Damn, Alex. I gave her everything I had, but it wasn’t enough.”Gabe stared at his reflection in the big window. He’d sat out on the front step until the cold sent him inside with no more answers than he’d had when he walked out of Em’s room. He’d done the only thing he could think of—he’d grabbed his dad’s bottle of cognac and asked Alex to meet him up here in the sunroom. He’d actually brought the bottle home from the office tonight, prepared to tell Em how much he loved her, maybe to celebrate a potential mating.Looked like that wasn’t going to happen.“Just what did you give her, Gabe? From what you said, she was blocking you, whether intentionally or because she can’t control her shields around you. So, yeah, you might have spilled your guts, but if she had everything shut down, she doesn’t know that. She’s had a pretty traumatic week, when you think about it. She’s been hiding from the pack for years, knowing she had something missing in her past and afraid of what it was, thinking it was all because she was somehow flawed, she’s dealing constantly with her estrangement from her parents, in the last week we’ve had a fairly wild rescue of six young sex slaves, four of whom have turned out to be Chanku, and to top it off, she’s fallen in love with the son of the pack’s alpha.”“That doesn’t—”Alex held up his hand.
