After we’d pried our bodies apart, showered, and dressed—and napped for half an hour, an unimaginable luxury that made me nearly panicky with the feeling of having neglected my responsibilities—I dropped Dimitri off at the cheap motel he’d been staying in. He promised to come back to my place within an hour with his car and his belongings, and he was right on time, carrying nothing but a big duffel bag and a coat over his arm.
I’d basically doubled everything he owned by taking him shopping, which gave me a strange, protective feeling I didn’t want to examine too closely.
So all of a sudden, there he was. In my house. The scent of him had already started to permeate the whole place, alpha pheromones and a hint of rich, tart citrus teasing my nose every time I turned around. Dimitri went out again and came home with groceries. Real groceries, not the box of cardboardy cereal and old mustard that’d comprised my entire stock of food after he’d used everything edible for those omelets.
Because I’d taken Friday off, I really did have work to do, and I hid myself away in my office for a couple of hours, grimly wading through emails until I couldn’t stand to sit anymore. Any actual soreness had healed already; that was one of those advantages of a werewolf physiology that I forgot to think about most of the time. I had no idea how humans dealt with getting fucked up the ass.
But every time I shifted in my chair, it reminded me of what we’d done. It didn’t hurt, but it was as if now that I’d been knotted—and come helplessly on that knot, a thought I wanted to avoid—I couldn’t stop thinking about a part of my body that I’d been mostly blissfully oblivious to all my life.
Finally, the tantalizing scents of meat and onions and some other things I couldn’t pin down, combined with my discomfort, got me up and heading for the stairs.
I found Dimitri in the kitchen drinking a beer, the bottle raised to his lips with his left hand while his right neatly flipped something white and floppy out of a pan and onto a waiting plate. He swallowed, put the bottle down, and grinned at me over his shoulder.
“Good timing. I thought I’d have to come and drag you away from that bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit,” I protested reflexively, even though honestly, most of it was. “What’s that? Are those crepes?”
He said something quickly in Russian that didn’t sound like a real word. I manfully resisted sayingbless you. At my look of total confusion, he repeated more slowly, “Blinchiki.” He shrugged. “Crepes, if you want to be all stupid and French about it.”
Crepes? Dimitri Pechorin knew how to makecrepes?
I made a face at him, but I couldn’t resist the incredible smells, and I crossed to the stove, trying to stay out of his personal space as much as possible. Just because we were mated now, it didn’t mean we needed to get all touchy-feely. The normal amount of distance I’d give a roommate. That was the way to go.
Even if he smelled nearly as good as dinner.
Stupid mating bond.
The stove held two frying pans, one for the crepe-things and one for potatoes, pork, and onions, all sizzling together in a way that promised the best kind of caloric deliciousness. God, I loved some things about Russian culture. They’d never seen a vegetable they didn’t want to ignore in favor of meat.
In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure they’d ever seen a green vegetable at all other than cabbage.
Either way, I approved wholeheartedly.
“So you kill people, you do in-home care for Hensley’s patients, and you cook,” I said. “What other talents are you hiding?”
A sticky sort of silence descended on the kitchen, emphasized by the hiss and spit of the pan and the tick of the clock on the wall.
“How many people do you think I’ve killed, exactly?” he asked at last, his tone painfully flat and neutral.
Well, fuck. I glanced up at him through my eyelashes. That cheerful grin had vanished, replaced by a downturned mouth and set jaw.
I’d meant it as a joke. Apparently he hadn’t taken it that way.
“You did offer to kill Blake the day we met,” I offered tentatively. “It didn’t seem like so much of a stretch?”
Another silence.
“One,” Dimitri said at last. “It was self-defense, mostly. Worst way to put it was that it was a fair fight. You probably don’t believe me, since I guess every murdering asshole would say the same thing. But I’ve never killed anyone for money.”
The right reaction to that probably would’ve been horror, or disgust, or at best dismay.
All I felt was a surge of vicious partisanship. Of course it’d been self-defense. Of course it’d been a fair fight.
Jesus, this mating bond had me all twisted into knots.
But looking up at him, remembering how gently he’d handled me last night and today…I didn’t have it in me to condemn him, even if hewasbending the truth to make himself look better.
And given how blunt he’d been with me so far, I doubted it anyway.
