Fuck, she’s perfect. I can’t wait to see Stryker’s pissed off face when I beat him to the punch and marry her first.
Chapter 12
Mason
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“Girl sizes are stupid.”
Stryker huffs in agreement, lifting the pair of shorts that Risa picked out and we stole from her bag. He holds them up against a pair of jeans to see if they match at the waist, and deciding that it’s pretty damn close, tosses them in the cart. Watching her try stuff on, it became abundantly clear that the numbers stamped on women’s clothes are simply for decoration because they vary so wildly that they’re utterly useless. Seeing as she’s adamant three outfits are enough, cringing as she saw the price, we were forced to go rogue.
While she’s busy trying on swimsuits, Bane convincing her that it’s that or skinny dipping on our next lake run, the two of us are hurrying around, snagging things at random. Pajama pants, summer dresses; anything she might need or we secretly want to see her in ends up in the growing pile in our cart.
Making our way to the register so that we can get everything in the truck before she notices, Stryker purses his lips, eyes flitting to me and away for the tenth time in the last two minutes until I finally snap, “What?”
He looks over his shoulder before leaning closer. We spent the entire ride into town teaching Risa how to turn everything into white noise, to dampen her heightened senses to a more manageable level before we became surrounded by people and she had a meltdown. The first time is always the hardest; hundreds of scents, constant chatter, footsteps, car doors slamming, or babies screaming. It rises to a level where you can’t actually discern anything at all, just a chaotic, overwhelming onslaught that creates an instant headache and makes most of us irritable the longer we stay, hating the vulnerable state that muting our senses puts us in.
Still, he drops his voice to barely more than a whisper, just in case. “What if us hovering this closely is making her feeltoosafe? If she felt like she was in danger, surrounded by this many humans and in an unfamiliar place, it might trigger her shift as a defensive mechanism.”
Skidding to a halt, I glare at him. “That didn’t work with a wolf literally trying to tear her throat out, so why would it be any different here when she’s mildly uneasy at best? Worse, what if something actually happened to her; you going to be able to live with yourself after kicking a freshly hatched bird out of the nest above a lake of gators?”
I scoff, heading to the register and dumping everything on the counter. “We’d have to put some decent distance between us for her to feel that exposed, so she’d be wide fucking open for anything to happen. We wouldn’t make it to intervene before it was too late.”
Paying and grabbing all of the bags, we hurry back to the truck to toss stuff in the backseat. Locking it behind us, we cross the strip mall’s parking lot to catch up with the others. At this point, Bane’s likely grasping at straws to keep her occupied, and I’m sure she’s already guessed why we disappeared.
Stryker runs a hand through his hair, as frustrated as the rest of us and not knowing how to cope with it. “We should have driven farther from home. We’re only a few cities away from Kingstyn, and you bet your ass she’s listed as a missing person. A change of eye color isn’t nearly enough to keep someone from recognizing her. Tomorrow, we need to make a trip to the agency to get her new ID sorted out and start rebuilding her life. That way even if someone thinks they recognize her, she can dispute it so that Blake asshole doesn’t catch wind of where she’s at.”
Walking through the door, I need to take a few extra seconds to mute everything down to a dull roar, the various perfumes and crowd making me nauseous. After I get it back to a bearable level, I do a cursory scan around the store, hating that I can’t instantly find the others like this and need to actually track them down.
“I’d rather he does. Hunting him down might piss her off and cause some legal problems, but self-defense is the golden ticket to excuse all murders.”
“Hard to make that claim with the amount of overkill we’ll be doing,” he argues with a hard glint to his eye. “Because no way in hell is that fucker getting an easy out.”
We’re in complete agreement on that front. Blake Thompson is going to suffer; it’s just a matter about how much we can cram in before needing to dump the body so we don’t get caught. Vengeance may be sweet, but we can’t very well protect our mate from jail.
We both stop dead in our tracks, catching sight of Risa. There’s no sign of Bane, and unless he has a damn good reason, it’s entirely possible that after we’re finished getting banned for life from this place, I’ll be kicking his ass next. He had one fucking job, and after the way he had her coming on his face last night, I expected a hell of a lot better from him.
