Page 50 of Alpha's Secret Baby Girl
The demon hunts again. Gwen dragged her hands through her hair, catching on a few knots. The physical reminder that she wasn’t keeping up her grooming habits made her wince. The stress was getting to them all.
“I need to talk to him,” she said, though she didn’t addwhy. Perhaps if she had Michael pass along the message or even text Rafael…
But that seemed cruel. It would put him in a state of panic that he couldn’t fix until they were able to actually talk, and besides that, if he was close to the demon, a distraction could get him killed. She kicked the floor and pressed her hands over her face, trying to straighten out her thoughts.
“He’s been acting more obsessed than usual,” Michael said, his voice careful. “Ever since he called the doctor here after one of your training sessions.”
Gwen dropped her hands again. “He didn’t tell you?”
Michael shook his head. Gwen hesitated. Was there a reason Rafael didn’t tell him? Or rather, what was the reason? She wasn’t sure that Rafael would want her to tell Michael what she saw if he hadn’t done it himself. Or maybe he would, because he couldn’t bring himself to say the words.
Goddess, life was confusing.
“I had a vision about how your father and mother died,” Gwen said, making up her mind. She explained as concisely as possible, sticking to the facts. She didn’t tell him about how Rafael had reacted, nor the questions he’d asked afterward.
When she was done, Michael took off his glasses and pulled a handkerchief—an honest-to-goodness handkerchief complete with embroidered pine needles—to clean them. Whenhe put the glasses back on, he gave one curt nod. “That explains it, then.”
“Explains what? He’s been avoiding me. He’s—”
“Not avoiding you,” Michael corrected gently.
Gwen frowned. “Not sure what else to call it. He’s never home. When he is, he barely speaks to me.”
“He’s not avoiding you,” Michael said, more firmly this time. “If he were avoiding you, you wouldn’t see him at all. You have to understand, Rafael wasn’t allowed to display emotion. He had it worse than I did, because most times, Randall couldn’t be bothered with me. But he was always under the microscope, not only from our father but the whole pack. When he’s hurt, the only way he knows to deal with it is to outsource that pain.”
Gwen inhaled sharply.
Michael grimaced and ran a hand through his dark hair. “No, that’s not right. What I mean is that he looks to fix other people’s pain. Other people’s problems. It’s as though he thinks by making their pain go away, some of his will, too. It’s one of the reasons he’s worked so hard to turn the pack around.”
“I don’t understand where you’re going with this,” Gwen said. Her fingers itched to pull out her phone and demand that Rafael return. But what if he’d been separated from the special ops, the demon was stalking him, and he had to hide?
Or, more likely, he’d left his phone behind when he shifted to do the patrol.
“We never got anything close to closure with our parents. Our father remained a bastard to the end, and our mother never broke free of him,” Michael told her. “That pain lingers. So Rafael has been fixing things among the pack, righting pastwrongs, as a way to try to make up for… well, for being Randall’s son but also for not being able to save our mother.”
“And now that he knows that the demon killed them… the only way he can deal with this fresh grief is to try to stop it from hurting anyone else and to avenge your parents,” Gwen murmured, her shoulders slumping as understanding dawned.
“There’s going to be guilt, too. If I know my brother, he’s wondering if there was more to our father than he allowed himself to see. He’s thinking, ‘Maybe I could have saved both of them from him.’ And he’s going to be thinking about himself, and that stupid move he pulled with you when you came back.”
Gwen frowned deeply at him.
Michael offered a small smile and a shrug. “When he forced you to marry him. He’s going to be thinking about that, comparing it to Randall’s behavior, and wondering if maybe he should have given him a chance, now that he knows he died trying to protect the pack.”
“I… can understand the difficulties in that,” Gwen admitted. “Even if I don’t think Randall deserves it.”
Michael shrugged, but it didn’t seem dismissive—more that he understood that feeling, too, but there wasn’t much he could say about it. “He never got over you, you know. He never stopped blaming himself for you leaving.”
Gwen let out a soft breath. She believed it. If he had told her that before she came to the island, maybe she wouldn’t have. Now, though? After everything she had seen and experienced here? She really did believe it.
“Come to bed, my love. You need your rest.”
Her heart skipped a beat just at the memory of his sleepy, warm voice. Ever since he said it, she wanted him to say it again.He hadn’t. She knew why he hadn’t. She hadn’t given him much in return to show her feelings for him. Sex could very well only be sex. He didn’t know how deeply her feelings for him still ran.
If you asked her, “Do you love Rafael Buchanan?” before her return to the lying, she would have looked you straight in the eye and said, “No fucking way.” It would have been a lie. And it was only now that she finally, finally, allowed herself to admit that. She loved him. She had never stopped loving him, even when the pain was at its worst.
“I need to go to him. I need to talk with him. Now,” she said. A horrible feeling knotted in the pit of her stomach. All of a sudden, she just knew she had to be with him right at this moment. She seized Michael’s arm. “I need to go to him right now!”
Michael seemed startled by the intensity of her proclamation but nodded. They headed down to the car. As they drove, Michael called Joshua to tell him that they were leaving the town and to stay to take care of things, while Gwen texted Kira, who was with Lianne, to let her know she would be gone longer than anticipated.
