Dallas cleared his throat, drawing my attention to where he was staring at me from over his own cup of coffee.
I knew what he was thinking—I always did. Be it because of some freaky twintuition or just because we had spent nearly every day of our twenty-eight years together.
His look told me that he knew exactly how I was feeling and that I needed to knock it the fuck off.
As if he was any better.
I’d never seen someone melt Dallas’s standoffishness as fast as Lennon had.
He was still an asshole to her, but I’d seen the bottles of water and granola bars that he’d been leaving on top of her laptop when he thought no one was looking. In his own way, Dallas was infatuated with the omega, not that he would ever admit it.
Which, need I remind the masses, was probably a very, very bad idea.
Speaking of infatuation, Zeke was pushing his plate toward her with a sheepish grin. “You can have my bacon, I don’t usually eat pork.”
Lennon blinked at him for a moment before reaching out and stabbing her fork into one of the slices of bacon on his plate.
We were breaking all of our rules this month it seemed—rules that we’d steadfastly followed ever since we became a team years ago.
And it was wearing on our team leader who dropped his mug onto the table with a loudthunk.
“Can you please hurry up?” Maverick growled, obviously irritated by how this lunch was going.
Lennon’s shoulders stiffened as she turned to him, her cheeks flushing with anger as she fixed a gray-eyed glare onto him.
“Why? It’s not like we have anything to do back at the B&B.”
“Because it isn’t safe,” he replied as if it was obvious.
Lennon gestured around at the half-empty diner. “Who is going to hurt me in the middle-of-nowhere Missouri? The guy feeding his pet squirrel peanuts?”
The guy in question was several booths over and was indeed feeding a gray squirrel. He was even wearing a red tie—the squirrel, not the guy. For some reason it would have been weirder if the man was wearing the tie instead.
“Need I remind you that the entire reason we’re your security detail is because you were almost kidnapped?”
“You all keep bringing that up as if I wasn’t even there.” Lennon snorted flippantly, tossing her blonde ponytail over her shoulder. “And need I remindyouthat I was nearly kidnapped in D.C., not the Ozarks.”
The two glared at each other in a standoff that had the rest of us shifting uncomfortably.
I’d never met someone who couldn’t be browbeaten by Maverick before. The man could stare in the face of danger and not bat an eyelash, but he seemed to have finally met his match in Lennon.
After a minute, Maverick sighed with surrender and leaned back in his seat. “Fine. Just eat your food.”
Lennon shot him a smug smile before returning her attention to her half-eaten pancakes.
The rest of the meal was eaten in silence and once we were walking out of the diner, I’d finally had enough.
“I’m surprised you were able to talk back to Mav like that, not many have done the same and lived to tell the tale,” I teased as I jogged to catch up with Lennon who was half-walking, half-stomping back toward the bed and breakfast.
“Why wouldn’t I? He’s not scary,” Lennon grumbled, slanting a glance in my direction before she slowed her pace so that we could walk together.
My inner alpha purred with satisfaction at that and I shoved it down deep with a frown. The suppressants that they gave us should have kept my instincts from popping up like that—just as it was designed to do. I’d even upped the dosage last week because Lennon’s sweet, cherry scent was driving me crazy on that damned tour bus.
I snorted at her words and immediately regretted it when the wind fluttered her ponytail and wafted her scent at me.
“Tell that to literally every other person we’ve ever worked with,” I told her, my voice tight for a moment as I hurried to get out of the wind and back into the bed and breakfast.
At least the still air inside of the house would keep me from wanting to search her neck for the source of her scent.
