Total pages in book: 115
Estimated words: 109329 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 547(@200wpm)___ 437(@250wpm)___ 364(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109329 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 547(@200wpm)___ 437(@250wpm)___ 364(@300wpm)
He huffed in annoyance. His foot crinkled the material.
“Will you shift?” he asked.
“Yeah. A nap will help me heal. Actually, while you’re here, can you do me a favor and set an alarm? We have that dinner tonight with Aljoe’s sisters.”
“You’re not going to be fit for anything until tomorrow morning.”
“Usually in the middle of the night I’m pretty decent, actually. That’s when I shower and move to my bed. Jessie is scheduled to heal me in an hour or so, though. I’ll be fine in plenty of time to walk back for the dinner.”
“Jesus,” he said under his breath, walking toward the hall.
“Susan, you are messing with protocol.”
It was a joke he clearly didn’t find funny.
All the doors were open. He stepped into her room, surely knowing it by her smell. He hesitated. She nodded before she fell asleep.
He started forward again. Hopefully she’d made her bed and put away her underwear. She didn’t usually have people in here. If she met someone, she went to his house so she could leave when she was done. She’d never much liked sleeping in other people’s beds. She’d earned a reputation as a hit-it-and-quit-it girl, but…they kept coming back, so clearly that wasn’t a bad thing. Then again, gargoyles never cared about the details, and she was primarily interested in gargoyles right now.
He stepped through into the bathroom connecting her and Nessa’s rooms. A large tub sat below a window at the far wall, the jets broken but the basin deep. He knelt beside it and gently lowered her in.
“Susan, honestly, I don’t need the white-glove treatment. I’m not as bad as I seem.”
“You are worse than you seem. You’re just determined and resilient and too hardheaded to acknowledge it.” He ever so gently smoothed her hair back so that it was pooled on the tile at the back of the tub. “Is he pushing you this hard, or are you pushing yourself and he’s letting you?”
“In some things he pushes me hard, but it’s usually mental or endurance. Not pain. When I end up like this, it’s because I refuse to stay down. His beast usually has him by then, and it waits longer to call off the fight. We have three months until the conclave. I want to show strength.”
He grunted, acceding that she was at fault for her condition. Some would still argue that her trainer was her guardian, and he should protect her from herself, but when alphas were involved, with their power and their beasts, everything edged a little closer to danger. The red line became narrower. It was practice for reality. For the hard challenges that would eventually come. And in the convocation, with the battles on the horizon, it might be what helped her survive.
Drawers opened and closed, and this time, she let her eyes stay closed.
“Do you have a neck pillow?” he asked.
“No. I should get one, though.”
The hot and cold water knobs squeaked as they were turned.
“Please don’t tell me you’re going to put salt in here,” she said, sleep dragging at her.
“I’m going to put salt in there.”
But as the warm water filled the tub, the stinging/burning sensation of salt didn’t come. He was poking fun at her.
A thought belatedly occurred to her, but before she could ask it, she’d drifted too far to pull herself out of the fog of sleep.
Running water lifted her out of sleep. She opened her groggy eyes as warmth swirled around her mostly healed legs. Sue sat beside the tub in one of the dining room chairs, head tilted forward, looking at his phone.
“Hey,” she said, and then cleared her somewhat scratchy throat.
Without glancing at her, he leaned down on his other side and came up with a water bottle. He balanced it on his lap to switch phone hands before holding it out for her.
She furrowed her brow in confusion but chuckled a little at the absurdity of the situation.
Also without ripping his eyes away from his phone, he turned off the water.
Wondering what on his phone had him so engrossed, and also why he was still here, she took a swig of her water…and then emptied it. She was dying of thirst. Healing always had that effect.
She set the water bottle down on the little band of tile circling the side of the tub. He took it, shook it, and finally looked up from his phone.
“Need more?” he asked.
Yes, but it wasn’t like she was going to ask the beta of the pack to go get her some.
“No, I’m—”
He got up without a word, slipping his phone into his pocket as he did so. The man was a little too good at reading body language. She’d have to work harder to keep her tells hidden.
With a sigh, she dunked herself into the warm water, dragging in all her hair. When she’d surfaced, he was sitting down again. He held out the water bottle.