“Dominic?” I whispered, now terrified that I would wake him up for whatever reason.
But his eyes didn’t open. He didn’t flinch, didn’t move.
Only spoke.
“What are you doing here, Teddy?”
Oh, God. He spoke. I saw his lips moving and heard his rough voice like a physical touch against my skin.
Dominic was awake.
My body reacted before I had the chance to even think about what I was going to do. I pushed myself forward, closer to his chest, and put my arm around his neck, squeezing him. He was awake. He was alive. Crackdown hadn’t killed him.
Burying my face under his neck, I didn’t even think about answering. There would be time for words. And when he pulled me even closer, wrapped his arm around me even tighter, everything else became perfectly irrelevant.
Only when my body was flush against his did I realize how much I’d missed it. We’d only been together once, but it was all I remembered, which wasn’t fair. It was all that mattered, which wasn’tright.
At least for a moment, it was okay. I was right where I’d needed to be all my life and didn’t know it.
“Fuck, Teddy,” he whispered against my ear, holding me tighter, and when he moved to push his other arm under me, I barely felt the pain of the wolf bite on me.
“You weren’t waking up,” I said against his neck, then pressed my lips against his skin. I didn’t kiss him, just touched him there. And God, it felt amazing.
“I needed the rest,” he whispered.
I nodded. “Then sleep.” Now that I knew he was awake and conscious, I wouldn’t care if he slept for a week. I’d just stay here and wait for him to wake up and…whatexactly?
What the hell was I even doing?
The realization was like a bucket of ice-cold water on my face.
“I can’t sleep when you’re here, Theodora,” he said, and it was an accusation. “You’re in my bed.”
Yes, I knew where I was. “I was worried.” I pushed my head back to see his face, but he refused to open his eyes and look at me. “Dominic.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” he whispered instead.
It was almost funny that this always surprised me when he did it over and over again. Here I was, wrapped up in his arms, and he held me like I was his freaking lifeline, but then he went and said things like that, and it made me second-guess my own freaking sanity. It made it really hard to believe myself when I said I wasn’t stupid.
Because right now, I was. I was the biggest fool to have ever lived on Earth, and I couldn’t even blame him for it. Because I did this. I kept putting myself in this position.
And even knowing that, even hearing his words, it was stillpainfulto push myself off him and get out of his stupid bed. I still wanted to ignore everything and just stay there, take whatever he had to say and soak up his warmth until I felt like I belonged again.
Ugh. My own self pissed me off so much, it was a miracle I could even stand.
“Emilie thinks you’re dying. You might want to go downstairs and talk to her before you go back to sleep,” I said, then regretted it the next second.
“Teddy.”
I didn’t turn to look at him. I couldn’t if I tried—my vision was blurry from the black dots in front of me, but I did manage to grab the backpack from the floor and make for the door.
“Teddy, wait.”
I didn’t. I just walked out the door and ran down the stairs like my tail was on fire.
“He’s up,” I told Derek, who must have heard my footsteps coming downstairs and was waiting for me in the foyer, together with the kids.
“He’s up?!” Emilie and Agnes said at the same time, before they started running around me and up the stairs, all at once. That I stopped myself from crying in those moments was a miracle, so I didn’t say anything else, just kept my head down and rushed to the door.