The landscaper fought only defensively and was hampered by carefully holding his arachnid friend, but still managed to block most of Neal’s rain of blows, absorbing the rest with an impressive show of imperviousness. Mary had never seen such combat outside of movies, and was stunned by the ferocity and might of Neal’s attack.
Finally, she managed to get enough of a hold on herself to shift back to her human form, and she ran forward, knowing she had to try to stop this. “Neal, no! He didn’t do anything, it’s okay! It wasn’t him!”
The look he leveled at her was feral and full of panic, but faded abruptly at her words, and he pulled the blow he was landing, letting the momentum of it pull him forwards into a slumping crouch. Mary went to him at once, putting her hands on his shoulders without hesitation. He flinched, then looked up in chagrin. “I’m sorry, Graham.”
The gardener wiped away a trail of blood from his mouth and shrugged, looking genuinely unconcerned as he turned to gently deposit the spider gently onto a branch.
“It was just a spider,” Mary explained soothingly. “I walked into a spiderweb, and it scared me. That’s all that happened. I guess… it was a shifter spider?” She looked at Graham for some confirmation, but he only scowled at her and then walked past them, not offering an explanation before he vanished down the path.
Neal’s shoulder shook beneath her hand and Mary realized after a moment that it was a weak laugh. “No,” Neal said wryly. “I’m sure it was just a regular spider.”
Chapter Twelve
Neal knew he was a fool.
Graham may not hold the attack against him, but he’d humiliated himself in front of Mary, and proved his unworthiness beyond a shadow of a doubt. He hadn’t stopped to think when he saw the deer, and Mary’s clothing loose on its form. The flash of her fear had been driving his steps, and between his wolf snarling for freedom inside of him and the rush of adrenaline at the thought of his mate in danger, he’d made a snap attack, not pausing or assessing. It was the worst kind of behavior in a soldier—a terrible slip of control.
No one who was whole, who was thinking clearly, would have reacted so poorly. Surely Mary must know how broken he was now.
“I’m sorry.”
Mary’s hands on his shoulders felt like weights of guilt, like judgment, and Neal was surprised when she kn
elt in the damp grass beside him, one arm still draped around him.
The press of her body at his side was distracting. The buttons of her blouse had popped off when she shifted, and it hung loosely now, open in the front to show glimpses of her luscious breasts as she moved.
“You seem to apologize to me a lot,” she observed without judgment.
“I’m broken,” he said. The simple words came out without effort, and he was astonished by how much better he felt for having said them.
Mary didn’t try to deny his words, and Neal was grateful for that. “Broken things are worth fixing,” she said gently. “You’re worth fixing. You don’t have to be sorry, you just… have to let me in.”
Neal lifted his eyes from the mesmerizing curves under her open blouse and looked into her face.
She looked back without wavering, which was something Neal couldn’t do with his own reflection, and the compassion and emotion in her eyes undid something old and rusty in his chest.
“I don’t know how to do that,” he confessed. He could be nothing but truthful with her.
“Just trust me,” Mary told him simply, as if trusting her was just that easy.
And unexpectedly, it was.
Morning flowed into noon as he told her everything—everything that had happened to him, and its consequences. It streamed from him in a rush of words that he couldn’t stop and didn’t try.
He told her everything backwards, from the escape of Beehag’s prison to the terrible ten years of his stay there. The dart at his throat, and the journey to the Costa Rican island where he was caged and tormented into remaining in wolf form. He recounted the day he was in South America, on the first day of their mission to stop the turncoat Marine who was using school children to shelter his drug business. He even told her about Afghanistan, from years earlier, and the nightmares he had suffered ever since, and they laughed together about playing kick the can in the cul-de-sac, growing up in different small towns.
Mary added her own observations occasionally, but mostly she listened. Not once did she act shocked or judgmental about his revelations to her. She just absorbed everything he told her with solemn attention.
Neal’s voice was raw and hoarse by the time he came to what he felt was the end of his narration, or the beginning. The sun, dappled through the plumeria tree above him, had burned off the clouds and dried the lawn. Downhill from them, the gazelle was grazing. She was in earshot, he thought, with those big dish-like ears, but strangely, the idea didn’t bother him.
He sat with Mary in silence for a long moment. It felt comfortable and natural, as nothing had felt in a very long time. He’d gotten used to feeling tightly coiled and filled with anger, and he felt strangely empty now. Empty—and yet filled at the same time, because of the woman who sat beside him.
“You helped all the other shifters go home, after you were freed from the prison?” she finally asked.
“Almost all of them,” Neal agreed, looking out over the green carpet to where the gazelle was pretending to ignore them.
“But not yourself.”