“Damn it, I still need to go out to my office,” he said after a minute. “I really can’t leave it until tomorrow.”
“I’ll clean up the floor.” Sometimes my own generosity astounded me, but that blowjob…he’d earned it. “You go and come back as soon as you can. I can’t promise to stay awake until you do. I’ll get the bed warm, though.”
“It’s a deal.” He kissed the side of my head. “You have some leaves in your hair still. I’ll go and let you have the bath to yourself. Want me to run some more water?”
It took him a minute and a lot more splashing to extricate himself, and a lot of laughter on both our parts, but finally he’d gotten a towel, started the hot tap again, and left me to it.
Down the hall, I knew Nate would be faithfully keeping a coffee-fueled vigil over Jessica and her children as they slept. The kids wouldn’t remember this any more than I remembered Calder finding me behind a dumpster.
I could picture it, though, because I’d heard about it so many times—he’d tried to read me baby books, or tell me folk tales of brave cats saving the day, but I’d always wanted that particular story. Where I’d come from. How he’d saved me. How he’d made me safe. He’d been so painfully young, in retrospect, but at the time he’d looked like the biggest, strongest, most competent person on planet Earth, sitting there on the edge of the bed holding my hand while I went to sleep.
Would those kids grow up with a personal mythology that included The Night They’d Crashed in the Woods? Would their mom tell them about me, the bobcat with the long blond hair and the tattoos who’d saved her life? Or about Nate, letting them get to adulthood with a mental picture of a kind, loving guy withdark curly hair who’d held them and warmed them up while I took care of her?
I hoped so. That’d mean they’d grown up safe, taking comfort from knowing that when things had been the worst, someone had helped and protected them.
Matthew had been safe as a kid, by his own admission, so he didn’t understand: Calder finding me, starving and cold and abandoned, wasn’t the stuff of nightmares for me. It was the story I told myself in Calder’s voice when I woke from a nightmare.
If I ended up on the other side of that equation, part of their comforting bedtime story, a hazy anti-boogeyman keeping the dark at bay in their sleepy imaginations, it’d be the best thing I’d ever achieved in my life. Fine? I was better than fine.
Even if that obnoxious, skinny-jeans-clad warlock who’d once knocked me out with a fucking water bottle had somehow become my best friend. Gods help me.
Despite my exhaustion, I was smiling as I dunked my head under to rinse my hair.
Chapter 7
Matthew
Leaving Arik all naked and gorgeous and not-well-enough-fucked-yet in the bathtub had to have been one of the most difficult and most responsible things—and they tended to go together, I’d found—that I’d ever done as pack leader.
But I’d been thinking about what I’d heard from Colin. Ian, to choose a totally non-random example, might be getting ready to claw the bad guy’s face off and call it a day, but I had the feeling this would end up being a different kind of problem. My office held the combined business-related libraries of generations of Armitage pack leaders, including dusty, musty tomes of pack law and traditions going back to the 1800s. One or more of those volumes would certainly have everything anyone could possibly not really want to know but still need to look up about marriage versus mating, child custody, and all the related bullshit that might come into play.
Paul, one of my oldest and most no-nonsense councilors, found me there an hour later, explaining that he couldn’t sleep and had seen the light on. He took the chair across my desk and picked up a book and a pad of sticky notes.
I’d expected to be at it for another hour or two, tops, and to make it back to bed well before dawn and catch a few hours before someone needed me for something else. Alphas didn’t need a ton of sleep; pack leaders learned to function on even less. It would’ve been enough. Mostly, I wanted Arik in my arms.
But right after three in the morning, Ian showed up at my office door, frowning down at his phone.
“You remember Angelo?” he said. “Hey, Paul, what are you doing here?”
“Reading law books.” Paul waved one at Ian, who recoiled in what looked like genuine horror. Well, there was a reason I hadn’t asked for his help with this project, much as I depended on him for nearly everything else. “That’s the vamp who showed up looking for help with the guy tied up in his trunk, right? The one those ridiculous boys’ pet scorpions ate. Trunk guy, not Angelo.”
“That’s the one. He texted me a minute ago. Diaz is in Lancaster. I guess he was already driving when he called Colin earlier, and he turned up in a big huff a little while ago demanding Fenwick help him find Jessica and the kids.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. I allowed myself one shining moment of fantasy in which I walked back to the pack house, took off my clothes, and slept in my own bed sometime before tomorrow night at the earliest.
Then I allowed that vision to poof out of existence, because I wouldn’t be getting it.
“I bet Fenwick loved the hell out of that,” I said, and Ian huffed a laugh of agreement. At least Charlie Fenwick, who ran the nearby town of Lancaster, had some of the same leadership problems I did. Namely, not getting to fucking go to bed ever. Misery loved company, right? “Since he hasn’t called me himself, I’m guessing Diaz hasn’t figured out that she’s here yet?”
Fenwick looked and frequently behaved like a bratty college freshman, but appearances were deceiving when it came to vampires. He was indisputably the oldest, richest, and most powerful supernatural authority in our neck of the woods, with Colin and me in the distant second rank. If you had a problem in our county or you needed to go over one of our heads, you went to him. Diaz had clearly done his homework.
After quite a few years of general hostility and mistrust, Fenwick, Colin, and I had come to a mutual understanding. Nate’s father, possibly the worst person on the face of theEarth, had tried to screw us all over simultaneously and had brought us together in peace and harmony in the process. Good times. Except for Jonathan Hawthorne, of course, who’d ended up barbecued from the inside out and then decapitated, to the lasting joy of everyone who’d ever met him.
So Fenwick would’ve called me to give me a heads-up if Diaz had figured out we had Jessica and had been on the way here.
Probably, anyway. You never really knew with old vampires. They had agendas outside the understanding of anyone mortal.
“No idea yet,” Ian said with a shrug. “Angelo isn’t in the meeting. He’s outside on guard duty. He only knows what happened before the door to Fenwick’s office closed.” Ian’s phone buzzed, and he checked the screen. “Oh, he says he forgot to mention, Diaz has a bunch of big dudes and also some lawyers with him? What the fuck?”
