Deadly Mates (Deadly Trilogy) (27 page)

He rounded the table, setting down his own plate, and
took a seat.  He gave me one of his lopsided grins and gestured to the plates filled with chicken and vegetables.  “And I cooked dinner.”

I smirked, trying not to laugh again.  “
You could also just say sorry, you know.”

Aidan looked down at the table, furrowing his brow.  “
Isn’t this better?” he asked.  He was absolutely serious.

I blinked, shaking my head.  “
Nope, saying sorry is always better.”  I closed my fingers around my fork and scooped up a piece of broccoli.  “That way I get to feel like I was right.”

He snorted and rolled his eyes.  He looked as if he were about to say something, but he must have thought better of it, and dug into the food instead, which was probably the smart thing to do given the wicked smirk that was playing on his lips.

We ate in silence for a few minutes.  The food, like always, was fan-freakin-tastic.  One of the things I loved about Aidan, the man knew how to cook.  The chicken was juicy; the vegetables warm, but still had that nice crunch.  Delicious.

I swallowed a mouthful of chicken and looked up.  “Something is really wrong with the team,” I said.  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I kind of wished I hadn’t said them, because it was pretty much the last thing I wanted to talk about right then.

Slurping his drink, Aidan leaned back in his chair.  His smirk was gone.  “Yeah,” he said.

Considering what had happened with Beck, I really expected more than just
Yeah
, but it didn’t look like I was going to get it.  In fact, he was looking at me with a perfectly guarded expression, which was weird.  Aidan wasn’t much for guarding his feelings, at least not with me.  With me, he kind of sucked at it.

I pushed some food around my plate, glanced back up at him, and heard myself ask a question that I wasn’t sure I really wanted the answer to.  “How did you know I was with Jared earlier?”

“Your Dad,” he said, forking a piece of chicken and popping it into his mouth.  He chewed it slowly, considering, and then swallowed it down.  “Jared beat the shit out of him and then took off when you called.”

I was thrown for a minute, and I was sure my eyes went saucer wide.  “What was Jared doing with my dad?” I dropped my fork.  “Wait.  He hit my dad?”

Aidan nodded.  His eyes were darkening, a rich brown velvet, and some of the guardedness faded as if he had just then decided to tell me what was going through his head.  “Jeff said something about people getting hurt when he fights with his brothers.”

I stared at him blankly for a few long seconds, trying to understand what Jared’s fighting had to do with anything.  I puffed out a breath.  Pulled one in, and said, “He doesn’t have any brothers.”  I was sure of that.

“About that.”  Aidan set his fork down.  He watched me with an intense stare, the kind that he usually reserved for when I was pissing him off or when he was about to tell me something I really didn’t want to hear.  “He does have brothers, four of them.”

And just like that, our nice dinner tur
ned into a long, long evening.

Eventually, Aidan finished telling me about
the newest piece of information that Tommy and Chris had found out.  He told me about his concerns with everyone in the team being brothers and stressed that he thought we should take apart the team and rebuild it.

He went on to fill me in on how the pack had handled me taking off with the
guys, which as it turned out, was better than I had hoped, and he thought that some of the males were warming up to me.  I thought that it was about time we had some good news.

But then he told me about his visit with my mother and when he was done, I was pretty much numb.

Through the whole thing, he kept his tone detached and direct, only giving the facts and closing off all emotion.  Except, he watched me as if he were assessing just how upset I was about the news, which, on a scale of one to ten, I was sitting somewhere near an eleven.

Given everything
he told me, it was a surprisingly short conversation and when he finished, I tried to tell him about what had happened at the camp, but he cut me off, gave me a kiss, and told me nothing had to be decided tonight, and then, he went to take a shower.

I puttered around the kitchen, washing the last few dishes.  I thought about everything.  About what I could fix and what was completely out of my control.  But mostly I thought about how this was the first time Aidan had talked to me, really talked to me, about pack stuff without trying to protect me.

In the bedroom, I stretched and changed into a pair of boxers and a tank.  I pulled my hair back, tying it into a loose knot, and waited for Aidan to finish his shower.

I had every intention of staying awake, I really did.  I wanted to talk to him about what had gone down at the hunting camp and about what we found, but as I la
id down and my head hit the pillow, sleep took me in a rush.

~ AIDAN ~

Jade was a bed hog.

I had an elbow digging into my ribs and a knee in my back.  The covers were kicked off the bed, not even a sheet left.  I went to roll over a little but I couldn’t.  Somehow she’d managed to shove me to
the edge of our king size bed.

The space on the other side of her was loaded with the pillows she’d flung.  She
had even snagged mine, I noticed, which she was now using as her own.

I held in my laugh and worked to dislodge her knee and elbow without waking her up.  She made a contented sound from the back of her throat and wrapped an arm around me, nuzzling her head into my side.  She didn’t fully wake up, stuck somewhere between sleep and awareness, and when I kissed her forehead she sighed, and then her breathing deepened and evened out, and she was lost in sleep again.

I probably should have been asleep, too, but sleep was definitely not my friend tonight.  My brain was too full of useless little bits of information.  The team was all brothers.  I killed their father.  Jared wanted revenge in the form of taking Jade.  The cougars kept their women in cages.  They used whips.  They used chains.  We didn’t know where to find them.  Jade’s mom was innocent and trapped in a house with the devil.  The devil was Jade’s dad.  I loved Jade.  Craig wanted me dead.  Jade loved the pack.  She wanted to protect the team.  The information was starting to sound like a record, with pounding base, playing on instant repeat through my head over and over.  There was lots of information, but not enough on any one thing to really do anything with.  Utterly useless.

I grabbed my phone from the nightstand, checking to see if there was any news about our sleeping captive.  Nothing.  It was just after three in the morning.  Beck would have just started his shift with Erika in tow.  Erika.  I really needed to talk to Craig and Jade about that.  She couldn’t be babysat forever.  Except, I really didn’t have a clue how to broach the subject since it kind of was my bad judgment that led to her being stripped of her beta status.  Just another thing to add to the
I don’t know what to do with it
pile.

I set my phone back down and was about to close my eyes and listen to the god-awful stream of useless information in my head again, when a tinkle of keys caught my attention.  A lock clicked.  A door opened and closed.  And then I heard Dominic.  “If you’re awake, it’s just me.”

You’ve got to be kidding me,
I thought, and held in the groan, not wanting to wake up Jade.  I started to get up, slowly lifting her arm from my chest.  She murmured something that sounded a lot like
Move over
and started shoving at me again as I slid off the bed.  With a soft chuckle, I grabbed a T-shirt on my way out of the room, and tugged it on as I headed downstairs.

I found Dominic sitting on my couch.  He was in blue — a dark blue T-shirt, blue jeans, and a light blue jacket zipped halfway up, and he was looking happier than he should for three in the morning.

“What are you doing here and why do you have a key to my house?” I asked, in a hushed voice, eyeing him from the bottom of the staircase.

“Of course I have a key,” he said cheerfully, flashing me a bright smile.  “I’m your second in command.  Why wouldn’t I have a key?”

I didn’t answer that.  Over the last month of knowing Dominic I found it better not to give him a reason to go off on one of his mind numbing lectures.  I sighed, sitting down in my chair.  “It’s three in the morning, Dom.”

He was still smiling a way too sunny smile, and come to think of it, I didn’t think I’d ever seen a real smile on him before.  He might smirk or grin, but he never really smiled.  “If you want it to work, you need to stop holding onto things that will keep you from moving forward.”

So it wasn’t the boundaries lecture he had in mind.  Fantastic.  I didn’t particularly want to listen to whatever he had to say.  Honestly, I wanted to crawl back in bed and wrap my arms around Jade.  But it didn’t look like that was going to happen.  “If you’re trying to give me more Jade advice, I don’t want to hear it.  I almost lost her once because of your advice.”

Dominic stretched out on the couch, his arms behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.  He was silent for a long moment before he said, “Did you tell her everything?”

“Of course I did,” I said, furrowing my brow. “What kind of a stupid question is that?”

Dominic shifted.  He steadied his icy blue eyes on me and his smile turned cold.  “She didn’t call Mac, figured you were reverting back into that
I’m not going to tell her something that will piss her off
mode.”

I hoped I didn’t look as annoyed as I felt, but judging by his cool chuckle
, I figured I did.  “You woke up at three in the morning to come here and ask me if I talked to her,” I said dryly.

His eyes narrowed.  “Nope,” he said.  “I was over at the headquarters checking in.  The hostage woke up.  Oh, and I had to break up a fight between Jared and Beck.”

~ AIDAN ~

Jade had adorable bed head.  Even though her hair was tied up, the indentations by her temples were visible, and stray strands flipped all over the place.  Waking her up had been a bit of
a challenge.  It wasn’t until Dominic had come in with a pitcher of ice cold water threatening to dump it on her that she finally sprung from the bed.  By the time I had finally hustled her out the door and into the car, it was closing in on four in the morning.

She walked a few steps ahead of me, her hands continuously running over her hair and then down her wrinkled hoodie and yoga pants, trying to smooth everything out, but she only succeeded in making herself look more rumpled.  The hoodie she was wearing was mine and every few seconds I noticed her discreetly pressing her nose to her shoulder, pulling in a deep breath of my lingering scent, and each time she did, something in my chest expanded and warmed.

It felt complete.  Perfectly whole.

The parking lot was pretty close to deserted, only a sparse few vehicles, all of them belonging to the team.  The air had a bite to it, stuck in that place where any
precipitation could easily change from rain to snow in a heartbeat.

Dominic walked along beside me.  He still hadn’t patched things up with Jade, both of them too stubborn to apologize first, I assumed.  Needless to say, the drive over had been on the tense side and painfully quiet.

Jade held the door open long enough for me to catch up and grab it before she took off down the hallway at a determined pace.  She was focused, in some kind of zone, so she wasn’t really paying attention, and when she reached the doors to the meeting room and they flung open, she startled, stumbling back a step.

Jared grinned as he let the door close and stalked toward her.  He was in matte-black tonight — black jacket, black T-shirt, black jeans — there wasn’t a speck of color except for the sparks of gold in his dark eyes.  And he was sporting one hell of a shiner.  He locked eyes with me as he closed the distance to Jade.  He leaned into her, and pulled her into a firm hug and said, “Hey, little girl.”

Clearly, he wasn’t done trying to push my buttons.

Jade flinched away from him as if his touch burned, and cut me a nervous glance.  Her face went tight and still, and for the first time ever, she looked at me with something that resembled real fear.  She stayed close to Jared and readjusted her stance, spreading her leg
s hip length apart, squaring her shoulders.  There was no doubt in my mind that if I made a move, she would place herself between me and him.  The look she gave me had a strange intensity about it, as if she knew exactly who she was, or who she wanted to be, and she wasn’t going to let me change that.

The truth?  I loved it.  I loved her fire and never wanted it to change.

I swallowed my growl and I folded my arms over my chest, hiding my clenched fists under my elbows.  I grinned.  It took a hell of a lot of effort to do it, too, but I managed a grin that I hoped looked somewhat real.

She arched a perfectly shaped brow and looked at me suspiciously for a second, and then she was suddenly crashing into me and her hands were in my hair and her lips were pressed to
mine with a quick, warm kiss.