Next week.
The words landed like lead in my stomach but dissolved quickly—apparently I was still anxious about Serena’s homecoming, but less so than I’d been before.
“BACK TO MY PLACE?” Kade asked as we climbed into his pickup.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“That didn’t sound as certain as I might’ve expected,” Kade teased.
It hadn’t been certain. Definitely not as certain as he was used to, anyway. I had managed to put off thinking about what was going on with Jeremiah and Shadow this weekend, despite having checked in with them on Saturday.
“There’s something I have to tell you.” I needed to do it. I’d been avoiding it for far too long, anyway.
Kade turned those insightful, golden-flecked eyes on me. “I’ve been wondering when you’d get up the courage to spill,” he said.
I jumped a little in my seat. “You already know?”
“Only that there’s something strange going on. It started late last week—you’ve been avoiding me.” He paused for a second, slanting his gaze at me as he pushed his seat back and turned to face me more directly.
“I decided to assume that it wasn’t about me.”
“Not even a little bit,” I said.
“I’m ready when you are.”
I bit the insides of my lips closed, considering where to start. Kade was certainly right—I had been avoiding talking about this particular issue since the hyena and Hunter had shown up on my doorstep, or at least the Shields’ doorstep.
But there was something else at play here, and I was too honest with myself, too well-trained as a counselor, not to admit it. I had been anxious about what was going on in my still comparatively new relationship with Kade ever since I had decided to take on the responsibility of the infant lamias and he had chosen to remain simply a “supportive whatever.”
That was something I was going to have to deal with later. At the moment, I needed to tell him what was going on with Shadow and Jeremiah.
“What I’m about to tell you cannot leave this truck. Not until I have other people’s permission.”
Kade nodded. “Confidentiality issues,” he stated.
I blinked at him, a little surprised.
“You know, I am a doctor. We have the same restrictions.”
“If anyone asks...”
“I knew nothing until you had the go-ahead.” Kade finished my sentence for me.
And then I told him everything. I hadn’t realized how much it had been weighing on me that I hadn’t let Kade know that there were two virtual strangers living in my apartment, even as he was busy meeting with the various Council representatives about their existence.
Draping his arm over the steering wheel, he tapped it lightly when I had finished my story. “That is substantially different from the story the werewolves are telling Keeya.”
“So I gathered. But I sensed absolutely no deception on either of them. It would be easy enough for one sociopath to get by my internal lie detector. Two? I’ve never seen it happen before.” I gave an openhanded shrug. “It’s not impossible, of course, but there’s almost always something that gives it away, at least in my experience. Lies taste... dark, somehow.”
“And they smell rancid,” Kade added. For that matter, it would be difficult to be a liar in any shifters setting, since so many of us had extrasensory—or at least extra-human-sensory—means of sniffing out untruths.
“Okay, then. If we assume that these two are telling the truth, then our best bet is to facilitate their meeting with the matriarch, and then let her take it to the Council, right?” I fought the urge to bring my hands in my lap, more anxious about this than I had even known. Though I had not spent much time around them, I had already grown to like the reticent hyena and the tightly wound Hunter. They were an odd pair. A strange match. But as half of an unusual pairing myself, I had no trouble with that at all.
“I think that is our best possible option,” Kade said. “I think you should get their permission to tell me as soon as possible, though.” He frowned. “I don’t like the sound of that werewolf looking around my house. If there’s any exchange to be made, I want to be in on it. I don’t want you going alone.”
I blinked. “Exchange to be made?”
“Perhaps not the right wording. When you take them to meet the matriarch, I plan to be with you.”
“I’ll contact them this afternoon.” I paused. “So are we going to your place, or back out to the ranch?” I asked, the coil of heat starting deep in my belly as I thought about the possibilities of either location.
Kade’s gaze met mine and the air in the truck’s cab crew heated, even as his eyes began to churn with gold. With one hand, he reached out and cupped the side of my face. I leaned into the touch.
“My place is closer.” His voice rasped with desire.
I turned my face and caught his middle finger between my lips. I sucked on the fingertip gently, then ran my tongue around it. Giving it a gentle nip before releasing it, I said, “Closer is definitely better.”
Without another word, Kade turned to face forward and put the truck in gear.
WHEN WE GOT TO KADE’S house, we slammed into each other before we were even all the way inside the house, our mouths and hands desperate for one another as we stumbled through the back entrance into the kitchen.
He reached around me and shut the kitchen door, and then pushed me up against it. His hot lips seared my mouth, even as his tongue flicked into it, seeking out the most sensitive spots so that I shivered against him.
Slipping his hands down my back, he reached the top of my thighs and lifted me up, sliding my back up the doorframe at the same time that he kissed down my neck and in between my breasts. I wrapped my legs around him, the jeans I had worn for my casual day at the ranch providing a barrier between us, but no obstacle for me to feel the hot thickness of him pressing against me. I whimpered, pulling my legs tighter around him and crossing them behind his waist.
“Too many clothes,” he muttered.
“God, yes,” I agreed.
With a single boost, he stood us up from against the door and began walking me back to the bedroom. I dipped my head to capture his mouth with mine and whispered against his lips, “The bedroom’s too far away,” before pressing against him, allowing the liquid heat of his mouth to melt me.
Kade stopped at the kitchen table, moving around to set me down. He pulled away from our deepening kiss long enough to say, “This?”
“Oh yes,” I whispered. “Please.”
He lifted me up long enough to slide the yoga pants down, capturing my panties as he went. The wood of the table was cold against my ass, but I lost all sense of that as Kade hooked one of the kitchen chairs with his ankle and pulled it over behind him. He sat down in front of me, his hands pressing my inner thighs farther and farther apart as he slid his shoulders under my legs and pulled me toward him, his hands hot on my hips.
I leaned back on my elbows and watched him over the swell of my breasts as he dipped his dark head downward. I forced myself to remain absolutely still, despite how much I wanted to rise up to meet his mouth. Instead, I waited, listening to my own racing pulse and the sound of my harsh breath.