“Want me to stay?”
I shook my head as I remembered she’d just gotten off a work flight.
“I’m good.” I wasn’t, but her sticking around wasn’t going to change that.
“Okay. I’ll get out of your hair. But if you need me, give me a call, okay?” Casey looked like she was still worried for me even as she took one last look at me before she walked out the door, which didn’t make sense. She came here to tell me not to go to Montana with Roy. I heeded her warning. I saved myself from… myself.
I should feel relieved.
I slapped my hand over my mouth to smother a sob.
Why, then, does it feel like I broke my own heart in a million pieces?
33
ROY
* * *
I limped back into the lobby of the Four Seasons and checked into the same suite I’d checked out of six hours before.
After leaving my weeping mate, I’d gone back to the woods near Mark’s cabin and ran until my paws bled. I had hoped it would clear my head. That some genius idea would kick in, and I’d figure out what I had to do to win Brooke back. To prove to her that I wasn’t a mistake.
That we could work through whatever reservations she had about us being together.
But she’d shut me out.
I couldn’t fix whatever was bothering her if she wouldn’t talk to me. If she didn’t want me around. I couldn’t smother her either.
I wanted to toss her over my shoulder and kidnap her. Tie her to my bed. Fuck her until she was so worn out from orgasms that she’d be swayed.
None of those ideas would work. Brooke had to be all in on her own, and that made my wolf furious and lost.
We’d had her. She was ours. She’d run off into the woods, and I’d marked her.
Made her mine.
She was running scared now. Not of me because she’d have done that within an hour of meeting me. Something else.
I had to figure this shit out.
My phone buzzed with a text from Boone.
What’s your ETA?
Fuck. I hit call to dial my brother. I needed some fucking advice right now. Maybe he could help because he’d had a tough time claiming Summer.
“Hey, Roy. You guys on the road?” he asked.
I frowned as I ran up the stairwell. I knew these steps too fucking well. “Uh no. I’m still in Denver.”
He paused. “What happened?”
I turned on the landing and went up the next flight. “Well…I think it was too fast for Brooke. I dropped her off to pack a bag, and then when I came back to pick her up, she’d talked to a friend and had changed her mind. The friend somehow dug up the thing with me leaving the Marines, and I think it freaked her out.”
Boone was silent for a moment.
I froze between the third and fourth floor.