Page 12 of Running on Empty

“Do you want to watch an action movie? It’s what I watch when I’m trying to wind down after a rough night,” he replied.

“Yeah, sure, but I can—”

He grabbed the remote from my limp fingers and lay back down again to navigate through the streaming service to get to the action movies. He flicked past the first few offerings then paused on a movie that I didn’t recognise.

“What about this one?” He shot me a sly smile. “Guy goes fucking nuts on a revenge spree and—”

“Sold,” I said. I wasn’t too fussed about what was on the screen, because I planned to just burrow down in the pillows and try and ground myself. It might not be my nest, but with Ronan’s familiar scent and the softness of the pillows, it’d do—at a pinch. But then, before I could relax, his arm snaked around me and he pulled me into his side as he clicked on the movie to bring it up. Which just meant that, as the opening sequence played, I felt my body coil tight.

Because this felt like the calm before the storm, in the same way that, when I was growing up, the growing tensions around my house would set my teeth on edge. A slammed door, a harsh look, a sharp word, it’d all herald what was to come. But Ronan stayed calm, relaxed. He just reached his free hand for a water bottle from his bedside table and passed it over to me.

“Drink that before the first shootout scene,” he told me.

“Or?”

Despite my emotions still flipping around and my primal reactions coming into play, I was starting to feel like my personality was slowly coming back online. The first part of me to do so was the one that didn’t take kindly to alphas bossing me around. Which made sense. Ronan shifted to his side to look down at me with a raised eyebrow and a challenging smile. But when that brought his face way too close to mine, my lizard brain kicked in again and I pulled my head as far back against the pillows as I could. His smile faded as he realised the reason for my reaction.

“No threats, Stevie, just consequences. You’re dehydrated and your head must be hurting.” I nodded. He pulled away, searching in his top drawer before producing a couple of Panadol and handing them to me. “Get them into you and drink that water. You’ll start to feel a whole lot better.”

That was incentive enough for me. My body felt like lead, as if I’d squeezed out of it all the sensation it could muster, but even so, as I lay there, I felt something when he put his arm back around me. He curled me closer, so that my head ended up resting on his chest and oddly that was the most intimate thing that had happened to me in the last twenty-four hours. I watched the actors move on the screen, heard their dialogue, but only partly, because my focus was on his breath coming and going, the beat of his heart slow and steady in my ears. Then the realisation of what we were sharing made me try and pull away.

“Don’t.” Just one word, then a sigh, and his hand went to my shoulder. “If this is hurting you or making you feel bad then roll over but…”

But what if it wasn’t? That’s what he was asking. What if I stayed exactly where I was, listening to the music of his body? It was far more compelling than the movie on the screen. A longer sigh escaped him as I relaxed again, my whole body going limp, as he stroked his hand back and forth between my shoulder blades. As my eyes grew heavy, I lost the ability to keep track of the plot for more than a few minutes at a time, and then my own sigh shuddered through me as darkness reached up to pull me down into sleep.

The absence of pain, both physical and mental, was far more seductive than anything else anyone had done, so I dived into it with all I had, seeking a far greater oblivion than the night before.

My wolf staredat me in the darkness. She paced back and forth, then let out a little chuff of breath, as if that was supposed to mean something, that same damn whine ringing in my ears. But her nervous energy was contagious. Of course it was, she was the other side of myself and my human side fought the rise up out of the darkness. It was cool down here, still and quiet. I didn’t feel, didn’t think, didn’t… anything until my eyes fluttered open and saw him lying there.

There was something almost boyish about Ronan deep in sleep, his mouth slack, his breath coming in long slow whistles. The TV had been turned off, so there was nothing to distract me from him. His scent, woody, resinous, like a pine forest, filled my nose, as his arm flexed, drawing me closer. I had to put my hands out and press them against his chest to stop him from smooshing my face against him. When I did, I felt it.

I’d fucked the Spencer pack in as many ways a human could, but all I had from that was fleeting memories and a whole lot of pain. So why did my fingertips feel like they were being seared as soon as I touched Ronan? He didn’t have an inch of softness on him, his chest hard planes of muscle that my hands were now pressed into. I needed to pull away, to wiggle out of his grip and put a whole lot of distance between us. I could run across their back lawn and jump over the fence like I was a kid, and as soon as I thought that, I knew it was what I had to do. His brow creased when I started to move, a small sound of protest slipping from his lips. So I stopped right where I was until his breath evened out again, which gave me a chance to study that magnificent body.

Ronan didn’t walk around without a shirt on, ever. That’s why I’d never seen his back tattoo. Even working out in the hot sun with his brothers, he’d have a tank top on or something. And as my eyes slid down the long lines of his body, following the path of his happy trail, I began to understand why. In neat little lines following the V of his hips, there were fine scars. As I ran my eyes back up his torso, I registered more, curling across the left hand side of his chest. Before I’d even thought about it, my hand jerked up and went to touch them but I pulled it back in time. My eyes narrowed trying to make sense of what I saw, and it was as though he sensed my visual exploration. He let out a snort of breath before rolling away from me, curling up into a ball on his opposite side.

There was nothing more to keep me in Ronan’s bed, now that he had let go of me, and it was past time I got home. So why did I search for further evidence of those scars, frowning when I saw more of them on his thighs? I shook my head at myself, unsure of what was motivating me. Gathering my resolve, I forced myself to ease off the bed in slow, even movements, displacing my weight cautiously enough not to wake him. I crept towards the door, daring to take one more look at him before opening the door and slipping out.

“Tryingto nick off home without us noticing?”

The abrupt comment had me freezing without taking another step, my heart rate sky-rocketing. Ash and Jax were just sitting in the lounge room, watching me leave Ronan’s room. From the look of things, including the fact that the TV wasn’t on, it appeared they had been waiting for me, rather than sitting up for a movie marathon.

“You were sexually assaulted,” Ash stated baldly, those flat blue eyes noting the way I flinched at his words. “And we need to talk about what to do about that.”

Chapter8

"What?” Those words,sexual assault, felt too big, too serious to be said in anyone’s lounge room. “No, that’s not what happened. The timer was almost up with them and I went there with every intention of sleeping with them.”

“The timer?” Jax said.

Shit, they didn’t know about that. I raked my hand through my now knotty hair. I hadn’t brushed it before going to sleep and now it was a mess.

“It doesn’t matter,” I forged on. “I said I was up for a wild night. We were going to fuck”—both men seemed to flinch at that— “and we did. It might’ve gotten out of hand…” My hand slid down, feeling that persistent bruised feeling in my pelvis. Beyond the fun of a good hard fuck, it was achy like a period cramp. “And we might have done things I didn’t sign up for.”

I frowned then, catching hold of a few more memories, a rapid flicker of images, and each one was more disturbing than the next. I’d been hungry, rapacious and biddable, scrambling to do whatever they wanted as they laughed…

“But they didn’t force me.”

“Did they ask you if you wanted to take Rush?” Ash asked, getting to his feet. “Did they explain what it would do and get your explicit consent?”

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