Tim huffed. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
“All I’m saying is it’s easy for us to get attached. We don’t do prolonged casual sex well. It’s not in our nature to continually mix our scents like that and not form some kind of connection. He won’t necessarily feel the same.”
“I know that.” He did know, all too well. And he’d given this same lecture to countless young shifters before and seen the consequences when they didn’t listen.
“Sorry. I know I don’t need to tell you any of it.” Alec sighed, and Tim pictured him rubbing a hand over his face. “I suppose I feel guilty for using your attraction to Calloway to get you to agree.”
Another thing that didn’t happen often. Alec very rarely apologised for anything, because he was very rarely in the wrong.
Tim leaned his head against the window and watched the street below, empty of people this late. “I knew what I was getting into, so let’s just drop it.”
“Done.”
“What I need to know is what happens now? Sebastian’s off work for the next week and then hopefully working from home for the two after that. I doubt he’ll stray too far from home in that time. But I can’t keep an eye on him all the time, even if he’d let me.”
Alec hummed, and the faint sound of fingers drumming on a tabletop sounded on the other end. “Cam has another meeting with Newell tomorrow. I have a few suggestions for him that might work. Can you stay there tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Good. The meeting’s at eight in the morning. I’ll call you after.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
Tim held the phone against his chest for a minute, mulling over the day’s events. It felt a lot longer than a few hours since he’d picked Seb up and brought him here. If this was how he felt after just one day…Fuck. He might have told Alec he knew what he was doing, but standing in that bedroom, surrounded by the scent of sex andthem, Tim had never felt so out of control.
Chapter Eleven
“Yep, two of them.”
Seb sat hunched over the coffee table where his phone lay, Nathan and Jared on speaker.
“And they apologised?” Jared asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you believe them? Did Tim?”
Jared again. Nathan had been oddly quiet for most of the call. Seb was starting to wonder if he was still there. “I’ve not really had chance to discuss it with Tim. He disappeared into my bedroom to call Alec,”—Nathan grunted at that.Still there, then—“but they seemed pretty genuine.”
“Was it the ones from that night?”
Nathan’s voice was lower, rougher than Seb was used to hearing it. “Um… not sure.”
“How did Tim react?”
Seb frowned at his phone. “What do you mean?”
“Did he shift?”
“What? No, he didn’t shift.” A week ago, Seb would have laughed at the idea of Tim shifting in anger. Not now, though, but he still found the idea hard to imagine.
Nathan let out a sigh that sounded like relief. “Not the same ones, then.” He didn’t give Seb time to comment as he barrelled on, the whole thing beginning to sound like an interrogation. “Did they mention anything else? Like why someone from their pack thought it’d be a good idea to scare you like that? Did they mention the supposed rogue shifters roaming around?”
Seb ran the conversation back through his mind. “No, nothing else that I can think of. Tim spoke to them for a while before I got down there, though. I can ask him when he gets off the phone. Oh—they did say they’d be around as long as the rogue shifters continued to be a threat.”
“Hmm, okay.”
Nathan said nothing else, and Seb struggled to decide whether that was a goodhmmor not.
