The violent vibrations of my cell phone on the nightstand were enough to jerk me into wakefulness, but luckily not enough to wake Kiara. With a quiet curse, I grabbed the phone and hustled out into the hallway.
I was still yanking on my robe when I answered the call.
“What did I say about the Loranger pack?”
My mother’s voice was chillingly cold. Had I ever infuriated her enough to get this tone?
The last time I remembered it, she’d used it on my brother. It was when he’d met his current pack—when she’d been forced to confront the fact that he was rejecting the Loranger pack (and their accompanying wealth) for real. For good.
“I believe you said not to associate,” I said.
My voice was still husky with sleep. I padded down the hall, veering into the kitchen and settling onto a bar stool. The French doors to the living room were closed, so this was the place where I was least likely to disrupt anyone else.
“If you were listening to me the first time, why the fuck did you scent mark him in the middle of the lounge? It’s on the front page of the gossip columns.”
There was no explanation she would accept. It was in my best interests to apologize and beg forgiveness.
Dash better have found some of her secrets by now.
“He showed up on his own, and I reacted strongly. I apologize. It was instinct.”
Mother hadn’t been ruled by instinct for a single second in her entire life. Sometimes I wondered if she even knew what instincts were. She didn’t have any of the motherly kind, that was for damn certain. I doubted she had any omega instincts either.
My fathers simply existed. They didn’t care for her, nor she for them.
“It was unacceptable. We were supposed to be fixing your image, Leighton. Not making it worse.”
I didn’t respond. As expected, she kept going.
Oddly, her cool tone shifted as she spoke, becoming more and more… I wanted to say desperate. It couldn’t be. Desperation had to be a trick, something funky happening with the sound coming through the phone. Edith Winston was never desperate.
In the middle of her tirade, the French door swung open. It hit the counter so hard I was surprised it didn’t shatter, revealing a grinning Dash.
He was halfway through a sentence before he saw the phone up against my ear. I made a sharp cutting motion with my hand, and he snapped his lips shut.
Finally, he listened.
Was that the first time ever? Probably.
“You’re clearly not listening to me,” Mother said.
“Of course I was. Understandably, you’re furious and you have my apology. It won’t happen again. Regardless of what happened, the Ashby pack informed me they would be reaching out to set up our next date.”
“You are going to publicly state that you have no association with the Loranger pack.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Muffling it with my hand didn’t work, so she must have heard it through the line. “If you insist, I’ll do it. However, that’s only going to bring a spotlight to the gossip because it will be such an obvious lie, it’s laughable. It’s exactly what I tell people not to do in situations like this.”
She was dead silent. Dash was snickering, bouncing on the balls of his feet with a laptop clutched in his hands. Underneath his eyes were dark smears of colour, but he was invigorated.
It had to mean he found something.
I wanted this bitch off the fucking phone.
The line clicked dead, giving me my wish.
Her hanging up without so much as a complaint was a danger in and of itself, but it didn’t matter if we’d made a discovery. I double checked the call was off, then hopped off the bar stool. “Did you find something?” I asked.
“Yes, I—”
