“You want to tell me where you’ve been?” he asked as she strode to the table.
Rosemary shot her father a look before glancing at me. Her gaze moved down my body before jerking away again.
Gods, her hair was longer than I’d realized. The damp strands reached the small of her back. She smelled like something spicy. Cinnamon. Lemongrass.
“Last week the militia picked me up,” she started as she reached for her food.
I straightened in my chair at the assurance in her tone. What in the absolute fuck?
“We knew they would at some point,” she said with a shrug. “Didn’t you get my message?”
“I was givin’ it two more days,” Gary replied darkly.
“What message?” I asked.
“If I told ya that, I’d have to kill ya,” he replied. “Sorry, son.”
The irony of a man half my age calling me son was overwhelming.
“Who’s we?”
“About that,” Rosemary said with a grimace as she took a bite of her sandwich. “Shit, this is good. Thanks, Pop.”
He motioned with his hand for her to get to the point.
“I’ve been working with a team to find out what exactly it is that they’re doing?—”
“The human militia?” I asked.
“Yeah, I mean, we call them that, but are they really? They seem like a bunch of lowlifes to me.”
“Rosemary Halle Whitlock, that vein in your mate’s neck is about to explode. Get on with it,” Gary ordered.
“So…yeah. I’ve been working with a team to try to figure out what exactly their objectives are. Uncle Dalton reported that his son had found his mate.” She lifted her hands and wiggled her fingers. “The idea was to get some information from the inside,but you saw those losers who took me. They didn’t know shit, so it wasn’t like they could spill any secrets.”
My mind was reeling, and I felt like I was going to come out of my skin. What the fuck had she been thinking? Those humans haddismemberedmy brother, one of the strongest Vampires I’d ever met. She’d thought she was going to infiltrate their organization by posing as a mate? They’d had her for aweek. She was lucky she hadn’t been tortured to death before we’d even gotten there. The thought made bile rise hot in my throat.
I had so many fucking questions I didn’t know where to start.
“You reported that you were mated?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice even.
“Well,Ididn’t.”
“To one of Dalton’s sons,” I continued.
A flush rose up my mate’s neck until her cheeks and ears were beet red. “Uh, yeah?”
Gary chuckled.
“It’s not like it’s true,” she said, picking at her sandwich as she wrinkled her nose. “But I had to get on their radar somehow.”
My heart pounded in my ears as Gary’s chuckles turned into snickers. The idea of another Vampire claiming my mate made a red film flicker at the edges of my vision.
“What’s wrong with your eyes?” Rosemary asked in horror, leaning in to get a closer look.
“Which son?” I asked through lips that had gone numb.
Rosemary mumbled something unintelligible and took a huge bite of her sandwich.
