Beloved Wolf Read Free

again and again. He’d held her, trying not to say the words that screamed inside his head: “Don’t go, don’t go. Stay with me, Sophie. Love me, Sophie.”
    The foster son of Joe Colton owed the man better than that. The half-breed son of a drunk owed Sophie more than that. So he’d pushed her away, out of his arms, out of his life. Coldly, almost brutally telling her to go away, to grow up.
    For the past nearly ten years they saw each other only at Colton family gatherings—which were only slightly less populated than some small countries. They acknowledged each other, but they’d never been alone together since that night.
    They weren’t alone now. Joe was standing on theother side of the bed, tears streaming down his face as he held his daughter’s limp hand.
    â€œShe’s going to be fine, Joe,” River assured him, wincing at the sight of Sophie’s bruised and battered face, the bandages he could see peeking out above the slack neckline of the hospital gown. She looked as if she’d been dragged behind a runaway horse, her tender white skin scraped raw in spots, swollen and in livid shades of purple in others.
    The largest bandage covered the left side of her face. There were more than one hundred stitches beneath that bandage. Her knee would heal. He’d make sure of that, even if he had to carry her on his back until the ligaments and tendons grew strong again. The scrapes and bruises, the scratches, would heal.
    But her face? Sophie had never been vain, but she was young, only twenty-seven, and beautiful. How would she react to a scar on her face? A scar that reminded her, each and every time she looked in the mirror, of the terror she must have felt in that alley?
    The mugger hadn’t just hurt her physically. River feared that he might also have destroyed her confidence, badly scarred her in ways not so readily apparent. Robbed her of her freedom, her ability to walk down a street without fear.
    River ran a hand through his shoulder-length black hair, rubbed at the back of his neck. His eyes sparkled with unshed tears that threatened to spill down over his lean, deeply tanned cheeks.
    On the bed, Sophie stirred slightly, moaned, seemed to be trying to open her eyes.
    â€œI…um…I’ll get the nurse,” River said quietly asSophie’s eyes fluttered open for a second, then closed once more. “But I’ll give you and Sophie a couple minutes alone together before I do.”
    He turned on his heels and left the room, his worn cowboy boots barely making any noise against the tile floor. The door closed behind him and he stopped in the hallway, one denim-clad shoulder leaning against the wall, his right fist dug deep in his jean pocket as he used his left to rhythmically beat the cowboy hat against his thigh.
    River James looked like exactly who he was. A cowboy. A cowboy whose mother had been a full-blooded Native American, and whose father had been a white man. He had the thick black hair of his mother, the vivid green eyes of his father, and the disposition of a man most wouldn’t lightly try to cross. Tall, whipcord lean, well muscled, hardened by years in the saddle as well as his unhappy life until the day Joe and Meredith Colton had taken him in, wised him up and given him a reason to believe he was somebody.
    Until then, he’d been like a lone wolf. And once Sophie had gone out of his life, he’d reverted to that lone-wolf state. Complete unto himself. He didn’t need Sophie, he didn’t need anyone. At least that was what he’d been telling himself.
    He’d been lying to himself.
    It had been a long time since the thirty-one-year-old River James had felt helpless, defeated. It had not, however, been quite so long since he’d been angry. His temper had been his biggest problem when he’d come to Joe Colton’s house as a teenager, and evenif that anger had turned into something closer to