Sailing Deep (5 page)

              Dylan was in the middle of playing Skyrim when Blake finally returned. He heard the lock turning and stiffened, half turning to stare at the door. When he saw it was Blake, he frowned and turned back to his game.

              “Honey, I’m home.” He said, stepping into the room and kicking the door shut.

              “It’s about damned time,” Dylan grumbled.

              “Awww, miss me?”

              Dylan grunted. “Hardly.” He stiffened as Blake bent in his peripheral vision, put a hand casually on his shoulder, and pressed a quick kiss to the top of his head. Dylan decided it was best to continue to ignore him. The mocking shows of affection only seemed to worsen whenever he protested.

              The man paused and Dylan heard him sniff. He could hear the smile in his voice when he spoke. “You took a shower. You smell like my shampoo.” There was something odd about his voice, and for a moment, Dylan wondered if he considered borrowing shampoo to be out of line, but then he brushed it off. That would be stupid, especially, since Blake had told him to use anything he wanted.

              He felt Blake’s hand stiffen on his shoulder and watched, with some satisfaction, Blake’s reflection in the computer screen look around. “You … you cleaned my room.”

              “You call it a room? It looked more like a pig stye.” The hand dropped from his shoulder, and he swiveled the chair around to face him, smirking. He expected Blake’s surprise, but he hadn’t expected the look of distress.

              “How … how am I supposed to find my stuff now?” His voice was still light with surprise, but it sounded hollow. Like he still couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

              “Well, what I assumed were dirty clothes are in the hamper in the corner. What I decided were clean clothes are put away in your wardrobes. I tried to organize your papers and gave up. I mostly just straightened the piles they were in and stacked them in the drawers of the desk. Towels were put in the bathroom. Trash is in the trashcan. I put everything else in the drawers of your nightstand or organized them on the desk.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, and your bathroom was disgusting! So I cleaned that, too.”

              Blake wasn’t looking at him. He was still blankly surveying the room. His eyes stopped on his four post bed. “You even made the bed.”

              Dylan nodded, crossing his arms over his chest. “If your duvet wasn’t so fluffy, you could bounce a quarter off of it.” Dylan’s smirk faded a bit when Blake continued to ignore him. “You know, the typical response when someone cleans up your mess is ‘thank you.’”

              Then Blake did look at him, and for once his expression was completely void of a smile. His eyes were wide and innocent, and his face was open. He looked completely in awe, as if he had never seen his room so clean and never could have imagined it so. “You were so bored that you cleaned my room.” He paused for a second, looking around the room once more before returning his gaze to Dylan. “Our room.” He amended.

              Dylan decided to ignore that comment. He cleared his throat, looking away. Dylan enjoyed making the cocky man speechless, but the way Blake was looking at him, with such open adoration, was making him uncomfortable. He shrugged. “I had nothing better to do. And honestly, it was disgusting. If you expect me to stay here, we’re going to have to set some ground rules.”

              He hadn’t meant to clean the whole room. It had started with only making the bed after his unexpected nap. Then he noticed the dirty clothes he kept stepping on and decided to pick them up. Then he saw the clean clothes that had yet to be hung up. That led him to take the discarded towels and to return them to the bathroom, which was in a terrible state of disarray. The bathroom was shared between Blake and his neighbor, but it looked like neither had ever bothered to clean it. If men had a reputation for being messy, male shifters were worse. After that, he had returned to the desk to check to see if Blake’s computer had anything entertaining on it, only to find himself cleaning up the desk, too.

              His cleaning spree had gotten out of hand, but he felt better now that it was done. It had given him time to think and digest what had happened. He had always been a bit of a neat freak, ever since he was young. Being in the military had drilled in habits that made his organizational practices better or worse, depending on how one looked at it. Organized surroundings made for an orderly mind. He now had the discipline to clean when he wanted to, instead of putting it off.

              “You are,” Blake began, his voice filled with an innocent wonder that brought heat to Dylan’s cheeks. He paused, licking his lips as he tried to find the right words. His smile finally returned, a small lift of the corner of his mouth, a tilt to his head. “Amazingly adorable.” Dylan choked, which turned into a cough. He was caught off guard by the sincere compliment.

              Dylan collected himself, adjusting his arms over his chest as he nodded his chin toward the large paper bag in Blake’s hand. He desperately wanted a subject change. “What’s that?”

              Blake looked down at the bag in his hand as if just remembering that it was there. He smirked, holding it up. “I brought dinner.”

              The food, Blake told him, came from the house kitchen. He said that breakfast, lunch, and dinner were typically served in the dining room at specific times throughout the day. Figuring Dylan wouldn’t want to deal with that so soon, he picked up food and brought it to their room.

              Their room. He kept specifying. He always said “our room” and not “my room.” It was a casual reminder that Dylan was stuck here for a while and that he’d be stuck with the man for at least a month. He wasn’t sure he liked the reminder. It made everything too much of a reality, and it sounded very … mate-like.

              The conversation while they ate was surprisingly unstrained. Dylan asked Blake where he worked, and Blake was surprisingly compliant. He was amused to find that their computer genius mole had gotten a job as a simple pair of eyes on security cameras. It was a perfectly innocent job, but it put the man close to everything that he would need to gather information.

              At one point, Blake tried to tease Dylan about his cleaning habits, but Dylan came back with spiteful jokes about Blake’s messy habits. Steering the conversation to a safer topic they started to discuss Skyrim, the video game Dylan had been playing. As it turned out, Blake had quite a few games on his computer. While browsing through them, Dylan had chosen one that was familiar enough that he wouldn’t have to think about but one that could still be entertaining. Blake encouraged him to try Assassin’s Creed, his favorite. Dylan smirked and replied that he had already played them all.

              After they had eaten, Blake settled on the couch with his laptop and turned on the tv while Dylan went back to his game. Dylan found the sudden casualness to be … unsettling. He was in the heart of the enemy compound, with their mole, yet they were wasting time casually playing on computers and watching tv. It was a hard concept to get his mind around, but he understood there was nothing else to do. His job had gone from secret reconnaissance to, essentially, being a mole himself. He wasn’t trained to be a secret agent. He was trained to be a SEAL. He wasn’t sure what he expected, but he was beginning to realize that a lot of what it entailed was acting like an average person. And that meant casually playing games to pass the time, even when he felt he should be doing something productive. 

              “Have you tried to contact my team?” He asked after a long period of silence filled with the sounds of the tv, video game, and the staccato of Blake’s typing.

              There wasn’t a pause in the clicks of his keyboard. “I just have.” He said slowly, half distracted.

              “And?” Dylan asked, turning to look at the other man.

              “And now we wait.” He said, finishing what he was typing and closing his laptop. He looked up, surprised to find Dylan staring at him. He raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t expect the correspondence to be instantaneous, did you?”

              Dylan frowned. “No.” As a matter of fact, he kind of had. He realized how stupid of an assumption that had been. Of course, the correspondence wasn’t instant. It wasn’t like texting. It had to be a coded message, and while his team was no doubt waiting for messages constantly, this situation was complicated enough to require some thought before a response was given. “What did you say?”

              Blake put his laptop on the coffee table and sat up straight, stretching his arms over his head. “I told your superiors that you had been found and picked up by the shadow guard, and I told them of my ploy to get you out of the holding cells and away from suspicion.”

              “Did you ask for their orders?”

              “Of course, I did. I’m not an amateur.”

              “When do you think they’ll answer?”

              He relaxed, slumping and rolling his shoulders. “It depends on how surprised they are by what happened.” Blake gave him a reassuring smile. “Come now, don’t make that face. You’ll get your orders soon enough, SEAL boy.”

              Dylan turned away from him. He hadn’t been aware he had been making a face. He heard Blake stand up from the couch. In the reflection of the unused monitor, he saw the man turn to look toward the window.

              “Are you ready for tonight?”

              “For the post-moon run? As ready as I’ll ever be.”

              “I certainly hope so.” There was something in his tone.

              Dylan turned the chair around again. “What aren’t you telling me?”

              Blake looked at him then; all smiles gone. It was one of the rare moments when the man seemed serious-minded, and it unnerved Dylan more than his cocky smirks. “The Shadow Pack has a lot of shifters, from all breeds, alphas and omegas.”

              “I know.”

              Blake shook his head once. “You’ve never been part of a pack like this. Your pack has been your team, who’re all military trained. You have been taught to control your primal urges, as much as you can. And you expect the same level of control from those around you, whether they are alphas or omegas.” Dylan nodded slowly, encouraging the man to continue but not sure he liked where this was going. “The Shadow Pack encourages shifters to embrace their primal urges. We don’t suppress the beast within. We are taught to listen to our instincts because we can. The whole purpose of this place is to give shifters a safe haven to be themselves.”

              “I understand.”

              “I don’t think you do.” Blake nearly snapped, walking around the coffee table, coming to stand by the desk chair to tower over him. Dylan inherently straightened, subconsciously showing he wasn’t intimidated. Blake continued without pause. “If you show hesitation or awkwardness while in your beast form, it can be easily written off as you being shy and new to the pack. That’s not what I’m worried about.”

              Dylan’s eyes narrowed. “Then what’s the problem?”

              “The problem is that I think you have too much control.”

              “And that’s a bad thing?”

              “In this case, yes.” He bent down, putting his hands on the arms of the chair and trapping Dylan, much like he had this morning, but, this time, he didn’t move in to steal a kiss. He hovered in front of Dylan so that they were face to face. His expression was hard. “We are mates, and we cannot let anyone doubt that fact. Not even ourselves. You have been taught to control the urges of the wolf. Tonight, you need to loosen your control. You need to let yourself submit to me. You can’t let yourself resist me and my call. I won’t abuse this trust,” He added, cutting of Dylan’s protest. “Not tonight. Not while you’re vulnerable to the beast.” Normally, Dylan would have found it hard to believe him, but there was something in his tone, in his eyes, that made Dylan trust him to keep his word.

              “I cannot stress enough,” He continued, “How you need to appear to be mine. Fresh blood is always exciting to the pack. Not only are you fresh blood, but you’re a new omega. The alphas will be interested in you. They will attempt to coerce you. They will seek to seduce you, and they will try to do so with force if need be.”

              Dylan’s brows were furrowed. “But you told them we’re-”

              “Mates. Yes, I did. It makes no difference. Until I prove my claim, they’ll test the boundaries. You’re not an ordinary omega, Dylan. And I’m not the only one who will notice.”

              Dylan was about to open his mouth, then closed it. He was going to say something about tonight, a protest, but he knew it was futile. Blake was undoubtedly right. As much as the man’s cocky attitude irritated him, Blake knew more about this place than he did. He knew this pack and their customs. He knew the people, and something about his tone brokered no argument. Dylan frowned. “What do I need to do?”

              A small smirk broke the grim mask and made his eyes spark. “Follow my lead and allow yourself to be drawn to me.”

              “Easier said than done,” Dylan grumbled.

              “Loosen your self-control and listen to the urges of your body and the beast. It’ll be easier than you realize. Your body responds to me more than you do.”