Page 100 of Running on Empty

“No.” I let out a long sigh. “Someone needs to be here to watch Stevie and I… I need to do this on my own right now. You know I’ll share anything I find out.”

“Yeah, you will.”

It was weird seeing the intense gaze of Ronan’s, his murder eyes, we called them, directed at me, but I was pretty sure I was safe. It’d gut Stevie if anything happened to me and he couldn’t let that happen. But the minute I walked out the door of the cottage, some of the exhaustion seemed to fade away, so I strode forward, down the pretty path, past the gardens and fields full of horses and to here.

Chapter58

Jax

Charlie had turned one of the rooms built inside the stables into her office, so towards the stables I went. As soon as I stepped inside the building though, I saw her office door was open and empty and the space between the two rows of horse stalls was filled with people. Four people in particular.

“Jax, right?” Cooper Murphy said, strolling over and then holding out a can of beer. I took it because fuck, it was un-Australian not to. I’d intended to just hold the thing as I quizzed them about their mate’s whereabouts, but the man slung an arm around my shoulders and steered me over to the wood barrel his brothers were standing around.

“How’s it going?” Archer asked, looking me over carefully, as if those pale blue eyes of his could see every line of exhaustion on my face.

I was going to give a pat response, just brush him off, but as I joined the group, the will to do that just seemed to fizzle out.

“It’s fucked,” I replied, cracking the beer can after all and drinking down a big mouthful. “I came over to see Charlie.”

“She had to go into town for a meeting,” Seb replied, those dark brown eyes searching mine. “Anything we can help with?”

I blinked, not having considered that they could, but when I looked them over, my heart sank. What the hell would they know? They were just alphas like me.

“Stevie’s shut down,” Seb observed and that got my attention.

“What…?”

“We haven’t seen her take a step outside the cottage since you got here a few days ago,” Lock said. “It was happening on the plane ride back. She wouldn’t let you put her down.”

“I didn’t want to,” I growled. “I couldn’t.”

Lock nodded slowly.

“She needed everything you had to give, the comfort of being close to her mate, but…” Lock tipped his beer back, taking a long hard swallow before crumpling the empty can. “But sometimes it’s not enough. Sometimes your omega is hurting too much.”

“You know…” I stopped my line of questioning, searching each man’s face. “Charlie was like that?”

“Worse.” Lock’s mouth became a thin line, his eyes flicking to his brothers, then back to me. “We were the ones that hurt her.” A small clearing of throats around the room. “Well, I did.”

“We all did,” Seb corrected, “though it was your fucking bright idea.”

“Something I have apologised for many times,” Lock replied.

“It’s why we weren’t keen on Charlie coming on the mission,” Coop said, trying for a smile, then failing. “It was nice, being the good guys for once. Because if our omega was going to go on a blood soaked vendetta, she’d have enlisted fellas like your brothers to come after us. We broke our omega’s heart so fucking thoroughly I’m pretty sure she thought she would never find anyone to love.” He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Then we had to try and find a way through that when we came back from deployment.”

“And you were able to?” I looked at them incredulously, but then realised I knew the answer. “You did. You’re together now. So how did you do it?”

“Really fucking badly at the start,” Cooper replied and Archer snorted as he rolled his eyes. “We thought it was just a matter of some nice chocolates and some flowers.”

“You thought that,” Archer muttered. “I wasn’t that fucking stupid.”

“Nope, Archer had a way in from the start.” Lock slapped his brother on the shoulder. “He knew that we’d always end up together and so didn’t burn so many bridges.”

“It wasn’t just that.” Archer gave his brother the side eye, then focused on me. “I just turned up. Every day in every way I could, I was there for my omega.”

“But I’m trying to do that,” I said. “I feel like an old mother hen, clucking around her, trying to get her to eat something, drink something, then soothing her again.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

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