Page 21 of Lost Touch

Please. I’m sorry.

Inadequate, yeah. But no other words would’ve changed anything either, and he obviously knew that too.

I forced myself to meet his eyes. When he looked at me like that, all glowy and intense, I had to fight the urge to duck my head and simply do whatever he wanted.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded. “That you—they did something to you. Why didn’t you say anything?”

Drew swallowed hard, and his eyes dimmed a fraction. “I didn’t want to worry you. And,” he went on, glancing down and away—and shit, had I really won a staring contest with an alpha werewolf? I ought to put that on a T-shirt—“I didn’t want to admit to myself that I…” He trailed off into a mumble.

Yeah, that was just freaking great. Hehadbeen in denial, and then he’d nearly—killed me? No. That might’ve been less terrifying, if he’d almost killed me.

He’d almost raped me.

I had to be able to think it, at least, even if I couldn’t imagine saying it. Maybe I was furious, but I also couldn’t bring myself to put it out there. He knew it as well as I did. I thought hearing it aloud might break him even more than it’d break me.

He’d been trying to protect me. Maybe not in the best way, and maybe not in the smartest way, and he’d obviously been a little too arrogantly confident that he could keep himself under control.

But he’d been trying to protect me.

And we’d been in that place together. They’d taken my memory and my nerve sensation, hurt me and wrecked me and left me a shell of myself.

But they’d taken something from Drew, too. I didn’t know what to call it, exactly, although I supposed control wasn’t the worst word for it. The thought of Drew,thisDrew, repentant and distressed and more anxious about whether he’d hurt me than about his own breakdown, taking me by force up against his washing machine…well, it didn’t compute.

That had been him, but…it also hadn’t been him. He’d been catering to my every need to try to help me with what had been done to me.

I owed him what help I could give him, too. And maybe I could only help him by putting my faith in the essential person he was underneath whatever changes they’d made to him.

I unpeeled my fingers from the steering wheel and opened the car door, Drew stumbling back and out of the way.

That little failure of his usual predatory grace leached away the last of my anger—at him, anyway.They’re all dead, I reminded myself.He killed them all. To save you. He already had his revenge.Our revenge.

It didn’t help that much.

I shut the door behind me, standing there in the chilly garage with a lump in the concrete floor digging into the bottom of my foot, face to face with Drew and his…everything. I couldn’t help glancing down, my eyes drawn like a magnet. Jesus fucking Christ. He had to be a shower not a grower, right? Because if that got much bigger…except that I remembered, far too vividly, how his erection had felt pressed against my back. And it had been even bigger than that.

So he showedandgrew. That didn’t seem fair, somehow. I swallowed hard and forced myself to look up again.

“You need to get dressed,” I said, making the understatement of the year. That enormous cock kept drawing my eyes, and the rest of him kind of kept drawing my eyes too, actually. “And then we have to talk. Really talk. No more keeping me in the dark. It’s a lot more worrisome for me to not know when you’re going to snap and try to—I’ll be less worried if I know what the hell is going on with you. At least then we can deal with it somehow.”

Drew blew out a long breath, reaching up to rub the back of his neck in a gesture that I’d already learned was habitual. That it made his biceps bulge and flex like that had to be a coincidence. His arms alone looked like weapons of mass destruction, totally aside from the claws and the teeth and the everything else.

We really,reallyhad to deal with it somehow, whatever that meant. If Drew went nuts again, I’d be toast.

Possibly well-fucked toast. A tremor ran through me, settling in the pit of my stomach.

And I really,reallyneeded to find out what the hell “differences in sexual function” meant. Just in case.

“Yeah,” Drew breathed out. “Yeah. In a second. I need to—you know I need to check you out.” That hung in the air for a second. “Check on you! Check you for—I need to make sure you’re not hurt.”

A deep-red flush crept up his neck and took over most of his face, but his features had set.

He meant it.

I needed him to get dressed before he touched me. But he didn’t seem to be moving, so I gave in and rolled up my left sleeve. “My arm gave out on me when I stood up. But I don’t think anything else got hurt at all.”

Drew approached me warily, holding his hands out slowly enough that I might’ve told him to get on with it under other circumstances.

When his big, warm hand wrapped around my wrist, I gave a little shiver.

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