“How does he take care of them?” York asked.
“I wasn’t saying you were murderers. I was just asking!” I closed my eyes, squeezing them tight.
Cashel broke out in full-on laughter. “We weren’t worried that you thought we’d put him down, because there’s nothing I’d have liked more. But to answer your question, no, we didn’t. We knew that in the human world, when a husband goes dead, one of the first people they assume did it is the other spouse. We didn’t want you to have to deal with that, but trust us, it would have been our preference.”
I never thought I’d hear someone say that not killing someone was a favor to me and not the dead person, but here we were.
“We dealt with him,” Cashel promised. “You won’t have to worry about him anymore.”
Their lack of details didn’t go unnoticed.
“Are you going to tell me what you did?” I looked from one to the other, but none of them gave me anything but a poker face.
“I’m going to take this response to mean you don’t want to, but if I pushed, you would tell me,” I said. “Am I right?”
“That’s exactly how it is,” Cashel confirmed. “Sometimes it’s better not to know things. And tomorrow, we are going home.”
Meaning, their home, which was now mine. It was a lot to wrap my head around.
Once, I’d have argued not knowing was never for the best, that full transparency was the way. Of course, that was when I was living a life as transparent as mud but was so oblivious, I didn’t know it.
“Thank you,” I said. It was a blanket gratitude because we didn’t have enough time before the sun came up for me to thank them for every single thing they’d done. In the short time I’d known them, the list would already fill volumes.
“You don’t need to thank us,” York said, his voice soft. “We are not doing this out of a desire for thanks and recognition or a sense of duty. Rather out of a desire to make your life better. Yes, ultimately we want you to choose us back, but if that’s not what you want, we’ll never push.”
“At the end of the day,” York continued, “since we first scented you, our lives have become about making yours the best it can be.”
“And that won’t change,” Lyon added.
“I probably should try to sleep.” I wasn’t ready to leave them yet, but if I stayed any longer, I was going to ask for details they weren’t ready to give. With all that had happened between yesterday and today, it was best to sleep on it before deciding whether to push or not.
“Do you think Millie will mind if I take a shower?”
York waved toward the house. I turned to see Millie in the window, holding a sleeping Alice.
“Nah,” he said with a smile. “It looks like she’s waiting for you.”
“Okay.” I went straight for the door, pushing back my desire to hug each of the men. It wasn’t because I didn’t think they would accept my embrace. They would. But if I flinched at the pain of their touch on my wounds, it would hurt them more than me.
They were so different from Mark, who would have relished my pain—and his responsibility for it.
Chapter Fourteen
Lyon
“It’s not right,” I said, overseeing York’s breakfast making with hands on hips. Everything had to be perfect. We had Isabella here, under our roof, but my bear was still unsteady, and that meant angry. My bear’s first instinct was anger, no matter what. Not at people. At events. Unmet needs. But mostly…unresolved issues.
“We have to be patient, Lyon. Seriously, we just got her here. Once she’s settled and begins to trust us, then we can broach the subject of her nest. If we overwhelm her, she’ll slip into her shell. You don’t want that, do you?”
I hated when York was right. I also envied the way he knew how to take things slow with our mate. I was a stumbling, fumbling mess inside. She needed to be safe, secure, trusting, mated, marked, and preferably filled with our cubs. Like yesterday.
Sighing, I decided he was right. “Let me help.”
“Flip the pancakes and French toast while I take everything out of the oven. She just woke up.”
I paused to listen. He was right. Her breathing had changed. Even her heartbeat picked up. We weren’t mated yet, and she wasn’t marked, but my bear tracked her every movement more intently than if she were prey.
In truth, my bear concerned me. He would never hurt her, but he was so focused on me mating her. It was clouding everything. He needed to calm the fuck down. Immediately. York was right. We needed to have patience.
