There was no other comfort he could give the father who hurt for his child, who hurt with her, struggled to protect her.
“I’ll hold you to that.” The Wolf Breed nodded abruptly. “Make sure she is.”
• • •
The sun was coming up when Cassie stepped back into the apartment at the Bureau. She shed the lightweight black jacket she wore in the living room, paused at the door to the bedroom and kicked her boots off. The snug tank came off next, dropped carelessly just inside the bedroom door; the pants were shed just inside the bathroom.
She wasn’t wearing panties.
Dog leaned against the door frame and watched as she adjusted the temperature, then stepped beneath the shower, her head lowering to allowing the steamy spray to saturate her hair.
She hadn’t spoken on the flight back, despite several attempts by the others to engage her in conversation. She’d withdrawn so deep inside herself that Dog had felt the beast rising inside him again, desperate because he couldn’t sense her.
It had been Graeme’s quick response, a cautioning shake of his head and the warning to wait, that had allowed him to find the control and ease back. That crazed Bengal carried a beast inside him unlike any Dog had ever sensed. If anyone understood the enraged fury consuming Cassie, then it would be him.
The sheer wild agony he’d felt echoing in his soul until that second he found himself flat on his back had eased. It wasn’t comforting, though, because the sense of aloneness he felt was worse. She’d pulled so far away from him that he could barely sense the emotions she was struggling to contain.
He’d been ten when the creature rose inside him. Ten when it had torn free. It had taken three days for it to retreat, to allow reason, sanity, to return to the boy he’d been. He’d be damned if he’d give Cassie three days. No way in hell would he let her drift in that black void alone.
Stripping and dropping his dirty clothes in the basket he’d always seen her use before, he activated the additional showerhead and stepped in with her. The little growl of warning and impending violence that sounded from her throat had him grinning.
“Savage little halfling,” he teased her, soaping his hair as she glared up at him before turning her back.
Her eyes were still that amazing neon, burning like flaming gems within her pale face. Once the Primal, as Graeme called it, retreated, exhaustion would claim her. And he intended to by God have this settled before her system completely shut down on him.
“Pissed at me, are you, baby?” Filling his palm with her scented shampoo, he buried his hands in her hair before she could avoid him, tightening them and holding her in place as a snarl escaped her lips.
Savage little beast she was.
He was filled with regret at the reason, but almost overwhelmed by pride as well. That enraged little creature had done what grown Breeds couldn’t. She’d put him on his ass, her blade at his throat, and he’d seen the threat in those raging blue eyes.
“Yeah, you’re pissed,” he sighed, working the shampoo through the lush curls that rippled down her back to her hips. “Not that I blame you. You have every right.”
What he’d done to her threatened the very core of the mating, and he knew it. He had not just allowed but ordered another Breed to lay his hands on her, to restrain her as he drove away. He’d legally disavowed their mating, separated himself from her at a time she felt she should have stood at his side.
What he’d done was unforgivable, and he knew it. But she would forgive him; he couldn’t allow her not to. She was his heart, his soul.
She was stiff, unresponsive, as he caressed her scalp with firm motions, working the shampoo through the curls. She refused to relax against him, to still the anger coursing through her.
?
??You were outside that room, you know what happened, you know why it happened,” he told her quietly. “You can be pissed, Cassie, you can be hurt, you can rage from now to hell and back, but it won’t change a damned thing, baby.”
He continued to work the lather through her hair, rubbing the strands between his fingers, bunching them, massaging her scalp.
“If it would take away the pain I caused you in that garage, I’d let you slice my throat a thousand times over,” he told her then and felt the almost imperceptible shudder that raced through her. “For as long as I live, I’ll know what I did to you, I’ll live it in my nightmares, because I felt every second of it shredding my own soul.”
She tried to jerk away from him, rage echoing in the low, furious growl that filled the shower. His fingers held her firm, gripping her hair with one hand, the opposite arm wrapping around her hips to jerk her back against him.
“There wasn’t a second, not an ounce of your pain that I didn’t fucking feel,” he snarled. “Let go of your anger long enough to sense the truth of that.”
She stood as stiff as before, the water coursing over them, brilliant white suds rinsing around them, silky soft, but not as soft as the long strands of hair caressing his body.
He could feel that rage still whipping through her, destroying both of them. Resting his forehead atop her head, he breathed out heavily, fighting against the devastation he remembered sweeping over him.
“Mutt didn’t want to stop you,” he whispered, feeling the flinch that raced through her body.
His eyes closed, remembering the sight of the other Breed’s hands on her bare arms, hearing her screams of pain and feral fury.