Free Primal Heat 3 by A. C. Arthur Page B

shook her head vehemently, her gaze still focused on the tinted window. “No. You don’t.”
    “I do.”
    “No!” she yelled. “There’s no way you can know how I feel because you’ve never endured what I did.”
    “You are right about that. I’ve never been abused by one parent and deserted by another. But Nivea, I do know about feeling helpless to stop the rage boiling inside. I know exactly how it feels to have shit happen to you that you don’t deserve,” he told her.
    “But you got over it, right?” she asked. “You found some cure and you were better and your life moved on.”
    “No,” he told her quietly. “You’re wrong.”
    Eli inhaled deeply and let the breath out slowly.
    “I’m not better. I pretend and I deny reality. But you, you’ve done a phenomenal job overcoming your past. You’re a great guard and you’re trustworthy and loyal. You are so much better than they are, Nivea.”
    “But I’m a part of them. I’m a part of the man that kills his own kind. Or now, is selling them to the highest bidder. For the last five hours I’ve been worried sick that the woman that would blame me for her perverted husband was going to be killed. I’ve spent all these years away from my sisters in order to protect them. I didn’t send his ratchet ass to a human prison because I loved my sisters and my mother too much. What does that make me, Eli? How impossibly screwed up does that make me that I could let him get away with what he did?”
    Eli moved across the seat, chancing the anger he could almost see emanating from her body, and choosing instead to try and soothe the hurt that was so evident in her voice. He wrapped an arm around her, tried to pull her against him. She didn’t budge, but she didn’t pull away again either.
    “It makes you stronger and better than any of them, Nivea. It makes you the woman I’m damned proud to have standing beside me in battle.”
    She’d turned to him then, staring into his face so intently Eli thought she might see right through him.
    “Right,” she said quietly. “Thank you for saying that, Eli. Thank you very much.”

CHAPTER 18
    For the first time since she was seventeen years old Nivea Cannon was confused. As she sat on the edge of the bed in her room she wondered why she was here at Havenway. Why, with all that had happened to her, had she come here and trained to be a guard? She could have gone anywhere and done anything.
    Still, leaning forward with her head hung low, she was unable to figure out why here, why with these people, and why on earth was all of this coming down on her now?
    It had been two hours since they’d returned. She hadn’t been able to get out of that truck fast enough. Her throat was raw from her heavy breathing because she’d felt like she was going to suffocate on the trip back. Eli was so close to her and saying so many things, she wanted to remember them all, to believe every word, and yet she couldn’t.
    She wouldn’t. Ever again.
    Once she’d been safely behind her closed bedroom door she’d convinced herself that she needed to shake off the self-pity and go check on her sisters, but that had been thwarted by another female that she wanted to put into a headlock.
    “Orders are no visitors,” Rayna told her with a smirk.
    Nivea really hated this chick. For one, she looked at Eli like he was a piece of steak cooked just right and she couldn’t wait to sink her teeth into him. Well, to be fair, she looked at most of the shifters around Havenway in the same manner. Tramp! And two, Nivea didn’t trust her. She didn’t like the glint in her cool blue eyes and that wasn’t because she was a Lormenian either. Nivea was not prejudiced by any means. There was just something about her that screamed “watch your back” each time Nivea was in her presence. The fact that she’d managed to save Shya Delgado may have bought her some get-out-of-jail-forever tickets with Rome and Nick, but Nivea was still holding strong