Paying a man I didn’t know to mate with me for a clearly defined purpose and with a clearly defined end date might not be the most dignified course of action, but I’d been able to live with it. PayingDimitri, the man I now knew and—liked, to be my mate on a continuing, open-ended basis? That was different. It meant I’d be paying him to fuck me. Paying him to pretend to enjoy it as more than a stopgap while he couldn’t have a relationship, or a sexual partner, he truly wanted. To act like he wantedme.
It’d mean admitting to myself, and by default to him, that I truly was too pathetic and undesirable to attract anyone on my own merits.
We’d stopped at a red light, and I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. My glasses left me with shitty peripheral vision, but I could still make out the harsh lines of his profile, the prominent nose and strong jaw. The faint smile on his lips, the breadth of his shoulders filling all the space allowed by the passenger seat and then some. His legs sprawled out in front of him, long and muscular.
I didn’t need to think about it, let alone broach the subject, right now. Later. I could put that off.
But the conversation about the mating reception had to happen.
I drew in a deep breath. “My mother’s been getting things ready for that big party she’s giving for our mating,” I said. “She’s been on my case about it.”
“Sure,” Dimitri replied easily, as if I hadn’t just handed him the equivalent of a social death sentence. “You told me that was coming up. You’re the boss, Brook. Tell me what to do and where to go, and I’ll have your back.”
His immediate willingness to help me however he needed to should’ve warmed me, dissipated the chill in my chest, but that reminder that he was willing because I’d employed him to be…I bit my lip and forced it down. No. Not now.
“It’s not just you, though.” Okay, I had to do this. He’d react badly. But I didn’t have a choice. “She wants your family there. I guess she was assuming that we’d already given them the details and that they were coming. And I—didn’t know what to tell her.”
A long, heavy silence fell, and it wrapped itself around me like ants crawling all over my skin.
He hadn’t started yelling, or told me to go fuck myself. That was something?
“My family won’t be there,” he said at last. “That wasn’t part of the deal. And it’s not going to happen. Your family wouldn’t want them there in the first place. Sorry.”
That last word sounded perfunctory, insincere, like he knew he ought to say it but hated the necessity. I didn’t blame him for not wanting to apologize for any inconvenience. Because my familydidn’twant them there, they didn’t even want Dimitri there, and I had no grounds to contradict him.
Okay. No arguing. But I knew how to negotiate, and that I could do without being an asshole.
“Look,” I began tentatively, “I know you haven’t talked to me much about your family.” At all, really, unless you counted that one anecdote he’d told about his mother making him read Russian classics. And I couldn’t bring that up. Letting him know how closely I’d hugged that story to my chest, one of the only crumbs of his real self he’d given me, would make me look as pathetic as I was. “But if there’s something I can do to make it happen, we could make it part of the deal. If you need some—support from me.”
“Support,” he said flatly. “You mean money. More money than the hundred grand you already gave me.”
“Do you have any idea what my family’s spending on this reception? Believe me, money’s not the—”
“I don’t want a single fucking penny from yourfamily,” he snarled, turning in his seat to glare at me, fangs dropping. “I wouldn’t take it if I was starving.”
“Where the fuck do you think my money came from?” I demanded, blood pressure skyrocketing so fast my arms went numb. I had to clench my hands around the steering wheel for dear life. If he hated my family that much, hated their money that much, and I was a part of that family no matter how much I hated them too…fuck, I couldn’t drive like this, the cars in front of me had gone blurry.
I wrenched the steering wheel, pulling us over into the right lane to a chorus of honking and then turning abruptly into the strip mall we were passing by, managing to get us into a parking spot behind a fast-food place. We came to a stop with a jerk as I slammed the brakes too hard.
“I think the money you paid me came from your own hard work,” Dimitri practically shouted, and when I turned to face him the rage in his had me flinching away. I’d never seen him like this. “And I hate that it came from your family indirectly, but that is what it is. You want to pay me to get you what you want? Fucking fine. But I’m not lettingthempay me to trot my family out like performing monkeys to make them look good. Fuck them. Not happening, Brook!”
His hands flexed, claws gleaming where they’d started to pop out of his fingers as he lost control of his shift.
And that scared me even more.
“Fuck,” he said heavily, after a moment of tense silence. “Fuck, Brook, I wouldn’t hurt you. You know that. Don’t look at me like that. Please.”
“Like what?” I dragged my gaze away from those deadly claws and back up to his. The deep, golden glow in his eyes and the fangs he hadn’t retracted didn’t reassure me much.
He swallowed hard, Adam’s apple bobbing. “Like you’re afraid of me. Shit. Brook, I fucking hate your parents. And your brother. Maybe that’s not what you want to hear. But it’s the truth. I’m not doing anything for them. I’d do nearly any—I’ll do what you paid me for. But my family stays out of this fucking mess. And believe me, you and your parents wouldn’t want them there. Please take my word for it.”
If he thought of me as anything remotely like a real mate, he’d want me to meet his family, wouldn’t he? He’d want them involved.
But he didn’t.
You and your parents.As if we were united in this, and he had to protect his family not only from my parents and brother but from me.
The coldness had spread, now, from my chest into my limbs, seeping poison that left me numb and lethargic. I tried to get a fix on the bond, but I couldn’t sense anything but anger and some other negative emotion: resignation, maybe.
