Wild Heart - C.R. Jane Page 0,4

his face, his arms crossed in front of him as he watched us questioningly. I just sat there in the van, unmoving, staring blankly at some plaster that needed to be repaired near one of the large windows back there.

“Sweetheart,” Wilder said softly, and a little cry burst from my lips at how out of place the tender words seemed in the situation. Wilder sighed and then got out of the van. I watched as he said something to Jim and Jim’s face collapsed in sorrow. He must have told him about Eve.

I’d obviously not known Eve terribly well, but it would have been obvious to anyone that she was the kind of person the world would miss. She just had this light about her that you didn’t see in very many people.

My door suddenly opened, and I realized I’d gotten lost in my head again. I lamely protested when Wilder unbuckled my seatbelt and then scooped me up in his arms. He carried me through the back door next to a grieving Jim, who was now talking to Carrie, all the way up the stairs to my room.

“We need to do something about this,” Wilder muttered as he sat me down on the bed. He briefly disappeared from the room, and I heard the sound of water.

He was running me a freaking bath.

Things between me and him were complicated. And there was the matter of Daxon.

But did I let him lead me into the bathroom? Did I let him strip me down? Did I let him gently run a warm washcloth over my skin, touching me like he was worshiping me rather than washing me? Yep.

Just like the sweet way he’d spoken to me in the van earlier, the soft way he was touching me in the bathtub…it just did something to me. It broke something inside me. I was so starved for affection and care that it was like my body didn’t know what to do with it when it got it.

Wilder was kneeling down next to the tub and only looked mildly alarmed as I randomly burst into tears and buried my face in my hands. He didn’t say anything, and I needed it that way. I needed to sit in the silence with him and mourn that things really sucked.

After yet another breakdown, I got into bed, exhausted. Wilder turned to go, and I patted the space next to me. “Lie with me?” I asked hoarsely. My body was shutting down, something it tended to do under extreme stress, and today had certainly been one for the books.

Wilder looked relieved and carefully lay down next to me without taking any of his clothes off. I buried my face into his neck and breathed in his scent. His chest rumbled against me in a soft purr, and I soaked the comforting sound in.

“Goodnight, Rune,” he whispered in a gravelly, tired voice.

“Goodnight,” I whispered back.

I still had nightmares that night, but I somehow knew his presence was preventing them from being worse.

Wilder was gone when I opened my eyes the next morning.

2

Rune

My stomach heaved each time I thought of Eve in the woods. I didn’t want to remember her that way, but it was funny how my brain insisted on reminding me of all the things I didn’t want to see. Like her dead eyes staring up into the sky. When I glanced down at my hands, I pictured them covered in her blood, and how much I would have done anything to save her if I had found her in time.

I moved into the bathroom and turned on the water in the sink and lathered my hands with the soap. I rubbed them into a white mass, then used my toothbrush to scrub under my nails again. I had to get rid of this horrible feeling like I couldn’t wash her death off me.

“You did nothing wrong,” I murmured under my breath and lifted my chin to catch my gaze in the mirror. I looked startled. It was the best way to describe the paleness of my cheeks, the red puffiness of my eyes from crying for the past half hour since waking up. I barely knew her, but we’d worked together at Moonstruck Diner enough times to make her loss hurt.

Lowering my head, not wanting to look at myself a second longer, I washed my hands, dried them on the towel, and staggered into the main room. There, I peered out the window to the grounds