Page 12 of Rebel Hawke

That’s something completely different.

I shake my head, my hair falling over my face even more, allowing me to hide for one more second. “I’m not mad at you, Atlas. It’s just…a lot has changed.”

ATLAS

The painand uncertainty in her soft, sweet voice takes me aback, making me retreat a step. As far as I can remember, we left things on good terms—or as good as they could have been under those circumstances. We nevertrulygot a chance to saygoodbye. She was here one day, gone the next. But there isn’t any reason she should be uneasy around me or be acting so strange.

An undeniable urge to reassure her tugs at my gut. “I doubt that very much, Wren.”

Time has passed—a lot of it—but that doesn’t change anything between us.

At least, it shouldn’t.

Seeing her again has brought back a flood of memories—of chasing each other around the gym, heated games of hide-and-seek when I wasn’t in the ring with her grandfather, playful teasing and camaraderie with her and the other Hawke kids.

Even sometimes consoling her through tears when things with her mom got rough again. But she won’t even look at me now, keeping her back toward me while she fiddles endlessly with the contraption in front of her that clearly doesn’t need it.

Her thick, dark hair hangs down to her mid-back, like it did when we were children, and I’d tug on it to get her to react. Only now, Wren isn’t the playful little girl.

She’s all grown up.

Perfect curves in an athletic, toned body, displayed in skin-tight yoga pants that hug her ass and a long sleeve shirt that forms to well-muscled arms.

While she never liked being in the ring herself, she was always racing around the gym with me and the rest of the kids and verbally sparring with me…

Something she clearly isn’t afraid to still do. Yet she won’t just turn around and talk to me face-to-face, almost like she’s hiding from me after all these years.

Wren inhales deeply, her shoulders rising and falling before she finally turns to face me slowly. “A lot has changed, Atlas.”

My eyes meet her uneasy caramel-coffee-colored ones. Surrounded by long, thick, dark lashes and set on one of themost stunningly beautiful faces I’ve ever seen, I could so easily get lost in them.

But I allow my gaze to drift over her, landing on the scars running across the left side of her jaw and down her neck to disappear under the collar of her shirt.

Some raised and puckered.

Some smooth and shiny.

Unlike the one on my shoulder, these are older and well-healed, and they’re clearly the reason she was reluctant to see me—or, more accurately, letmeseeher.

The fire…

Imagining the pain she must have suffered hits me like a jab straight to the stomach. Worse even, because at least I’ve trained to take those and brush away any pain. But one thing I can never easily ignore or handle is seeing anyone hurt—at least, not anyone who hasn’t voluntarily put themselves into the ring.

And Wren has clearly lived through an agony I can’t even imagine.

One Mom, Dad, and Wren’s grandfather all downplayed for us when they told us she had been caught in a house fire that injured her and killed her father a few years after her move to Texas.

They were undoubtedly trying to protect all the kids from the reality of what had happened to our friend, but anger that they didn’t tell us how bad it was quickly replaces the sympathy I momentarily feel for her.

She doesn’t need or want that, just like I don’t.

It doesn’t do anyone any good.

I shake my head, reconnecting my eyes with hers and offering a grin I hope covers my reaction to knowing what she went through after she left us. “Nothing’s changed, Wren…”

She gives me a forced smile that doesn’t reach her gaze. “You’re sweet.”

No one has ever called me that.

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