TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 358

CHAPTER 285. MUFFINS AND APOLOGIES

CHAPTER 285: MUFFINS AND APOLOGIES

EMBER’S POV

I wake, reaching for him.

My hand goes out across the sheets before my eyes are even open, the way it’s been doing since Alaska, since some animal part of me decided that the first thing it needs to confirm every morning is that Knox Volkov is still where I left him.

The sheets are cold.

The dent in the pillow is there, but the warmth in it is gone, long gone, hours gone, and for one ugly second my whole chest seizes up and the bad thoughts come fast and stupid

He’s gone, something happened, Rafael, the council, they came in the night, and I slept through it.

And I’m sitting up gasping at nothing before my brain catches up to my body and reminds me that I am a grown woman in a bed the size of a small country and the man is almost certainly downstairs doing king things.

“Get it together,” I tell the empty room.

The empty room does not respond.

The empty room is enormous and beautiful, full of soft, expensive luxuries, and with a fire that someone has clearly come in and tended while I slept.

Which means a stranger has been in here watching me drool on a pillow, which is a thing I’m going to have to make peace with about my life now, apparently.

I miss him already. It’s embarrassing how much.

Weeks ago I was a woman who’d trained herself not to need anyone for anything because needing people was how you got hurt, and now I wake up, and the first thing my body does is grieve a man who’s probably forty feet away eating breakfast.

I don’t know what he’s done to me. I don’t entirely want it undone.

I find a robe – mine, somehow, unpacked and hung and waiting, which is its own small vertigo- and I pad to the door, and I open it, and I nearly walk face-first into Hale.

“Good morning!”

I make a sound that is not a word.

She’s standing directly outside my door. Not near it. At it, close enough that opening it has brought

CHAPTER 285 MUFFINS AND APOLOGIES

us almost nose to nose.

She’s beaming at me with both hands wrapped around a small covered tray, and I have absolutely no idea how long she’s been there.

“Oh

sorry – morning,” I manage, one hand pressed flat to my sternum where my heart is trying to climb out. “You scared me.”

“Did I?” She tilts her head, delighted, like being scary is a charming little quirk of hers she’d forgotten about.

“I’m sorry, dear. I came up to apologise, actually. For last night. I was dreadful at supper; I know was. Knox gave me such a look.” She does a small theatrical wince. “I get overexcited when there’s someone new. It’s a failing. I poke and poke, and I forget that not everyone enjoys being poked.” She lifts the tray. “I brought you something to make up for it. I baked. I never bake, ask anyone, but I was up early, and I thought, the poor girl, alone in this great cold house, the least I can do is -”

“You really didn’t have to.”

“I know I didn’t. That’s what makes it nice.” She says it so reasonably that I almost laugh.

And here’s the thing about me, the thing that’s gotten me into trouble my entire life.

I am physically incapable of being cold to someone who is being warm to me, even when every

instinct I have is standing up in the back of my skull with its hackles raised.

Last night this woman pinched my chin like I was a melon she was testing for ripeness. Last night she stood in the doorway of the most private moment of my life and smiled.

And now she’s holding a tray of muffins and apologising and looking at me with such open, hopeful, slightly-too-bright eyes that I feel the old reflex kick in, the one that says be nice, smooth it over, don’t make it weird, and I hate that reflex.

“That’s thank you,” I say. “That’s really kind.”

“It is, isn’t it?” She beams wider. “Come down. Marjorie’s done a proper breakfast; the muffins are just a little extra from me. You shouldn’t eat alone.”

I would, in fact, love nothing more than to eat alone.

But I’m already being towed down the hall in the wake of her, and I’m thinking that at least downstairs there will be other people.

Other people feels safer than this hallway and this woman standing too close to my door at an hour I didn’t know she knew I’d be waking up at.

The breakfast room is full of morning light, and the smell of actual food.

CHAPTER 285: MUFFINS AND APOLOGIES

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