Cash swallowed hard and glanced away from me, but he nodded. The way his expression twisted up wrecked something in me.
No wolf should feel that way in his own pack.
I scowled across the bed at him, crossing my arms to hide how I clenched my fists. The last thing I wanted to do was make Cash think I was mad at him.
Nope, I was pissed at Grant.
And Reeve.
And myself, most of all, because I’d left him behind and now, I couldn’t even convince him to turn his back on a pack that’d treated him like shit and left him for dead.
He had nothing left to lose, and still, he wouldn’t join us. It felt like a failing, as if I had nothing to offer when that was plainly untrue. We were sitting in a large, nice house paid for with a company our pack had started and grown and maintained.
Every single one of us was happy and safe and provided for. None of us wondered where our next meals would come from anymore. We’d built this.
And Cash wanted no part in it.
The way he chewed his lip and shrank against the pillows curled in my gut. I must’ve smelled mad. He caught it on my scent.
And with a stab of guilt and horror, I realized—Cash thought I might hurt him. Me.
With a deep-belly inhale, I leaned back, away from Cash, and shook my head. “It’s fine,” I promised. “Whatever choice you make, it’ll be your own, and I’ll respect it. But there will always be a place for you with our pack if you want it.”
Cash’s gaze flitted over my face, searching every inch of it for a lie. I didn’t remember him having this much doubt, but truthfully, it wasn’t like I knew the guy anymore.
“We could use someone like you,” I said with a smile, hoping to assure him.
He scoffed through his nose. “Oh yeah? What kind of guy is that?”
Fair point. I rubbed the back of my neck. “Well, what do you do?”
His cheeks turned pink, and the flush looked healthy on him. It was a relief.
“Build stuff,” he muttered.
“What kind of stuff?”
He shrugged, glancing at his knees. “Houses. Whatever.”
“So you’re a carpenter?”
Another shrug. “I apprenticed with one.”
Okay, to me, it sounded like he was a carpenter, but for some reason, he wasn’t giving himself credit for it. “That’s great! Of course we could find something for you to do here. I mean?—”
It was different here in the city than it’d been back home. Here, we purchased homes. Hired people. But there were pack members or wolves from other nearby packs who did all kinds of things. Not every one of us worked at Crescent.
“There’s always something to do around here, and to start, our place by the lake?—”
“That burnt last night,” Cash confirmed with a deep frown.
“Yes, that. We’ll need to rebuild it. It’d be a place to start, when you’re feeling up to it. If you want to stay.”
Cash wrapped his arms around himself, brought his knees to his chest, and shrank. “I’ll... I’ll think about it,” he mumbled into the space between his legs.
All I could really think was that I was making him uncomfortable, so I left shortly after that and slipped out onto the landing just as Dakota was trudging out of our bedroom.
He came down the stairs, looking rumpled and sleepy. He was wearing sweatpants and one of my shirts that damn near swallowed him. He smelled like him and me and the tangled-up sweetness of spending a night wrapped up in each other’s arms.
