Tangle of Need

EMOTIONALLY BATTERED BY a tender, haunting night that had been followed by the possessive wildness of her lone wolf’s loving when morning broke—a loving she hadn’t been able to resist, even knowing it was wrong—the last person Adria anticipated seeing when she opened her door to a knock a few hours later, was Martin.

Too stunned to speak, she just stared at the sandy-haired man who had once been her lover. She didn’t know what she’d expected if they did ever meet again, but it wasn’t this muted sense of loss, slivers of memory floating through her mind. As if he’d been part of another lifetime.

“What are you doing here?” she finally asked, searching for but not finding whatever it was that had drawn her to him so long ago. In spite of the pain he’d caused her, she knew that in the final calculation, he wasn’t a bad person—it was simply that there was no strength in him, and she needed that in her man.

“I wanted to talk,” he said in a hesitant voice, his hazel eyes uncertain. “I won’t blame you if you say no, but I’m asking.”

Stepping out, she closed the door behind herself, the cell phone she’d returned to the room to retrieve in hand. “Let’s walk outside.” No matter what the status of her relationship with the black wolf who refused to allow her to set him free, she couldn’t, wouldn’t, have Martin’s scent inside her room. It would be a betrayal.

Martin didn’t say anything until they were in a part of the forest that overlooked the lake closest to the den, its waters smooth as glass today. Several packmates walked along the water’s edge, played in the shallows in wolf form, or sat on the pebbled shore, but there was no one nearby, no chance anyone would overhear their conversation.

Leaning up against a sturdy young cedar, she ran her gaze over Martin. He was … different, the changes subtle but present. As if he, too, had been broken and put back together, his face holding a maturity it hadn’t had the day she’d slammed the door in his face. And his eyes, they were turbulent with emotion when they met her own. “I came to say what I should have a year ago.”

Still unsure about where this was going, she simply waited.

“I’m sorry, Adria.” Stark words, his expression devoid of pretence, of the stiff dignity that had always been his armor. “Sorry for being a bastard and sorry for not having the guts to face up to what I was doing to us.”

It wasn’t anything she’d ever expected to hear, but she had the words to answer him. “Thank you for saying that.” It meant something that he’d made the effort to find her, to speak an apology she knew couldn’t have come easily. “But it wasn’t all your fault—I played my part.”

“Don’t,” he whispered. “Don’t absolve me of blame I full well know I deserve.”

“I’m not,” she said, because she understood the courage it took to face your own failings, and she would not belittle Martin’s.

“But”—she held his gaze, let him see the truth in her eyes—“it’s done with, nothing you need to carry like a millstone around your neck.” Her life right now might be a turbulent storm, but the chapter with Martin, she’d closed long ago. It was part of a past that had shaped her but no longer caged her. “I hope you find happiness.” The wish was a genuine one, for a man who had once made her laugh.

Closing the distance between them, he touched a hesitant finger to her cheek. “I never knew what I had until you were gone.” An unspoken question, his eyes shadowed with loss and a tormented guilt both.

“We’re a piece of each other’s history now, Martin,” she said gently, the strength to be kind coming not from her aggressive soldier instincts but from the part of her that understood compassion did not have to mean weakness. “In the past.”

His gaze betrayed a regret that silvered the most poignant emotion through her, but found no twin. As Riaz had seen what seemed like a lifetime ago, she had never loved Martin the way a predatory changeling female should love her man—until it was a wild howl in her blood, a near-painful craving and a tenderness that burned. Still, they had not always been adversaries, so she didn’t hurt him by rejecting his embrace before he left.

“Good-bye,” Adria whispered as his back disappeared into the trees, knowing she had laid the final ghost to rest, even if Martin continued to wrestle with them. There was calm in making peace with her past, but that peace was overwhelmed by an anguish that went to the soul, as if a chunk of her self had been ripped out and the wound wasn’t healing.