Dimitri had already wolfed down three slices, pun fully intended, before I’d done more than nibble the end of my one.
“You could’ve gotten something else,” he groused around another monstrous bite. Table manners. That would be lesson number one. “There’s like ten places to eat here. Or do you live on gold-plated caviar or something?”
He leaned over and polished off his fourth slice of pizza, totally unconcerned by my scowl.
“For one thing, I don’t even like fish, fish products, or anything fish-related. For two, ha fucking ha. I’m not a snob. I’m just not that hungry.”
“Okay.” He dropped a fragment of burned crust on his paper plate. “You going to eat that, or not?”
I pushed my own plate across the table without a word, and he dug in.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out: Yet another email from my assistant, who’d been left to hold down the fort while I took Friday off. Jackie seemed to think I must be dying if I hadn’t come to the office. On the other hand, she hadn’t stopped sending me questions, either. A presentation that I hadn’t signed off on. Spreadsheets not adding up. The legal department had an HR issue that someone had punted to me for some unknown, ungodly reason. Death, apparently, was no excuse for avoiding the HR team. My temples throbbed.
And apparently Blake had been looking for me.
Well, that did it. In a burst of furious rebellion, I powered my phoneactually all the way offand stuck it back in my pocket.
When I glanced up again, Dimitri had finished the last crumb of my erstwhile lunch and was eyeing me in a way I didn’t like. That look seemed to flash right through me like an X-ray, and I could feel my cheeks heating up.
“What?” I snapped.
“You might as well have jumped up on the table and started shouting ‘Give me freedom or give me death.’ When’s the last time you turned that fucking thing off? Ever? And you’re off work today. The fuck are you doing checking it in the first place?”
I’d never turned it off, in fact. And I’d taken a “day off” three years ago, approximately, when my cousin got married. I’d missed most of the ceremony taking a call from a panicked client with a software glitch. Since said glitch could’ve, worst-case scenario, caused a dam to release millions of gallons of water and flood a whole valley, it’d seemed worth it to step out.
That cousin kind of sucked anyway—and she’d already gotten divorced, so it wasn’t like I’d missed much.
My father had still been pissed about my breach of etiquette, even though he would’ve taken the call too. He’d have been doubly pissed if I’d sent it to voicemail.
Blake had been the best man.
I simply couldn’t win.
“You know, you get that sucking-a-rotten-lemon look on your face every time you’re thinking about work,” Dimitri commented, breaking me out of my brooding. “Maybe you should quit. Ditch the job, your shitty family, all of it. Go do your own thing.”
The grain—okay, fine, metric ton—of truth in that infuriated me, my heart pounding and my fists clenching. How dare he be right! Especially when fear of the unknown and of being alone was mostly what was stopping me. Asshole.
“You don’t know my family, and you don’t have any right to comment on them,” I growled, my own werewolf nature surging to the surface. My fingertips itched, claws aching to come out. “And if I did that, you could say goodbye to your easy payday. So maybe you should shut the fuck up.”
“Okay,” Dimitri said, his tone so low and even it raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Shouldn’t he have been snapping in turn? But he’d sat back in his uncomfortable molded plastic chair, reclining as if it actually fit his massive frame. Were his eyes glowing? Given the glare from the skylights and my poor eyesight, I couldn’t tell. “Big, dumb, polite, and also silent. Got it. Wear the suits, look alpha, and shut the fuck up.”
A little bit of guilt crept in around the edges of my temper. My family—and they were in fact shitty, just like he’d said—weren’t his fault. And neither was anything else that’d happened to me before we’d met, for that matter.
“I didn’t mean it like—”
“I said I got it.” This time his tone had some bite to it, and it stopped me in my verbal tracks. “I’ve made worse deals. That’s why I’m on everyone’s shit list and in so much debt, right? So forget it. I’ll keep my mouth shut and my opinions to myself.”
I had to try one more time, even though the tight, heavy lump in my gut made me want to curl in on myself and hide. “You’re welcome to express—”
“No.” That single syllable hit me like a blow to the already-aching stomach, hard and filled with contempt. “What’s next? We have enough clothes. We should get going.”
That totally false statement distracted me from everything else.Enough clothes?Was henuts?
“We have suits and a couple of shirts, but you need more. And then there’s jeans, slacks, belts, shoes, and accessor—”
“You’re—”
The third time was seriously not the charm, something I was rapidly beginning to think he didn’t have any of. “Stop interrupting me! So far you’re not doing a very good job of being politeorsilent!”
