Forever (Shifter Island Book 3) Read Online Free Page A

moment she didn’t answer him. Then she said in a small voice, “I just ran off on him. This whole time, I haven’t cared about what he was thinking, or doing. That’s not right. And he… he came looking for me.”
    “If he was cruel to you, you owe him nothing.”
    Never in his life had he seen a wolf treat his mate the way Lane had treated Abby, with such disdain, such disregard for her feelings. He’d thought all along that the man might show up at some point looking for her; persistence was certainly something every wolf was familiar with. But he hadn’t for a moment anticipated that Lane would show up here only to belittle and shame her.
    “I need to make certain he’s gone,” he said. “It will only take a few minutes.”
    He thought she might protest again, but all she did was nod.
    Even in human form, he could move more quickly than Lane would under normal circumstances, but Lane was enraged, driven by adrenaline. Aaron reached the woods near the dock just as Lane was stepping out onto the fragile old structure.
    The old man had tied Abby’s boat to another craft, a larger, newer one, and was getting ready to pull away. Lane didn’t ask him for help; he simply ran the last few steps along the dock, slipped a little on the wet wood, and landed in the better boat awkwardly, collapsing onto the seat with an expression that made it plain he’d twisted an ankle in the process.
    Good , Aaron thought.
    He stood watching, hidden by the trees, until the two boats were well away from the island.
    Lane hadn’t looked back even once.
    Relieved, Aaron ran back to the cabin. Before he went to Abby, he went to the water jug and poured some water into a cup. He took a long drink, then filled the cup again and brought it to his beleaguered mate.
    She struggled to sit up on the bed, as if all the energy had been leached out of her, and was still so wobbly that he had to hold the cup for her as she drank, as if she had been near to death with fever.
    “I’m sorry, Aaron,” she said when she was finished drinking.
    “You have no need to apologize to me,” he told her. “You haven’t failed me. I think, if anything, you’ve failed yourself.”
    She blinked at that, then said, “I guess so.”
    “I wish I could give you the power we have inside of us. The strength. The gods gave us a tremendous gift—the heart of the wolf. I wish I could share that with you. You’d stop feeling like prey.”
    He paused, looking up at the cabin’s rough-hewn ceiling as if he could see through it to the sky. “We make poor choices sometimes, but we never feel weak. Helpless. Not here, at least.”
    “You looked very helpless when Luca was lying in that bed,” she reminded him with a wobbling smile. “So did your mother and father.”
    He smiled wryly. “You’re right.”
    Her eyes searched his face—for comfort, he realized—then dropped to her lap, where she was anxiously wringing her hands together.
    “After my mother died,” she said quietly, “my father… kind of lost it. I guess he thought he couldn’t control what happened to her, but he could control everything else. Or try to. Maybe I reminded him of her too much. I don’t know. I just know that all of a sudden, it was impossible to please him. Everything I did was wrong. But he was the only parent I had left, and I didn’t want to lose him, so I did my best to do what he wanted. To please him.”
    Deep inside of Aaron, the wolf rumbled with anger.
    “I mean…” Abby said. “I know what he did was wrong. I know I didn’t deserve all that. At least, I don’t think I did. I never gave him any reason to be ashamed of me. But they say when you get used to something, you keep seeking it out.”
    She looked at him plaintively, hands wrung together so tightly that they were white with lack of blood.
    “I want you to know something,” Aaron said.
    “What?”
    “That there are rules we abide by, for the good of the pack. For the good of our souls. They’ve