The flash of the future took her breath away, remembering Quinn’s hand on her stomach. Penn couldn’t say all of what she wanted… It was how covens operated, raising their children together.
Could this be real? Could she really have this? Was the universe going to let her?
She looked into Asher’s eyes, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was staring over her shoulder out the window into the blackness. Of course, the universe wasn’t going to let her. Number one, it wasn’t sentient; number two, she was going to have to fight like hell for it.
She couldn’t build her life on what she wanted to want to do.
“There are other rooms,” Asher said to the window.
Penn froze. “Was that a statement of fact? Because yeah, I have eyes. Or were you trying to say something else?”
He turned back to her. “If you want.”
“If I want a different room?”
Hurt almost took her breath away. It felt like that dangling, tentative future had been swiped out of her hands within a breath of thinking about it.
“If you want,” he repeated.
“What do you want, Asher?”
He closed his eyes and scrubbed two hands over his face like he wanted to rub it off.
She forced herself to laugh. “You know, besides sanity.”
“I want you,” he said to his palms.
“But not in this room.”
Finally, he looked at her. “Yes, in this room, in this bed, every day for?—”
He stopped talking, but she heard the rest of the word: forever.
She forced herself to take a deep breath. She could not commit to a man because she didn’t want to move again.
“I know I fake it well,” Asher said carefully, now talking to the floor. “I say the right things. I do the right moves, but it is an act. I forgot how much until I came back here.”
She walked over to him and crouched so she could meet his eyes.
He looked surprised to find them standing face-to-face.
“You performed for them because you didn’t want them to worry,” Penn said.
He nodded once.
“Yeah, everybody does that, Asher.”
“Okay fine, but not everybody’s hiding what I’m hiding.”
A horrible thought struck. “Do you do that to me?”
He looks surprised again. “No.”
Her relief weakened her knees, especially as he smiled. “There’s never been any point. You know.”
She nodded once. She only got glimpses of the wolf’s rage within him, but it was more than enough. “But we’re working on that, okay? I mean, the fact that you’re healthy enough to fake it is shocking.”
“It’s taken years. It might take many more.”
