Page 53 of Captive Mate
“I’m barely awake. And you should talk. You drank half the pot before you bothered to wake me up…”
I tuned out their bickering and snuck a glance at Matthew. His lips were turned down, his whole expression gloomy. Because Ian and Nate had caught us together? I edged away from him, preferring to create some distance myself before he did it for me.
And then went rigid with shock as Matthew leaned in, grabbed me around the shoulders after all, and tucked me under his arm, with my head pressed into his bare shoulder. “Come on,” he muttered. “They’ll fight for a while if we sneak off and leave them to it.”
Well. All right then. We turned slowly, not drawing their attention, and sidled down the path, picking up the pace once Nate’s protests about only having used his share of the milk started to fade away behind us. Matthew didn’t let go. It was odd, matching my stride to his, but I had long legs for my height and fell into the rhythm of it.
It was odd, but it felt good.
“What happens after breakfast?” I hadn’t meant to sound quite that needy. Fuck. These little twinges of uncertainty in my belly and the happy, helpless smile that kept trying to spread over my face could both fuck right off.
“Showers. Or maybe just one shower. And then — I don’t know about you, but I could sleep for a week. So maybe we can squeeze in four hours or so before someone comes to fucking harass me.”
“Were you up all night?”
I glanced up at him and caught his nod. “I’ll tell you all about it while you eat.”
We strolled the rest of the way in silence, which wasn’t quite as awkward as before but was still a little on the heavy side. His arm was heavy, too, resting on me. I wanted to lean into it, so much so that when we reached the pack house and he let go of me as we went up the front steps, it was kind of a relief.
My shoulders felt weird without his arm, though, like the phantom of his touch was still weighing me down.
No one was in the main front room of the pack house. In fact the whole house was oddly silent.
“Everyone who isn’t patrolling the boundaries is in bed, probably,” Matthew said before I could ask. “No one’s trying to kill us right now. As far as I know. I’ll be right back.” And he jogged off up the stairs without looking back at me.
I wandered into the kitchen warily, in case someone else was around after all, although I didn’t hear or scent anyone. The kitchen was plain, functional, and outdated, with a scratched-up table and chairs and a groaning old fridge. My stomach made a similar rumbling sound as I sat down at the table.
Ugh. I winced and shifted my weight. Sitting in wooden chairs probably wasn’t my best move today, although I knew the soreness would heal within a few hours. I could heal it myself, but — well, I was still a little drained from the night before. And that was a really excellent reason I could use to cover the fact that I simply didn’t want to. What if Matthew changed his mind? I needed to hang on to this feeling as long as I could. Savor it. I traced a long gouge in the table with my fingertips, wondering what it would be like to stay in a place long enough to have a piece of furniture with history like this. For all I knew, Matthew had made this scratch with his fork — or his claws — as a grouchy boy having an argument with his brother.
Usually I could ignore my grief over my own adoptive brother, but for a moment it took me by the throat.
Matthew burst back into the kitchen, now wearing a shirt, and headed for the stove, and I blinked it away.
He shoved two frying pans onto the stovetop and went to the fridge. “I can’t cook anything besides fried eggs,” he said. “I hope that’s okay.”
Gods, this pack needed help. A cook. And maybe a financial planner. Not that they could afford either of those.
“Fine. Thank you.” I shot him a polite little smile. Miss Manners would’ve approved. Fuck, why couldn’t I just be normal? Maybe because I’d tried my normal, and they’d locked me in the basement.
“You’re welcome,” Matthew said with a slight answering frown. He seemed stiff and weird too.
With his back to me, and the pans starting to sizzle, it got even harder to relax. The strong lines of his body were an excellent view, but I couldn’t see his face. I’d have preferred to at least know if he was still frowning, if he was standing there panicking over how to tell me he wanted me to eat my eggs and get the fuck out, offhand comments about sharing the shower be damned.
“What happened? With the Kimballs?” I prompted him, once the sound of sizzling had started to wear on my nerves.
“Oh, yeah,” Matthew said, as if he’d totally forgotten. “Well, I missed most of it…”
He launched into an explanation of what had happened before he took off after Parker, and what he’d gleaned afterwards about what he’d missed. Our salt circle had caught most of the Kimballs, but not all, and while our side was getting the loose ones subdued Parker had slipped away and gone after me.
Colin and his father got into a shouting match that ended with Colin straight-up challenging his father for pack leadership. Ian had run to Nate, and meanwhile Colin and his father fought it out; Colin won, and at that point he called off the pack war. The Kimballs argued, the salt circle failed, and there was a general fracas that didn’t result in any deaths but left a few weres on either side nursing injuries.
Which brought us to me and Matthew coming back to find Colin and his medic helping Nate, and everyone else retreating to lick their wounds. Colin was, for now, the official pack leader, but he still had to deal with his pack council and assert his control.
But none of that was my problem, and personally, I thought Colin would pull it off. The Kimball council was full of a bunch of spineless cowards, and they’d defer to whichever Kimball came out on top in the family’s infighting.
“I guess we’ll have to wait and see,” Matthew said as he slid eggs onto two plates. And then he paused, sighed, and got out two more plates. Nate and Ian’s voices were floating in from the front room. Ugh, we’d have to share our breakfast. “Anyway, I’m going to batten down the hatches and keep quiet. If I try to help Colin take power, it’ll only make him look weak.”
He set a plate with only two eggs in front of me. Damn Nate and Ian anyway. I helped myself to way more than my share of the bacon and stuffed some in my mouth before anyone could stop me.
