“I get it. You don’t need to remind me eight million times. She’s my friend. I care about her too.”
His hand tightened on the doorknob, making the metal creak. “Finding Kellen is the only priority in your life right now. Is that clear?”
That got me out of my seat like a fire was lit under my ass. “You don’t get to make those decisions. You never got to.”
Lucas opened the door, and when I was sure he was about to leave without trying for the last word, he turned around again. “You can pretend all you want with the vampire, but you and I both know who matters most to you. If my sister isn’t back within a week, Secret, I’ll have Desmond transferred to our office in Los Angeles. Permanently.”
The door closed behind him with a final click.
As if I’d needed another reason to hate him.
Chapter Ten
Inside my bedroom, Holden had been busy.
Upon seeing what he’d done, I wished I’d kicked him out before Lucas and I went head-to-head. The worst-case scenario I’d imagined was coming in and finding him naked on my comforter, waiting with a leering grin. This was worse.
He was fully clothed and cleaning.
“What are you doing?”
Holden held up a rumpled silk top and shook it at me accusingly. “This is Cynthia Rowley. What’s wrong with you?”
To me it was a purple shirt. I understood brand names, even respected their appeal. I’d wondered at women who paid two hundred dollars for a shirt until I owned my first one. Better made, better tailored, just all around better. Having a no-limit credit card didn’t hurt, either. I’d started taking for granted that I owned the finer things in life.
They were just things.
Whether my shirt was from Cynthia Rowley or Forever 21 ultimately wasn’t making my life any better or worse, so the shirt was on the floor with everything else I owned.
When I didn’t reply, Holden shook his head with a disgusted sneer and continued hanging things in the closet. In an order I couldn’t make sense of. I hadn’t even seen him grab some of the clothes from the living room. Damned speedy vampire.
“I sort of assumed when someone did this, they’d hang them in color order,” I observed.
“Too obvious, and really doesn’t help much.” He pointed to the left side of the closet. “Normally, this would go day to evening. For you I had to tweak it since, well…no day.” Holden smiled at me. I stuck my tongue out in return. “So we went casual to formal. Basically the same idea anyway.”
Sure enough, on the left side were all my nice T-shirts, cropped jackets and jeans, and progressing towards the right came my skirts, dresses and fancy Tribunal duds.
“Well damn,” I said. “Looks good.”
“Of course it looks good.”
I loved seeing these glimpses into the anal-retentive fashion history of Holden Chancery. His job at GQ had ended two decades earlier, and I’d thought his interest in clothing was only a lark, a passing phase as opposed to a life-long dedication. But he obviously cared about this stuff a great deal.
It was a fantastic distraction from Lucas’s looming ultimatum too.
As if reading my mind, Holden said, “Your wolf has free will.”
“Free will to send others away on a whim—”
“That wasn’t who I meant when I said your wolf.”
“Oh.”
Holden sat on the edge of my bed once the last article of clothing had been properly assigned its order and my closet looked amazing. I sat next to him, and he looped a chummy arm around my shoulder. “I know you’re worried, but remember, Desmond can say no.”
I shook my head and nestled into the crook of his neck. “Desmond can say no to Lucas about as much as you can say no to Sig.”
His chuckle vibrated against my cheek. “I can say no to Sig. I just choose not to because I’m fond of the current arrangement of my limbs.”
“Exactly.”
“Then I suppose we had better find the girl.”
“Is that you offering to help?”
Holden kissed my forehead. “I think we both know if I didn’t offer, you’d just force me to do it anyway. I’ve gotten wise to you, love.”
“Since you’re being so helpful, do you want to do my laundry too?”
“Are you sure you want me hand washing these?” He brought an extended forefinger into my line of sight, and dangling from it was a pair of violet-colored lace panties. I snatched them away from him. “Now don’t be modest, I’ve seen you wearing far less.”
When he reached to grab them back, I wriggled free of his arm and ended up facedown on the mattress, trying to squirm away from his attack. He retaliated by climbing over me so he was straddling my lower back and keeping me pinned to the mattress. I managed to turn underneath him, so at least I was looking up at him instead of away.
I’d thought it was a game, but now I was wondering what kind of game we were playing.
He retrieved the underwear from my outstretched hand, his chest against mine and his face so close I could have licked his smooth jaw. Once he’d won the game of keep away, he let my nice La Perla undies slip onto the floor but remained pressed to me. My heart was hammering, and there was no way it was escaping his notice.
He sniffed my throat, and a shiver thrilled through me. “Holden…”
With him on top of me, I didn’t have to question whether or not he wanted me. I knew.
His thumb traced my lower lip, bringing back a reminder of the kiss we’d recently shared. One more time he lowered his mouth towards mine, but this kiss was soft and delicate. Too sweet to suggest anything else. He withdrew, placing one last kiss at the corner of my lips, then rolled off me.
“Sunrise,” he whispered huskily.
Had he really been cleaning that long? I let out a wobbly breath I hadn’t known I was holding. Who knew the sun would be the ultimate cock-blocker?
I awoke with something hard digging into my ribs.
When I rolled over to lessen the pressure, my head smacked against Holden’s with a comical hollow thonk. I don’t know which of us had the empty brain basket, but the noise was loud enough to imply it was probably both.
“Guh,” Holden said, jerking awake.
Meanwhile I had discovered the culprit behind the pain in my ribs, and unfortunately there were no Is that a gun poking in my ribs or are you just happy to see me jokes to be made. It was my gun. I’d worn my holster to bed. As often as I’d cursed myself for going somewhere unarmed, perhaps sleeping with a loaded weapon was a bit much.
My alarm clock said it was pushing nine, meaning we’d slept through sunset and right into night. It meant Friday was almost spent, and I was running out of time to live up to Lucas’s selfish, one-sided threat.
“I have to see Desmond,” I announced.
It wasn’t necessarily meant for Holden, but he was the only other person in bed with me, so he took it as an invitation to respond. “And tell him what, exactly? ‘Even though you broke up with me, my other ex is using your life to leverage threats against me’?”
“You make it sound like Lucas is threatening to kill him.”
“He’s making threats about the future of someone he once claimed to be best mates with. How far off can a death threat be?”
That made a chilly lump form in my belly. Surely Lucas wouldn’t put Desmond’s life in danger.
Oh, fuck it. What did I really know about what Lucas would and wouldn’t do? I’d thought he was a good man making hard choices. Maybe he had been, once. Now? They say heavy is the head that wears the crown. Lucas’s head was plenty heavy, and it had turned his spine into Jell-O. His big, bloated, ego-saturated head.
“I have to go,” I repeated.
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“As hilarious as I imagine that conversation would be, I think I’m better off going alone.”
Holden propped himself on his elbows and grinned at me. “Are you sure? I’m really good with dogs.”
I whacked him in the face with one of my big, fluffy pillows.
“Negative conditioning doesn’t reinforce positive behavior,” he remarked through the cotton.
“Keep it up and I’ll show you real negative conditioning.”
I pulled the pillow away, and he was still smirking like an idiot. “I think I’d like that.”
“You would too.”
Chapter Eleven
Holden left me to take care of my business, giving me time for my much-needed cold shower.
By the time I’d washed my hair and changed it was after ten. It would have taken less time, but Holden would have killed me if I’d undone his amazing closet organization less than twenty-four hours after he’d fixed it. I settled on clothes from the middle of the closet, pairing a low-cut short-sleeved red shirt with my dressiest jeans—the ones with cute nautical button details on the front.
Not exactly the fiercest ass-kicking ensemble if another pack of werewolves came after me, but I was still armed. My New Year’s resolution had been to not put myself needlessly in danger anymore. It was proving harder to live up to than I’d hoped—who could account for bayou swamp wolves, really?—but I was doing my part.
My part involved wildly expensive silver bullets and lots of them.
Since my shoulder holster would have shown in stark contrast to the red top, I threw on my leather jacket, dulling the femininity of the outfit about three notches. Oh well. The jacket had seemed brand new a year earlier. Since then I’d been stabbed in it, gone swimming in the Hudson and gotten demon blood on it.
Now it looked like it had been hard traveled through the front lines of World War II.
Ballet flats did their best to add a bit of girlish charm back to my look, but honestly I was wearing them because it was often easier to run in them than my high-heeled boots.
Walking to Desmond’s apartment building took a smidge over half an hour, and it took another ten minutes for me to grow a pair and walk up to the front door. The building he lived in was owned by Rain Real Estate, naturally. Before living with me Desmond had lived in Lucas’s penthouse at Rain Hotel. I was guessing after the wedding, Desmond didn’t feel like living with the wolf king anymore. I couldn’t blame him, seeing as I didn’t want to be in the same room as Lucas, let alone cohabitate with him.
