The rivulets of water that poured down his back did little to clean him. Malcolm ran his hands through the wet strands of his hair, washing away the shampoo there. The vampire’s blood that’d covered his torso mixed with the hot water, pooling in a pink mixture over the cream-colored ceramic before gurgling down the drain. The steady white noise of water against tile soothed him. Malcolm closed his eyes, allowing the water’s heat to rush over him, the ache in his muscles, the tightness in his shoulders. Trixie hadn’t been afraid of him or disgusted with what he’d done. He wiped a hand over his face, clearing the water there.
He wasn’t certain what to do with that.
Once he felt thoroughly clean, he scrubbed some more, isolating himself until the hot water ran cold. Eventually, he turned off the shower. The steam from the water created a fog that remained trapped in the small space, the bathroom mirror cloudy and opaque. Swiping a towel over its surface, he stared at his reflection, trying to assess exactly what it was Trixie saw there, what it was that’d stopped her from turning away.
He couldn’t see it.
The coppery taste of blood still lingered in his mouth. He brushed and flossed his teeth. Bloodsuckers tasted as bad as they smelled, like metallic rust mixed with rotting meat. Disgusting. When he was finished, he wrapped a towel around his waist to cover himself and padded out into the main room.
Trixie was sitting at the card table with a basin of warm water he’d given her and a pair of tweezers in her hand. He’d tried to help her tend to the wound when they’d first arrived, but she’d insisted she wasn’t letting him near her again—“not with a ten-foot-pole, darlin’”—until he’d gotten the rest of the vamp blood off him. “Bless your heart, it’s unsanitary,” she’d hissed with a little wrinkle of her nose. He wasn’t exactly well versed in southern euphemisms, but his heart hadn’t felt very blessed. He didn’t have the patience to point out that everything they’d done in that dingy alley hadn’t exactly been the definition of sanitary.
As he approached her spot at the table, she glanced toward him. Her eyes widened at the sight. Him, bare-chested, naked from the waist up. He was vaguely aware this was the first time she’d ever seen him unclothed in full light, having indulged in little more than passing glimpses after he’d shifted. Having been raised among humans, he wasn’t as comfortable with nudity as other shifters. He tended to keep his clothes on more than not.
He stood before her, waiting for her response, for her to whistle in appreciation in a way that was brazenly Trixie, ask about the meaning beneath any of the ink that covered his skin, or maybe even wince at the sight of his gnarlier scars—war badges earned over his years spent fighting for the pack.
Instead, her gaze raked over him, slow and assessing. He watched her visibly swallow, a light pink warming her cheeks before she roughly cleared her throat.
A surprise grin pulled at his lips. Who was this woman who could let him take her rough and wild in the middle of an alley but then blush at the first brush of intimacy? She was a seductress, a siren, or so she made everyone think. But the way she glanced away so shyly made him wonder if he’d been wrong to treat her that way. Intimacy and sex weren’t always one and the same, though he preferred them to be.
He’d thought that first night he’d pleasured her that maybe he could separate the two. He’d been foolish. For him, that separation wasn’t possible. It never had been. He’d given her a part of himself and there was no way he could take it away now, even knowing she’d crush his more fragile innards. If he was going to leave his heart in the palm of her hand, why not make himself truly bleed?
“I need to go get Dumplin’,” she said. “He doesn’t like being alone.”
“Dakota meant it when she said she’d keep him till morning. He’ll be fine,” Malcolm mumbled.
Refusing to look at him, Trixie turned her back in his direction. She tried to use the tweezers to remove the glass from her hand and winced.
Stubborn witch.
“Let me help you.”
Malcolm pulled out the chair beside her, the wooden legs giving a loud scrape against the hardwood flooring, before he did the same with her chair, forcing her to face him. He sat down beside her, taking her palm in his own without giving her a chance to protest. She had washed some of the blood away with the water in the basin he’d given her, but a few shards still remained. She hadn’t even touched the gauze, the medical pads, or the warm washcloth. She should have let him take care of her first, before his shower, when they’d first returned to the ranch.
He grumbled his discontent. “This’ll hurt,” he warned. He used the tweezers to remove a larger piece from between her thumb and forefinger.
Trixie hissed.
The sound tore through him. Her pain became his own. He hated that she’d been hurt under his watch again, even if it’d been her own choosing. He should have stopped her, should have protected her from needing to clock that vamp with her glass. He moved on to a piece in the middle of her palm. The shard had pierced her at an awkward angle. The way she winced before he’d even touched the tweezers to the glass surface highlighted how much pain she was in. Stubborn. So damn stubborn.
“You never should have gone anywhere near Cillian,” he ground out, trying to distract her as he worked. Blood pooled in her palm, and he dipped her hand into the basin in between each removal to clean it.
“Cillian isn’t the reason there’s glass in my hand,” she snapped defensively.
The subtext seared through him. He didn’t need her truth-telling abilities to read it.
You’re to blame. For not protecting me.
She didn’t say the words, but he felt them, deep in his chest. A sign of his own guilt.
The price of love was always his to pay.
Malcolm tried to steel himself, to ignore it, to push through. “Flaunting yourself in front of him was foolish,” he shot back. “Bloodsuckers like him don’t know how to take no for an answer. He won’t care if you call uncle. If you keep risking yourself like this, you’re going to get yourself killed. First, throwing yourself under the bus for that coyote shifter, now this. Volunteering to go into the Blood Rose was dangerous enough, but I wasn’t about to pretend I had any right to question your choices. But add Cillian to the mix, and you were in over your head.”
“Says you. I know how to handle myself.”
Another shard. Another wince. Each sign of her pain shook him.
She had handled herself well in the alley, but that wasn’t the point.
He growled, low and warning. “You’re playing hard and fast with your life. When you bet against fate, no one ever wins. Not in the long run. Death always finds you.”
“Or you do.” She met his gaze then and held it. “Whichever comes first. Though I’ve heard it’s one and the same.” Her eyes flicked to his hands, to the words tattooed across his knuckles, then to the image of a reaper on his upper arm, and back again. “Don’t act like you don’t do the same to protect those you love.”
The fire in her amber eyes flared as he removed the last shard, but this time, she didn’t wince. From the hardened look in her eye, she wasn’t allowing herself to.
Dropping the piece of glass onto the table, Malcolm slid the nearby gauze across the scratched wooden surface, drawing it toward him to wrap her hand.
He thought about arguing about the difference between wolves and witches, about his kind’s increased capacity for healing, a shifter’s speed and strength. Those were things a witch could only dream of, but ultimately, that defense would have been a lie.
He’d have done what he did anyway.
“No one would miss me.” He dabbed antiseptic over the wound, then wrapped the first layer of gauze over her palm. “For you, that’s not the case.”
“Like hell it is.” The edge in those words caught him off guard. “They’d miss the idea of me, the woman they think they know.”
Not the woman they both knew she was. The one who risked her life for those she loved, who tended plants like they were babies because life was important to her, who rescued mean old dogs, and wolves, and made them a less little less mean.
It was the first time either of them had openly acknowledged it—the mutual masks they wore, donned for different reasons but meant to protect all the same.
They were both quiet for a long moment as he finished wrapping her hand.
As soon as he taped the last bit of gauze in place, she tore her hand away from him. “Why were you angry with me? Not in the alley, but before. What did I do to hurt you?”
“It’s nothing.” He shoved back his chair and stood. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“It’s not nothing. Not to you.”
He didn’t like the way she saw straight through him. He placed his hands on his hips, dipping his head, then blowing out a short breath. “Miles, Chance, the others. The moment any of my packmates step into a room, I disappear,” he admitted. “You prefer their company.” He placed a hand on the table. “I get it. I don’t make it easy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel—”
“Is that what you think?” she said, cutting him off.
His gaze fell toward her, to where she sat, glaring at him. For all the rage in her eyes, he’d have thought she’d be six foot three, not barely five feet with her heels off. “From where I’m standing, that’s the only truth I see,” he said.
“You’ve spent so long hiding behind your own pain that you have no idea how others see you, do you?” Trixie was shaking her head. “You try to keep everyone at arm’s length, but you don’t understand how much you’ve failed at that.” She crossed the room to his bunk, where she reached beneath his pillow. “I did it for you, you big brute.” She took the tiny rucksack of bills and coins—her poker winnings—and dropped it onto the game table with a thunk. “To start your I’m-getting-the-hell-outta-here fund.”
For a moment, all Malcolm could do was stare at the small bag of money.
“It’s not like that.”
“If you can’t buy your freedom, what’ll it take?” She placed a hand on the chairback. It was a sexy pose, meant to tease, though right now he knew she wasn’t teasing him. “I like to imagine you happy, even long after I’m gone from your life”—she gestured around them—“and happy ain’t here for you.”
He’d been wrong, so fucking wrong. A lump lodged in his throat.
“There’s nothing you can do.”
It was the truth, plain and simple. He couldn’t live in the human world or show his face anywhere that wasn’t frequented solely by shifters. It was the price of being a wanted man. At least at Wolf Pack Run, being a killer didn’t mean he was locked away in a human prison.
“You said the same thing when I took that damn bottle from you, and now look at you.” She nodded to where he stood in his towel, half-naked before her.
“This is different, Trixie.” He shook his head, tried to keep himself from snarling in frustration. It wasn’t her he was frustrated with. It was him, for damning himself for the rest of his life this way. It’d been the foolish mistake of the pissed-off young boy he’d once been. “Money, time, none of it matters. I can’t escape from here.”
Not unless he wanted to spend his life running.
He’d done enough running away in his life. He wanted something he could run toward.
“You said the same then, but you escaped the grief, didn’t you?”
“To a point,” he admitted.
Trixie drew closer. The scent of her wrapped around him, charging him like a live wire. “You don’t have to bear your pain like a badge of honor for all the world to see.” Her words were harsh, callous, accusatory. “You don’t have to wallow in it. It doesn’t protect you, not like you pretend it does.”
He snarled, unable to stop himself. His eyes flashed to his wolf. “You’re one to talk.”
Trixie took a small step back. “Excuse me?”
He stepped closer, closing the gap she’d created between them in two powerful strides. He could practically feel the brush of her breasts against his navel, the warm heat of her body. “You’re so disillusioned you can’t be real with anyone. I bet you can’t remember the last time you dropped the mask for more than a handful of minutes.”
She lifted her chin in defiance. Those ruby-red lips puckered with rage, drawing his attention there.
“I may wear my pain like a statement,” he hissed, “but you can’t stand the way you feel so you bury it, and that’s made you so callous you don’t even see the point in anything anymore.” He thumped a fist against his own chest. “At least I own it.”
“Fuck you and the high horse you rode in on.” She stabbed a finger at his chest, stomping toward his bunk. Before he could stop her, she was stripping off her shoes, tossing them onto the floor with an audible clack. She pulled her dress down, wiggling the tight fabric over her hips.
Malcolm growled at the sight of her back. Bare golden skin. His cock stiffened. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” She turned toward him then, unhooking her bra and tossing it onto the floor beside her so that she stood there in nothing but her panties. She stared him straight in the eye, gorgeous breasts bared. “It’s called hate sex, asshole. It’s kind of our thing, innit?”
Malcolm swallowed, the breath tearing from his lungs, all his frustration with her evaporating with it. “I don’t want to have hate sex with you, Trixie,” he whispered.
The words instantly disarmed her.
Trixie’s eyes went wide, then watery. “Don’t say that,” she whispered back. She gave a slight shake of her head like he’d hurt her, lip suddenly quivering. “Not now, damn it.”
“Come here,” he ordered.
The sight of her standing naked and vulnerable before him destroyed every defense he’d ever built around himself, each brick he’d laid to keep everyone walled away.
She listened, walking toward him but refusing to look him in the face. “Look at me.” She did, but not fully. He gripped her chin and forced her head up. “Take it off,” he demanded.
“What?” She was already nude and clearly thought he meant…
He nodded to her face. “The makeup, the mask, all of it. Take it off. For one goddamn night. That’s all I’m asking.”
Trixie shook her head, mouth agape. “I don’t know how,” she finally whispered.
Malcolm swallowed, the emotion in his throat easing. “Then let me do it for you.”
He reached to the table, taking the warm washcloth that still lay there into his hand. Stepping closer to her, he cupped her chin in his palm, gently stroking the terry cloth over her skin. First her forehead, her cheeks. There was a spattering of freckles hidden beneath her foundation and rouge that he’d never seen before. It made her look younger, not that she needed to, and it didn’t take much to imagine a gorgeous blond-haired little girl, face covered in those same freckles, mouth dripping with watermelon juice, smiling for a camera.
The southern summer he’d tasted on her skin.
Her eyes fluttered closed as she relaxed into his touch. There were tears pouring down her cheeks, and gently, he swiped them away. When her mascara, eyeliner, and shadow were gone, he laid a tender kiss on each lid. She shuddered.
Finally, when most of her face was clear, he tended to her lips. With her lipstick gone, the pink was still stained slightly, leaving them vibrant, full, like the mouth of a woman who’d been kissed, or who wanted to be. He hadn’t yet laid his own mouth there.
“You’re beautiful,” he whispered.
Another tear ran down her cheek. “I look better with it on,” she said softly.
Malcolm shook his head. “Not to me.”
He didn’t fully understand what her tears were for, but he wanted to chase every one of them away, to make sure no one ever hurt her again. Whether him or anyone else. It didn’t matter.
As long as she felt safe. Was safe.
He returned the washcloth to the table.
“Do me a favor, will you, sugar?” Trixie placed a tentative hand on his chest as he drew her to him. “Don’t be gentle,” she rasped. “I’m not certain I can bear it.”
“I won’t be,” he promised.
He pulled her into his arms.
***
Trixie didn’t know which was worse: the fact that she was crying like a damn fool, that she’d let him remove her makeup, or that he was looking at her natural face like she was still the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. She could hardly stand it.
As if he could sense her insecurity, he drew her close. She slipped her underwear off before he lifted her to straddle his waist. She wrapped her legs over the jutted muscles of his hip bones and her arms around his neck. The towel that’d been perched on his hips fell to the floor with a damp little swish.
“You’re gorgeous,” he whispered, kissing up the side of her neck and reassuring her as he carried her toward his bunk. “The most goddamn beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
His words were crass, but the care and complete honesty there stole her breath away. Somehow, that only made her tears come even faster.
She wasn’t even certain what she was crying for. For all the times she’d hidden her true face or for all the men who’d made her think she needed to. Or the fact that whatever this was between her and Malcolm, it’d been destined to end before it’d even truly started. She should have told him about Stan, about the threat against her from the beginning.
How had she been so foolish? So selfish?
He laid her out on his bunk, placing a hand on the top bunk and stepping back to admire her. “I didn’t know you had freckles,” he said softly.
She smiled through her tears. “I didn’t know you had a tattoo there.” She nodded to the cross inked above his knee, over the taut muscle of his thigh.
“I got it when I was sixteen.” He smiled sheepishly. He pawed at the back of his neck. “Thought it made me a badass.”
She chuckled. The thought of Malcolm needing to put any effort toward being seen as anything but one sexy, scary MFer tickled her. Her eyes fell to his hands, the tattooed knuckles there. “Why angel wings?” She’d been burning to ask from the first moment she’d known what the letters read.
Malcolm shrugged, glancing away from her for a moment, eyes distant. “Because I needed an angel’s wings to carry me away from there.” He looked back toward her. “But I also knew the only way to claw out of that hellhole was with my own two hands.”
It was a cowboy’s answer. Simple yet moving. She didn’t need to ask where there was. Chicago. The place that was supposed to be home but hadn’t been, the place he never shared, because nothing about it had been worth sharing. At least for him.
“I’m glad you did,” she said. She meant every word of it.
His eyes raked over her, sparing no flaw she didn’t want him to see. He didn’t leave a single curve or blemish untouched. “You’re breathtaking.”
Another truth. She blushed.
Trixie returned the favor, taking in the wide muscles of his chest, the rippled abs and the thin trail of black hair that led down to the thick, hardened length between his legs. It was only her second favorite part of him. Not that she was picking favorites or anything. The first were his eyes, so dramatic and brooding, not the familiar wolf ones currently staring back like all the other times she’d slept with a shifter, but the dark pools of his normal brown, so deep they were nearly black. She’d thought they were cold, uncaring, and they were at times, but when he’d been tending to her hand, she’d seen the depth there, the tender man who hid behind dark fury. A killer with a soft heart.
“You’re not half-bad yourself,” she teased.
Malcolm threw back his head and laughed, loud and unguarded. The sound broke something inside her chest, like a dam of emotion, every feeling she’d been shoving away, storing under lock and key. It all burst free at the sound of his joy.
For once, she let it wash over her.
When he’d finished, his eyes settled on her again. “Do you want me to—?” He nodded to the bathroom, where his discarded jeans lay within view and maybe his wallet with a condom.
A familiar heat flared inside her.
“I’m clean and on the pill,” she whispered, understanding his question.
“I didn’t expect anything less.” He ducked under the edge of the bunk, positioning himself on his hands so he hovered above her.
“You think better of me than most.”
He paused, staring down at her for a moment. He kissed her then, slowly and deeply. His tongue tangled with hers in a soft, languid caress. He pulled back. “I know you better than most,” he whispered against her lips.
This time, the truth there surprised her. He was right.
The prickly scruff on his chin grazed her cheek. He kicked her legs apart, and the head of his cock nudged against the outside of her entrance.
She wiggled her hips lower, his tenderness killing her. “I told you not to be gentle.” She was already wet for him, burning with need.
The gold of his wolf eyes flared. “I won’t be.” Malcolm sheathed himself inside her in a single stroke, filling her so full she gasped for relief.
He didn’t give her any time to adjust to the size of him, and she didn’t want him to. He drove into her, each thrust of his hips aiming up and inward. Hooking his arm under one of her legs, he hoisted it onto his shoulder, giving him greater access. He drove deeper, harder. There were no words to be had. The splendor of finally joining together left them both speechless, breathless. She was everything.
A few minutes in, the door to the bunkhouse started to creep open, his packmates returning from the evening’s fun.
“Shit!” Miles’s swear came from the cracked door.
“Get the fuck out,” Malcolm snarled.
The door slammed shut immediately. The sounds of his packmates mumbling outside followed. Malcolm didn’t miss so much as a stroke. He thrust into her, each continuous blow making her hotter, driving her higher onto the bed. She gripped the tangled sheets beneath them.
“Good to know you can still be mean when you need to be.” Trixie chuckled. Reaching around him, she scraped her nails affectionately over the broad muscles of his back. “Who’s to say he couldn’t join in on the fun?” she teased, searching for a bit of levity now that her tears had dried. But she didn’t really mean it.
Malcolm glared at her, eyes filled with open jealousy, exactly what she’d wanted to see there. No pretending she didn’t matter to him. Not anymore.
“I’m not sharing you,” he ground out, refusing to give her any relief. He saw straight through the bluff. He slammed into her, angling her ass up so he could hit her G-spot. The man already knew exactly how to pleasure her most, and they’d only been together a handful of days.
Trixie moaned, loud and throaty as she always did, exactly as he’d intended.
“You’re mine,” he growled, wolf eyes flashing. “Now make sure they all know it.”
Malcolm didn’t make it easy for her to fight it. He pounded into her, working her clit with his hand, the tension building inside her until she was screaming his name. The rickety wooden bunk frame pounded against the wall.
“I guess we’re out of a place to sleep tonight, boys,” Miles said loudly from outside the door. He sounded as amused as he was annoyed.
Trixie laughed at the devilish grin that crossed Malcolm’s lips. The hand he’d been using to support himself dropped to her breast, bringing him flush against her. He palmed her. Even with those massive paws of his, she was more than a handful.
She felt herself clench, the walls of her pussy tightening.
“Come for me,” Malcolm ordered. “I want to feel you finish around my cock.” He leaned down, tweaking the sensitive flesh of her nipple.
It was enough.
Trixie came apart on a wave of pleasure and sweat and emotion. The shudder that ran through her was unguarded and wild. Malcolm finished shortly after her. She watched his face as he came, drawing in the open ecstasy of it.
When they’d both finished, he collapsed on top of her, rolling and repositioning them a moment later so that she was cradled in his arms against him.
A man who wanted to snuggle her after the fact was novel, new to her, and she felt like a fool again as another fresh round of tears came. One trickled onto his arm before she could stop it.
“Hey,” he whispered, his voice rough and raspy. “Hey, what’s wrong?” The rough pad of his thumb swiped across her face, catching each tear that fell.
It took Trixie a long time to answer in part because she didn’t know what to say. “No one’s ever claimed me as theirs before,” she said. It was true, she supposed, but she couldn’t tell him the true reason for her tears.
Malcolm propped himself on his side, bending down to kiss her. “Their loss is my gain.”
Trixie’s crying only worsened. The sob that tore from her throat was downright embarrassing because she knew, without a doubt, that he meant it.