Page 54 of Omega's Forbidden Heat
She huffs and rolls her head in an exaggerated manner. “One of the stables down there, number eight.” She motions her hand in that direction, but doesn’t turn her head as if that’s where the peasants reside and she can’t bare to look that way.
He turns. Then halts. “She’s been taken to hospital by the way.” He glares at her and her eyes fall away. She squirms.
“I’ve been saying for years that that horse is an accident waiting to happen. He’s too old. That girl is a fool to keep riding him.”
“It was you, wasn’t it?” he says it quietly and darkly, gripping the rein so tightly the leather chafes against his palm.
She lifts her head to meet his gaze. “What?” she says with irritation.
“You’re the bitch who wrote the letters.”
Her eyes widen and her mouth opens. Not for long. A split second, a fleeting revelation. It’s enough to tell him he’s right. But then her eyes narrow back to vindictive slits and she hisses at him, “You can’t speak to me in that way. These are my stables—”
“Yeah, and I wonder what all your other customers would think if they knew you’d been sending poison pen letters to some poor young girl. I wonder what her parents would say. I wonder what the police would say.”
She glares at him. “You’ve got no proof they were from me.”
He smiles. Once upon time he suppose this woman was beautiful but all the spite and viciousness in her heart has leaked out onto her face and the permanent scowl, the curl of her lip, the rigid frown lines, make her look haggard and cruel, despite her perfectly prepared hair and her honed figure. “Don’t I?” he says.
“Are you threatening me?”
“No, I’m just asking you to be nicer to Amy.”
He starts to lead the horse away. He doesn’t want to waste any more time here.
“Oh, I get it. The rumours were true. She’s thrown herself open to the first available Alpha that comes a long.” She laughs. “Why am I not surprised?”
He halts, another revelation dawning on him. “You’re jealous of her. You can’t stand how bright and beautiful,” he swallows, “and kind she is. You can’t stand that everyone loves her. You can’t stand to see how much joy she derides from her old horse and how she’ll have things you can never dream of. You tried to turn the village against her, and these stables. But you failed.” He twists back around. “If you ever say another unkind word to her, or some snide comment about her to someone else, I will reveal to the whole goddamn world the ugly, nasty little troll you are.”
Chapter Twenty
The drive to the hospital requires all his concentration. Night has descended and the winding country lanes lie hidden in darkness, his headlamps revealing only a little of the road ahead at a time. Plus, he’s tired. The earlier adrenaline that had spurred him to find Amy bleeding from his body and in its place exhaustion. His eyelids droop and he blinks, forcing himself awake. The gland on his neck aches in a way it never has before and he rubs at it absentmindedly.
He finds Finn in the accident and emergency waiting room, hovering on a plastic chair and nursing a cup of coffee. He lifts his tired face up to Jack as he stops before him and once again Jack can’t read him.
How did he mess everything up so badly? Again? Part of the reason he’d stayed away from Amy was to protect his friendship with Finn — the only one he has. And he failed. He’d given in to temptation and now he’s lost the both of them. He needs to make Finn understand; he needs to find the words, and not stand there like a mute fool. He needs to tell him how much he loves Amy.
Yes. He loves her. He knows it now. Knew it the moment Finn said she was missing — his heart freezing in terror in his chest. And it had only confirmed the strength of it when he’d found her on the forest floor and lifted her into his arms. He is hers completely. There is no use fighting it, or hiding it any longer.
But the words refuse to come and he sits with Finn in the hospital waiting room. Occasionally a medic comes to talk to them, to inform them of Amy’s progress. Her ankle is broken, but it won’t need surgery. Jack sighs in relief at that news and Finn glances at him sideways. They take turns to prowl the waiting room, surprisingly empty — one drunk asleep in the corner and an elderly couple huddled in the other — until the sky lightens and the morning chorus of birds can be heard above the clatter and clangs of the hospital waking into life.
Jack wrings his hands. It’s a habit he picked up in prison. Funny, how he’d learned to regulate his scent, make his face neutral, but his hands would never conform. It was his tell. He stares at them now. Then glances out towards the glass doors and across the car park.
He spent many days, weeks, here over the summer, out there across the car park, in the hospice. Being here again, brings it flooding back.
He looks away, his eyes scanning the waiting room. It hasn’t changed; the same plastic blue chairs, same stench of bleach. Yes, he’s been here too, in this room, that night five years ago. He can almost see the ghost of his younger self hunched in the corner, face in his hands, trying not to cry, trying not to fall apart. The doctor had come and checked him over, the two policeman flanking his sides, and then they’d bundled him away to the police station.
This place had been his last and his first taste of freedom. He closes his eyes and he sees his mum laid out on the bed, the laboured rise and fall of her chest, the rattle of her breath in her throat. He sees the man laid out too, motionless on the ground, and he feels the pain in his own fist like an ever present phantom limb.
“Jack.” He opens his eyes and looks up. Had he been sleeping? Finn offers him a small plastic cup, hot with coffee. “It tastes like shit but you look like you could use it.” He takes the seat next to Jack’s.
“Yeah, thanks. I think I was nodding off.” He takes a sip of the liquid and scolds his lips.
Finn blows across his own drink, gripping it between both his hands. He stares straight ahead. “Jack,” he says.
“Hum.”
“I wanted to say,” he inhales and Jack braces himself. “I wanted to say I’m sorry, about that night.”
