I shrugged on my way across the room. “You’re not leaving until you’re sober.”
He smirked again, then flopped down face-first on my bed.
I closed the bathroom door and stared at myself in the mirror. At my flushed cheeks. At the red splotches on the points of my hips, where they’d slammed into the counter. Then I twisted to stare in shock—or amusement?—at the faint pink handprint on my right ass cheek.
Good god.
Well, at least I’d finally figured out what Bishop Mattheson was good at,otherthan drinking and breaking skulls.
I woke up less than an hour after I’d passed out, finally ready to do what needed to be done. What I hadn’t been able to face two hours earlier.
Bishop snored softly beside me. Still nude and completely uncovered.
Shit.
What the hell was I thinking?
While he slept, I snuck—Snuck! In my own home!—into the bathroom for a shower, where I lathered up every single inch of my body, including my hair.
Shifters have great noses, and I couldnotwalk around the bar smelling like the widower whose wife’s murder I’d promised to solve and avenge. My customers would never let me live it down. Davey would never let me hear the end of it.
Austin would—
Bishop groaned from the bedroom. I tied my robe and raced across the room, praying that he wasn’t about to puke in my boot.
“Shit,” he said with one look at me. “I was hoping that was just a really hot dream.”
“It was a hotsomething,” I conceded. Hot fuck. Hot mess. The jury was still out…
“That’s not funny. That shouldn’t have happened.” He stood, stone-cold sober, and began scanning the room for his clothes.
“Kitchen floor,” I reminded him, and he groaned again at the memory.
“I’m sorry, Charley,” he said on his way out of my room. “That was wrong. We shouldn’t have. I mean, Yvette…”
I sprinted into the kitchen after him and put one hand on his arm, forcing him to make eye contact as he clutched his clothes to his broad, hard chest. “No. Don’t do that. We didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But Ilovemy wife. I miss her every fucking day. I would never have cheated on her—”
“And you still haven’t. That wasn’t a betrayal of your wife, Bishop. That was an expression of your grief. Of your anger. What happened wasn’t about either you or me. Not together, and not separately. Sometimes passions get all mixed up. Anger feels like lust. Pain feels like pleasure. The human brain is a fucked-up merry-go-round of emotion and you clearly needed that as badly as I did. You needed a release ofsomekind, and if it wasn’t that, it would have been something else. Possibly something violent involving Nolan Blake, when you were too drunk to remember why he doesn’t deserve to die.
“The truth is that I needed that too. I’ve got some shit hanging over me, and… Well, it doesn’t have to ever mean anything more than that. Both of us being in areallyrough place and needing what the other had to offer.”
Bishop blinked down at me. “You won’t tell anyone?”
“Cross my heart.” I drew an X over one robe-draped breast, and I swear I saw his eyes dilate, just for a second.
“Don’t do that, Marshal,” he growled. “I swear to god, I’m a good man, but I’monlya man.”
I laughed, pleased to be back in control. “If you don’t want everyone to sniff it out on their own, I suggest a shower. Lock the door when you head out, though, because I’ve got to go.”
“Where? It’s two-thirty in the morning.”
“Men who wash my scent off, then sneak out into the night don’t get to ask where I’m going.”
Bishop snorted. “How many of those men are there?”
“Fuck off,” I said as I bent to retrieve my newly cracked phone from the floor. But I said it with a smile.
