Free Wolf (The Henchmen MC #3) by Jessica Gadziala Page A

wasn't one I felt fit to play. But he had been so good to me, so understanding, undemanding. I owed it to him to try.
    My hand raised slowly, his hand still holding it at the wrist, and moved to the side of his face, resting there. "I don't regret you. It's weird and it's warped and I'm pretty sure I need therapy for thinking this, let alone admitting it... but I've felt okay here. That sounds strange," I said, searching for the right words. I seemed full of the wrong ones all of a sudden. I sucked in a breath and charged on, ignoring the sharp twisting inside that was trying to make me clam up, to keep him from getting any further under my walls. "It's like... I feel like every day of my life for eight years I have been wearing a mask. I try to hide it, disguise it, pretend it isn't there. But it's there and all I've accomplished by denying it is making sure no one can ever really know me. No one. Not even Lo. It's... made me unknowable. It has made me alone even in a room full of friends. But you..."
    "Saw under the mask," he supplied when the words failed me.
    I felt myself nodding. "I don't need to pretend here. It's... safe here." I threw myself onto my back on a strange, hysterical-sounding laugh, covering my face with my hands. "Like I said... I think that proves I need some serious head shrinking."
    My arms were snagged at the wrists and pulled away. "Stop hiding," he said with a pointed brow raise. Then he reached across my body and grabbed my book off the bed where it had fallen when I passed out. He pressed it into my hands, reaching down and dragging the blankets back over our bodies. He settled in beside me, one arm draped across my belly. At my questioning look, he settled his head into the space above my shoulder. "You won't sleep," he said simply, knowing it was the truth. "You read. I'll sleep."
    And there it was: acceptance.
    He knew.
    He saw.
    And he didn't shrink away; he didn't look at me any different.
    He saw and he accepted.
    His breath warmed my neck and chest, his arm was a comforting weight across my middle, his massive body beside me, curled toward me, offering protection.
    And, again, the word flashed across my mind, it burrowed deep into my soul:
    Safe.
    I was safe.
    So I read. And Wolf slept.
     

EIGHT
     
    Janie
     
     
    Wolf's body didn't move all night, my sleeping, stalwart protector. He drifted awake a few minutes after I finished the book, turning his face in toward my neck slightly and planting a soft kiss there. My stomach clenched at the normalcy of it, the casual intimacy, like he did it every morning. But then he rolled away casually, looking up at the ceiling for a moment. "Good book?"
    I almost wanted to laugh. "Yeah," I said, smiling wide at his profile, a happiness inside me that felt foreign and almost overwhelming.
    His head tilted in my direction, his eyes drifting over my face for a long moment and I watched as something strange happened, a shutter closed down over his eyes. While the honey-colored depths always hinted at a bit of distance, there had always been an openness there. Right then, it was gone completely. He shut down. He shut me out.
    "Shower first," he commanded, bolting off the bed and making his way toward the door, Harley and Chopper jumping up to follow.
    The door slammed and I sat up slowly staring at it. What the hell was that? Like, I got that he had walls. There was nothing about Wolf that suggested he had escaped from his past unscathed and completely well-adjusted. I mean he couldn't have a normal conversation for chrissake. Suddenly, I found myself wanting to know every detail. He implied he had done something bad, something that didn't help him, but had helped his mother. Did he do something to his father? Or his mother's boyfriend or something? I wanted to know. I wanted to know every gory detail.
    I'd looked into Wolf. A year ago when Hailstorm decided to work with The Henchmen, I dug deep and tried to find more than the surface information we had