“Titus…” Faythe groaned. And that’s when I realized how my protest sounded.
“I’m not arguing. I’m saying that this entire phone call is an insult. The council has no right to question my behavior and no right to tell Robyn who she can’t…be with.”
“You’re right. That’s not our place. And I promise I wouldn’t be asking, regardless of what the council wants, if I didn’t think this was in her best interest,” Faythe said. “You’re her Alpha, at least for the time being. Do the right thing. Guard her while she’s with you, both physically and psychologically.”
“Robyn’s well-being is foremost in my mind,” I assured them through clenched teeth. “And you have my word that I have no plans to seduce her. But I won’t tolerate having my judgment questioned again. Is that understood?”
“Perfectly,” Faythe said, while Marc grunted over the line. “Thank you, Titus.”
I echoed Marc’s grunt. Then I hung up the phone.
“How is he?” Robyn said from halfway up the stairs, and for a second, I thought she’d heard Faythe ask me not to abuse my authority as an Alpha by sleeping with her. As if I would ever abuse my authority. During that second, I found myself in a rare moment of speechlessness, unsure how to cover my own humiliation.
Acknowledge the awkwardness and joke it off?
Ignore the whole thing?
But then Robyn jogged down the rest of the stairs with her gaze glued to Corey Morris, who still lay panting on the floor, and I saw no sign that she’d overheard. “Lunch. From Knox.” She dropped a brown paper bag on the table in front of me, and I could already smell the sandwich inside. “When did he shift?” she asked as she crossed the concrete toward the open cell at the end of the basement.
“Just now.”
“So can you tell who infected him?”
“Not yet. But soon, hopefully. His scent will begin to develop, now that he’s shifted.”
“Like an old Polaroid?” she asked, and I laughed.
“Kind of. It’ll happen once he’s recovered from the shift, and that’ll be faster if we can get him to eat something and drink more water.”
She glanced at the rabbit meat on a paper plate in his cell, then marched forward with clear purpose.
“Wait!” I reached for her arm as she passed, but she dodged my grasp. “He might not—”
“Corey?” Robyn dropped onto her heels in front of the new stray, and I followed her into the cell, prepared to get between them if Morris had a bad reaction to being approached for the first time in cat form. “You need to eat something. Trust me, you’ll feel one hundred percent better once you do.” She reached for him as if she’d stroke his head, but I darted forward and pulled her away.
“Don’t touch him yet. Let him get used to—”
Robyn pulled her arm from my grasp and scowled at me. “He won’t hurt me.”
“You don’t know that. He’s not himself yet. Don’t you remember how confused and terrified you were right after your first shift? His instinct will be to snap or swipe at anyone who comes close, and if he hurts you before he knows what he’s doing—” I will never forgive myself. “—the guilt could color his perception of his feline half forever.”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Morris needs a positive outlook on his new form. He needs to understand from the very beginning that this new part of himself is powerful and sometimes dangerous, but not inherently bad in any way. If he hurts you before he’s had a chance to come to terms with what’s happening to him, his initial impression of this new form could be that it’s monstrous or somehow wrong. Or worse—uncontrollable.”
Her frown faded. “You’re not trying to protect me from him. You’re trying to protect him from himself.”
“I’m doing both,” I said as I watched Morris breathe heavily on the floor. “That’s my job.”
“You really care about him. About all of them.” She sounded surprised by the realization, and I tried not to be offended by that.
“Why would I be here, if I didn’t?”
“I don’t…” Her frown became a slow smile. “You’re not what I expected from an Alpha.”
I couldn’t resist the opportunity to throw her own words at her. “Maybe you should stop expecting me to be like all the other Alphas. We’re breaking new ground here, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I have noticed,” she said. “And I want to help.” Robyn turned and squatted to put herself closer to Morris’s height. But she preserved the distance I’d put between them. “Corey? I want you to nod if you understand me. Titus needs to know that even though you look like a cat, you’re thinking like a human. That’s something I didn’t even know was possible at your stage in the game. So can you give us a nod?”
Morris lifted his head and pushed himself onto his haunches. He blinked slowly. Sluggishly. Then he nodded.
Robyn’s smile looked young and excited, as if she’d just seen her first rainbow. “Good. Now we need you to eat something. The faster you recover, the faster we can get a good whiff of your scent and find out who did this to you. That way we can—” She stood in a single graceful motion, frowning at me. “What will happen to whoever infected him? That’s a crime, right?”
“Yes. But the consequence depends on the circumstances. If he was infected by a new stray who didn’t know any better—who didn’t intend to hurt him or infect him—we’ll focus our efforts on rehabilitation. On teaching him how to be a productive and safe member of the Pride.”
“And if he can’t be rehabilitated?” There was something fragile in her voice, as if she had some personal stake in my answer. And of course, she did.
Robyn was in the midst of that very rehabilitation process. The council considered her sentence to be training and rehabilitation rather than punishment, but I could see in her eyes, and in the sudden, defeated slump of her posture, that she wasn’t sure it would work. That she wasn’t sure she could truly learn to control her feline self, which had been acting on an unchecked instinct telling her that bad men deserved to pay.
“Robyn, you’re going to be fine,” I whispered, to keep the conversation as close to confidential as I could.
“Yeah. I know.” She blinked, and that glimpse of vulnerability was gone, buried beneath the very bravado that had steeled her spine when I’d caught her in my car. “I’m talking about whoever infected Corey.”
“With any luck, he’ll be okay too.”
A gristly sound caught our attention, and we turned to see that Morris was finally gnawing on the hunk of rabbit meat, not yet sure how to separate flesh from bone in his first cat-form meal.
Robyn smiled. “It helps if you use your paw…”
This time I didn’t try to stop her when she knelt and crawled closer to Morris, but I did follow her. I had to be close enough to pull her out of harm’s way if the new stray decided his meal was being threatened. Because as Faythe and Marc were determined to remind me, her safety was entirely in my hands.
NINE
Robyn
I closed the guesthouse front door, and finally, I could exhale.
Robyn’s well-being is foremost in my mind. And you have my word that I have no plans to seduce her.
Titus’s words echoed in my head, and a bitter taste filled the back of my mouth.
He didn’t seem to know I’d overheard his phone call. And I hadn’t, really. All I’d been able to make out was the last few seconds of the conversation.
Why would he give Faythe his word that he had no plans to seduce me, unless she’d made him promise not to?
Where the hell did she get off, deciding who I could and couldn’t sleep with? After Abby’s stories, I’d expected that from the rest of the council, but coming from Faythe? After she nearly tore the council apart over her right to marry—or not—as she chose?
I had no plans to seduce Titus either. But a girl has the right to change her mind, and that hungry way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t watchi
ng made me want to find out whether he tasted as good as he smelled…
If he truly wasn’t using me to provide a dam for his Pride, then I would damn well decide for myself whether or not to reciprocate any hypothetical interest from the world’s first stray Alpha.
I would not let my private life be scheduled or restricted by committee.
“Whoa, those aren’t paper plates!” I stopped in the entryway to the dining room, stunned by the display laid out before me.
Titus’s dining room table—a massive slab of wood shaped like a vaguely oval leaf, with copper veins running through it—was set for eight. Each place setting included a bowl nested inside a broader, shallower bowl, set on top of a large matching plate with fancy scalloped edges. There were four forks, two spoons, two knives—one laid across a small plate set to the left—and stemmed, gold-rimmed glasses for three kinds of wine, as well as a water goblet.
“It’s Titus’s mother’s china,” Brandt said as he rounded the table, setting the smallest wine glasses in place. “He said he’d skin me alive if I dropped anything.”
I ventured closer, studying the beautiful, complex scrolling pattern on the edge of the shallower bowls. “What’s the occasion?”
“I believe you’re the occasion,” Lochlan said from behind me, and I jumped, startled by his sudden appearance. Evidently, I would never get used to how quietly shifters moved around.
“Me?” My heart thudded harder, and when he smiled, I realized he could hear it.
“Don’t take it personally. He’s been looking for an excuse to use them. His mom broke them out for every holiday before she died.”
“Oh.” Yet my pulse remained elevated. The pendulum swing from paper plates to heirloom china was extreme, no matter what Loch said.
“It’s a lot of dishes, huh?” Brandt ran one finger over the gold-rimmed plate on the bottom of the nearest place setting. “This one’s called the service plate. You don’t put food on it. It stays there because there isn’t supposed to be an empty place on the table until dessert is served. So all your other plates and bowls sit on top of the service plate.”
Wow. I was way out of my league. “What’s that glass for?” I nodded at the last one, as Brandt set it carefully on the table.
“It’s the dessert wine glass.”
“Don’t look too impressed,” Loch said. “He had to look up ‘how to set a formal table’ online.”
“I had to look it up because no one else knew either,” Brandt said with a scowl.
“True,” Lochlan conceded. “We’ve never used the full set before.” He turned to Brandt. “Knox says we’ll be ready to eat in ten, and we’ll be forgoing formal dress, since our guest of honor has no luggage.” He glanced at me with a grin, and I laughed. “We got sidetracked today by the new arrival, but tomorrow, someone will take you shopping.”
“Wait, there was going to be formal dress?” Brandt appeared suddenly worried. “The most formal thing I own is my good T-shirt.”
Lochlan smoothed a loose strand of blond hair toward his bun. “Well, save it for another day. You’re off the hook.” Loch somehow looked well-put-together yet casual in a navy wool cardigan with leather elbow patches, over his black enforcer’s tee. “I have to get to the kitchen before Knox starts yelling.”
I followed Loch—and the sounds and scents of a serious culinary undertaking—to find the rest of the enforcers at work in various stations around the huge gourmet kitchen, chopping, stirring, and blending under the supervision of our illustrious chef. Knox’s tattoos were temporarily covered by an honest-to-goodness white chef’s coat with a double row of dark buttons, accented by a knee-length black apron. He definitely looked the part, and the speed and skill with which he was toasting the tops of a series of small custard-filled dishes with a tiny blowtorch said that his former restaurant’s loss was our gain.
“Wow! You’ve got your own little sweatshop in here!” I said as my gaze wandered over the meal courses, in varying stages of near-completion.
“Out!” Knox ordered, pointing toward the hallway with one finger. He never even looked up from his torch. “The guest of honor isn’t supposed to see the preparation.”
“You’re thinking of the groom seeing the bride before the wedding,” I said as I backed away from the kitchen, a smile taking up most of my face. The food smelled amazing…
“Ten minutes!” Knox called after me.
I wandered from room to room on the first floor of Titus’s home, through the theater, a formal living room centered around an enormous marble fireplace, a sunroom with huge sliding glass doors, a room with no clear purpose, other than playing video games on the massive television and mixing drinks at a full-scale bar, then into the glass-walled wine cellar nestled beneath the curving marble staircase in the foyer.
But my favorite space was an informal den, one wall of which held a collection of framed photographs of what could only be Titus’s family. Two boys, several years apart, grew in age over the course of the display. With them in most of the shots were a mother with long dark curls and a father with piercing gray eyes and a thick head of prematurely white hair.
Their clothes were nice and obviously expensive. The locations were often tropical or historical. But the family itself could have been anyone, at any time. They looked so…normal.
As I studied the pictures, the whisper of a shoe against the hardwood floor at my back warned me that I was no longer alone.
I turned to face Titus with a triumphant smile. “I heard you coming that time,” I said, and his soft laugh made me frown, even as the sound sent delicious little shivers up my spine. “You made noise on purpose, didn’t you?”
He shrugged. “It doesn’t feel fair to sneak up on you, when you’ve had so little practice listening for us.”
“I was infected four months ago. This should be coming easier for me by now, shouldn’t it?”
Titus ran one hand over his short scruff of beard, and my gaze caught there as I wondered, not for the first time, what his stubble would feel like against my palm. This time, instead of squelching the dirty fantasy that thought inspired, I let it play out a little.
Cold night. Warm bed. Bare bodies. Titus’s hands sliding over my—
“I’m sure the learning curve is different for everyone,” he said, evidently unaware of the salacious turn my thoughts had taken. “And I’m just as sure that there are things you’re better at than I am.”
“Any idea what those things are? Because off the top of my head, all I can come up with is menstruation and makeup application. And I couldn’t swear to that second one.”
Titus laughed, and the sound filled me with joy in a deeply felt but incomprehensible way. As if his mood were connected to mine through some psychological puppet string.
Would it be like that with any Alpha? I hadn’t spent much time around any of the others—an intentional choice on my part.
Did that connection work both ways? If I smiled, would he feel happier?
My gaze wandered over the photographs again. “These are your parents?” I asked, cringing over how obvious the answer must be. But he only nodded. “May I ask what happened to them?”
“Car crash.” Titus slid both hands into the pockets of his casual slacks. “I was twenty-five, and my brother was fourteen.”
“How awful!”
“Really. It’s okay. It was five years ago.” He turned to a freestanding bar along the wall and pulled a crystal decanter full of amber liquid from the shelf. “What about your family?”
“My parents are still alive, in the clinical sense, at least. Though neither of them has had anything I’d describe as a real life in at least a decade.”
“And how would you describe a ‘real life?’” He poured an inch of whiskey—as my nose labeled it—into a short glass, then wordlessly offered it to me.
I shook my head to decline politely. “I’d be happy if either of them ever left the house for something other than work and grocery shopping. Thou
gh I’m not sure they actually leave to shop anymore, since my sister showed them how to order groceries online.”
“And your sister? What’s she like?”
“Married with a two-year-old daughter. Dana’s a guidance counselor at an elementary school in Kentucky, in a town full of women just like her. Seriously, she wouldn’t stand out in a random sampling. But at least she and her husband have a date night every Friday. She’s the one who encouraged me to apply to graduate school.”
“How much do they all know about what happened to you?”
“Nothing.” Despite the size of the room, instead of echoing, that word hung there in front of me, like a cloud of smoke in the air, tainting every breath I took. “The council said I couldn’t tell them anything, for their own good. And I’m only allowed to talk to them on supervised phone calls.” My voice dropped into a bitter growl. “The Di Carlos confiscated my cell phone until I’m ‘rehabilitated’.”
“We keep several disposable cells on hand. I’ll have Naveen set one up for you after dinner. And of course, you’re welcome to call your family while you’re here.” He took a long sip from his glass. “Do they know you’re no longer in school?”
“No. But I told them I’d need another semester to graduate. That I was short two classes. With any luck, I’ll be finished serving my sentence in time to graduate next December.”
“I’m sure you will be.”
I kept my doubts to myself and changed the subject. “What about—”
“Knox says it’s time to eat,” Brandt said from the doorway. “He made me actually come find you instead of shouting. It’s not a very efficient system.”
Titus chuckled. “Sounds like the manners are chafing.”
“Like burlap underwear,” Brandt confirmed.
The guys were already in the dining room when we arrived, each standing behind one of the eight chairs in a very formal posture, in spite of the fact that they all wore jeans. At each place setting, nested inside the other dishes, sat a steaming bowl of orangish soup. A beautifully browned dinner roll lay on the small plate at each setting.