“I don’t think I do. You are so much more than you know, Morgan.”
“And you know nothing of me.”
“Then tell me.” She leaned forward, deliberately working the muscles of her legs. “If you have suffered… I want to help you as you have helped me. I owe you so much. Let me repay at least a little.”
He started for the door, and stopped. Every nerve burned with conflicting urges. Run. Stay. Avoid her at all costs. Take her. Possess her. Make her yours forever.
“There are many who care about you, Morgan,” she said behind him. “You do not want to owe anyone… and you don’t want anyone owing you. Do you think I have not seen that time and again in my work?”
“Among your charity cases?” he snapped. “Those who are too weak to survive on their own, and too proud to admit it?”
“The circus needed your help, and you gave it. You could have left, but you stayed. You had no reason to encourage me, yet you did. I cannot understand you, Morgan… and yet, somehow, I do.”
“You are a child.”
“I had a father who loved me, and a brother who protects me even when he is too diligent. Perhaps I let myself be protected. But who protected you?”
“I don’t need protection.”
She paused, and he thought he had driven her from the subject. But she was not finished.
“You lost your family when you were young,” she said. “But you have a new family now. Caitlin, and Ulysses, everyone in the circus. They are all your friends. And Harry regards you as a son.”
He couldn’t bear it. The bit of conversation he had heard between her and Harry, when he had left the bags by the door—that had been more than he wanted to know. And yet he had envied their easy intimacy, the affection between parent and child. His last conversation with Aaron Holt had been… best forgotten.
“What was your father like?” she asked.
He turned on her. “He was a dreamer, a wastrel, a man who could not care for his family.” He closed his eyes, seeing the haggard, agonized, pleading face that bore so little resemblance to the man he had known in boyhood. “He left my mother…”
Too hard. Too much. “I went looking for him,” he said. “To bring him home.”
“Did you find him?”
She seemed to sense the enormity of what she asked, for her voice had grown very small. He smiled brutally. “I found him.”
“You hated him,” she whispered. “Oh, Morgan—”
Was that pity in her eyes, her voice? Was she reaching out, her fingers poised to stroke his cheek, pat his hair as if he were a disconsolate child—one of her precious, pitiful orphans?
He moved faster than human eyes could see and grasped her about the wrist.
“Don’t pity me,” he growled. “Don’t you dare pity me.”
He crouched over her, his legs to either side of her hips, pinning her arms to the bed. Athena understood, oh, yes, she knew—but she was calm, unafraid.
He did not want her fear. He wanted… he wanted…
“Morgan—”
He silenced her once more with his lips.
Chapter 15
Athena knew better than to show fear. The wolf was in Morgan’s eyes, in his need, and she knew she had pressed too quickly.
But she needed, too. She needed to understand him, and now—as he kissed her with a harshness that swiftly transformed into a hungry caress—she realized she needed something far more physical.
The very physical desires she had denied herself, knowing that no man would be able to satisfy them even should he wish to bother with a cripple. The entirely selfish fulfillment that benefitted no one but herself.
Now she had begun to want—not dream, not wish, but actively seek what had not been within her grasp until this moment.
That frightened her as Morgan himself could not. Her legs had begun to waken from their long sleep, but she hadn’t reckoned how every other part of her would so brilliantly come alive at his touch.
It had happened before, with him, but not like this. His fingers tangled in her loosened hair, fiercely holding her still as he kissed her with all the thoroughness she had imagined in her waking dream downstairs.