keep the chill off them as she strode through the woods, her heightened vision making the path as clear as day to her. She didn’t slow until she reached Cobalt’s small territory. The snow had piled up in the clearing, but the storm had swept it away from the front of the raised L-shaped cabin.
She waded through the snow, legs growing colder and stiffer by the second. It was slow going, sapped her strength as she kept her gaze locked on the front of the cabin, her thoughts on getting inside and warmed up.
And being alone.
She had never needed to be alone more than she did at that moment.
Her feet were numb by the time she reached the steps. She kicked the snow off each wooden board, working her way up to the deck. When she reached it, she glanced out at the clearing and paused to take in how beautiful it was with the snow glittering in the slender moonlight and the stars sparkling above the mountains.
Only for some reason, it wasn’t as beautiful as it had been when she had admired the view before.
She looked off to her left, up the valley.
Towards Black Ridge.
A need to keep on walking, to go back to that place, flooded her but she forced herself to go inside instead. The air was chilly inside the cabin. She kicked snow off her boots and removed them, winced as her feet touched the icy floorboards and hurried to the fireplace on the right of the open-plan room.
She busied herself with making a fire, letting her mind empty as her hands went to work, purging everything the brothers had said about Saint and his kin, and how tense she had been when they had been crowding around her. Cobalt was bound to report everything she had said to Rath, and she only hoped it might go some way towards making her alpha see that Saint wasn’t a bad bear. He just had a bad tendency to let the bear in him take the reins when he was angry and made poor decisions while his more animal side was in control.
She slowly relaxed by degrees, and by the time she had lit the kindling and the