Three weeks. He had come into her life just three weeks before, and he had become such a part of it that now she wondered how she was going to do without him.
She looked at the window again. She really should run from him.
A tear slid down her cheek instead, because she couldn't run from him. But she could never have him, either.
CHAPTER SIX
It wasn't a nightmare. The next morning Grace awoke to the knowledge that she couldn't just escape the events from the night before any more than she could escape Matthias, and she couldn't run from them. She brushed her hair and teeth, stared at her pale reflection, then grimaced and headed to the kitchen. She could smell coffee, and she was dying for it. The need for caffeine was crawling through her system, with the same craving that desire for Matthias was clenching between her thighs. Dreams had tormented her through the night. Dreams, nothing, she had been tormented with visions of sexual delights that had her blushing at the thought of them. She should have had nightmares of blood and death, not dreams about what that bulge beneath those black leather pants could do to her.
"Good morning." He came to his feet from the kitchen table, another pair of leather pants covering his muscular legs. His feet and chest were bare.
Grace stared at the broad, hairless chest, as she came to a sudden stop. She'd been wanting to see that
nipple ring she had glimpsed under his T-shirt. Now that she was seeing it, her mouth watered, her lips tingled with the need to capture it, to tug on it.
But as sexy as the sight of it was, nothing could detract from the thin white scars that crisscrossed his chest and abdomen.
He pulled a shirt from the back of the chair and shrugged it on, covering the horrific scars. They weren't thick and ridged, but they crisscrossed his flesh like a road map.
"Sorry about that." He turned away from her, walking across the cheerful, bright kitchen, buttoning the black shirt. "I made coffee."
She couldn't help it. Grace moved quickly across the room, facing him as he turned back to her.
"I have to see it," she whispered, her fingers going to the buttons of his shirt. "All of it, Matthias. You don't have the right to hide it from me now."
His hard, sharply defined features tightened, as her fingers undid the buttons of his shirt. She pushed the cotton shirt from his wide shoulders, and tossed it over a chair.
"Did he do this?" she whispered, her fingertips touching the evidence of the cruelty he had experienced. Some of the scars were older, almost invisible. Tough, darkly tinted flesh rippled under her touch, as he glared down at her.
"He enjoyed using the whip. The scientists needed to know under what conditions we couldn't fight or complete our objectives. We were put through a variety of simulations. Torture being the favorite of them all. If we didn't succeed in the objective given us, we died." Her breath hitched in her throat, as tears flooded her eyes. She followed the scars on his chest, his side, then moved around him to stare at his back.
"Oh, God, Matthias." The scarring was worse on his back. She leaned her forehead against his back, clenching her eyes tight at the incredible pain he must have endured.
"It doesn't hurt any longer, Grace," he assured her.
Grace lifted her head, her gaze going to his shoulders. On his left shoulder was the Breed marker. A genetic shadow of a paw print. Within that print, four blood-red teardrops had been tattooed into his flesh. Around the paw, a precise tattoo of what appeared to be dark smoke had been drawn, a single feather, tipped with blood, caught within it.
"Why this one?" She touched the bloodstained feather wrapped in wire.
"The price of submission," he growled.
"And this one?" A line of carefully disguised bones, wrapped in the same barbed wire, the wire twisting from the base of his spine to the middle of it.
"Friends who died for their freedom," he answered.
"And this?" She touched the blood red teardrops encased by smoke.
"The tattoo was made by a tribal medicine man. It's a protection symbol, to hold the evil within it from marking my soul." His voice was heavy, filled with pain.
"The teardrops are the evil?" She asked. "Why?"
"They mark each Council member I've killed."
Grace froze, her fingers trembling over the four markers.
"The larger one denotes a directorate member. The two medium-sized ones are scientists, the smallest are trainers. I don't bother to list the coyote soldiers, they aren't worth the need for protection." Disgust for those Breeds colored his voice.
"And Albrecht will add to it," she whispered. "What happens when you run out of room?"
"Then I return for another protected circle and begin again." His back tightened, as rage thrummed in his voice.
"And does it help the nightmares?" she asked, "or make them worse?" Matthias stared over the room, his soul bleak at the sound of her voice. He could hear the pain and compassion in her voice, the need to understand. And despite the blood that stained his hands, all he could think about was touching her.
"Sometimes, it stills the nightmares," he answered, as he turned to her. "And sometimes, they only grow worse."
His hands gripped her shoulders, the softness of the cotton hiding the warmth of her flesh from him.
"Would you stop?" she asked.
Matthias could see the hope in her eyes, the innocence. That innocence alternately lightened his soul and weighed it down. He had never meant for her to know what he was, he had thought he could keep that part of what he did hidden after he claimed her.
Because he couldn't stop.
"We have other things to discuss," he said, rather than answering her. "We need to discuss us ."
"There's no us , Matthias." The regret in her voice tore at him. "I won't report what I saw, but whatever we had is over."
She tried to move away from his touch. Despite the arousal he knew she felt, the tender feelings he knew hadn't died, still, she moved away from him.
Once she had come to him with a smile, her pretty eyes lighting up in pleasure. Now, her dove-gray eyes were dark and shadowed, knowing the truth of what he was.
"It doesn't work that way." He had to tell her the truth. He couldn't force her into the mating, as much as he wanted to. He couldn't pull her into it without her knowledge.