Read Online Haunted Wolves: Green Pines, Book 2 by Moira Rogers - Free Book Online Page B

car. “Whatever you want, honey—”
    “Don’t say that.” Lorelei whirled around, out of his grasp, her expression fierce. “Don’t call me that, and don’t act like I’m more than a responsibility.”
    The words hit him low and hard, the pain so surprising he bit off a response without thinking. “Of course you are. You’re pack.”
    “Pack?” she repeated. “That’s bullshit. You don’t trust me to have your back. I’ve seen the way you look at me.” She lowered her voice. “You think I’m just as broken as Boz.”
    “The hell I do,” he growled. “God damn , woman.”
    “So say it.” She stepped close, right up in front of him, her face tilted up to his. “Say you think I’m fine.”
    A thousand miles of human emotion and pack instinct lay between the woman rocking blindly, her wolf caged, and the woman standing in front of him. But fine … If he tried to force out the word, she’d hear the lie on his tongue.
    “You’re hurt,” he said instead. “Not broken. Hurt.”
    Lorelei made a frustrated noise and tried to turn away, but this time he didn’t let her. He caught her shoulder and pulled her around. “I’m hurt too, all right? I’m not perfect. I’m not Jay or Fletcher, who can make the world right again. But I’m trying.”
    “Stop it—” A sob caught in her throat as she slapped at his hand. She stumbled back a single step, and smoothed her hair away from her face with shaky hands.
    This was hell. Tears and trembling and him frozen in the face of both, torn between the need to protect and the knowledge that his protection only made her feel worse.
    Overriding both was brutal common sense, along with the survival instinct he’d trusted his whole life. “Get in the car, Lorelei. You can shout at me until you’re hoarse if you want, and I won’t touch you. But we need to get out of here.”
    She didn’t argue. She didn’t say anything as she climbed into the passenger seat, buckled her safety belt and stared out the window. Colin counted himself lucky the car was still there—in one piece—and took his place behind the wheel in equal silence.
    He’d shamed her somehow. He’d belittled her, made her feel weak and small. Or maybe the night had done that—he could read between the lines well enough to see she’d lived not so differently from the people they’d met tonight. Homeless and scared on the streets, maybe even as a wolf.
    The only way to bring them back to level ground was to strip away his own armor. “I saw my first dead body when I was eight.”
    He caught it in his peripheral vision, the way her hair flew as she turned to face him. “You what?”
    “I was eight,” he continued, like they were having a conversation. Just chitchat. “My father had a job come up that he had to take, but my aunt was sick, so I couldn’t stay with her like I usually did. He brought me with him and told me to stay in the car, but I didn’t. Because I was eight.”
    “Was he a werewolf too? Was that the job?”
    “He was.” Colin tightened his grip on the wheel. “I wasn’t. I was born human, like my mother.”
    She was barely breathing, her slow, shallow breaths harsh in the quiet of the car. “What happened?”
    “My father had to put down a rogue, a wolf who was hurting girls. Hunting them, looking for a mate to turn or something, I don’t know—but he cornered the bastard and put him down. And he was getting ready to bury the body when I got bored and went looking for him.” The memory should have faded over the years, like so much of his youth, but he could still smell the dirt and the blood, could see those unblinking eyes staring up from a head wrenched to an impossible angle.
    “No,” she whispered, contradicting her own question. “Colin, you don’t have to.”
    He shook his head. “It’s who I am. It’s how it all started. Maybe I should have been traumatized, but my father clapped a hand on my shoulder and he said, ‘It’s okay, Colin. We got