Rosemary stared at me like she’d never seen me before.
“What kind of mate are you?” she whispered scathingly.
“Yours,” I replied instantly.
“You—I—” she shook her head. Her body lost the tension she’d been holding, and her shoulders slumped. “There’s somethingwrongwith you.”
“What the hell is going on?” Sitting up, I ignored the sore spot on the back of my head and gripped her hips before she could climb off me. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’m fine,” Rosemary replied tiredly.
“You’re not fine.”
“No,” she let out a humorless laugh, the sound bordering on hysteria. “No, you’re right. I’m not.Let go of me.” She shoved at my wrists.
Letting my hands fall away, I stared as she rose slowly to her feet and stepped over me. A second later, the bathroom closed almost silently behind her.
“So I see things are going well,” Chance noted sardonically from the end of the hallway. “That’s good.”
“Shut up, Chance,” I spat, getting to my feet.
“Nice face.”
Lifting my hand to my cheek, I pressed it against the stinging there. The tips of my fingers came away with blood on them.
“Shit.”
“I mean, it could be worse,” Chance said, following me to the kitchen. “She could’ve kicked you in the balls. Did she kick you in the balls?”
“Shut the fuck up, Chance,” I repeated.
“You seem to be walking fine, at least.”
Dalton and Gary seemed to have moved to the kitchen table, probably to give Rosemary and me a bit of privacy, not that we really had any in a house that small. Vampire hearing was very acute. We could hear anything happening inside the house, no matter which room we were in.
Grabbing a paper towel, I wet it and set it against the scratches on my cheek. When I turned, Dalton was staring.
“Deserved that and worse,” he announced, his tone grim.
“What the fuck is going on, Gary?” I asked, rounding the table so I could see his face. I had a feeling that the man had been deliberately ignoring me when I entered the room.
“I’ve stayed out of it,” he said, meeting my eyes. “I understand the mating bond, and I’d never get between that. I also understand the drive to protect the people you care about. There’s not a thing on this earth that I wouldn’t do for Rosemary or for her mother when she was alive.”
I could hear abutcoming.
“But if you don’t pull your head out of your ass, I’m going to do it for you.” He glanced at Chance. “And I might be in a wheelchair, but I’ve tussled with quite a few Vampires in the past, and I think I’d surprise you.”
“Lay it out like I’m five years old,” I ground out, still completely fucking confused.
When I’d left that morning, everything wasfine. Rosemary had been lying in bed, sleepy and satisfied. How the hell had she gone from that to a complete hellcat in the hours I’d been gone?
“How in the fuck do you keep leaving your mate?” Dalton asked, his head tilted a little to the side.
“She’s safe here?—”
He slashed his hand through the air. “No, I understand why you’re doing it. I’m askinghow.”
“What do you mean?” I glanced between Dalton and Gary.
