I shut down the engine and turned to Dimitri. He’d gotten his shirt and tie arranged sometime during my mother’s monologue, and he sat there looking at me grimly, outwardly ready for a day at the office. And inwardly? Christ, how the fuck would I know? We’d barely spoken the night before or this morning, eating dinner together quietly, going to bed separately, and getting up and getting ready without more than the necessary exchange of a few sentences about who’d made the coffee.
It was like the Dimitri who’d taken me apart in the shower and the Dimitri sitting beside me were two separate men, and they liked to pretend not to know each other.
And no matter how much I’d come to unwillingly depend on one of them, and crave the other, I didn’t understand either of them particularly well, either.
“You were listening to all of that?”
He nodded. “I’ll go where I’m told and behave myself, like always,” he said without any enthusiasm.
The early hour, my mother’s sparkling personality having its inevitable effect, or some other source of reluctance?
Prying into his private business yet again, when he’d made it so clear he didn’t see it asmybusiness, might backfire so badly. The dashboard clock read 7:12. Barely enough time to prep for that meeting. I was never late to meetings, never anything but five minutes early and completely up to speed on the topics to be addressed.
But…maybe this was more important.
For once, I had to take a moment to be me. Not a VP of Castelli Industries, not a more-or-less-willing participant in my family’s obsession with the company and the pack’s status.
Just a man, with a mate who clearly had something weighing on his mind.
I couldn’t think of a way to ease into it, though. Not with the clock ticking, and not after that horror-show of a call with my mother.
“Will you tell me why they really can’t come?” I asked abruptly. Dimitri’s face closed off completely, eyes flashing, and I quickly added, “Please? And not because I want to put pressure on you. Not because my mother’s being a bitch about it. We were talking about it yesterday, and then I got sick and we had to drop it. But I don’t even know if you were okay with the excuse I gave. I understand you don’t want them to have anything to do with my family, believe me,” I went on, desperate for him to give me something. Anything. To show me that he trusted me, even just a little bit. “You said they wouldn’t want them there anyway. But I’m not my family. And I—I’m not them.”
The anger faded from his expression as I talked, replaced with something closer to—shame? It looked like shame, and felt like it, too, from what I could pick up through the bond.
He stared out the windshield at the blinding sunlight reflecting off of the building’s expanses of blue-tinted glass. If I did that, I wouldn’t be able to see for hours. Stupid alphas.
The clock changed to 7:13. I forced myself not to fidget.
Finally he said, quickly and very low, and still not meeting my eyes, “My mother’s in a wheelchair. Broken back a long time ago. She’s human.”
I stared at him in shock, everything I’d assumed about the money I’d paid him flying straight out the window. He’d said it was personal. A family issue. And like a prick, I’d thought—as much as I’d thought about it at all—that he meant something like an equally deadbeat brother with gambling debts or something. Not this.
And Dimitri had hidden this from me. Because he didn’t trust me? Maybe, but…a cold, sick ache had taken hold of the pit of my stomach, fed by the way he’d insisted that we wouldn’t want his family at the reception to begin with. He knew how my family operated: alphas at the top of the pile, and then werewolves, and then—distantly—other shifters, and finally humans. An imperfect werewolf, like me, wasn’t worth much.
Let alone a human woman with a serious medical condition.
Did he truly, honestly, think I’d agree? That I’d be disgusted? Or…embarrassed to be mated into a family like that? My mother certainly would be. She’d be horrified beyond belief.
Imagining her reaction and the pain it would cause Dimitri and his mother made me want to sink through the floor of the car and the asphalt beneath, covering my face and groaning the whole way down.
Dimitri had to be brought to understand that I didn’t feel like that. Hehadto, and the desire to explain myself, even though he hadn’t directly accused me, built almost into panic. I opened and closed my mouth, unable to find any words that wouldn’t sound patronizing or defensive or like pointless platitudes.
But I’d waited too long to answer, and Dimitri reached for the door handle, saying roughly, “It’s not your problem. We should go insi—”
“No, wait!” I grabbed his arm, the muscles rigid with straining tension beneath my fingers. “Wait,” I said again, my voice shaking. He stopped moving, but he didn’t let go of the door. I only had one shot at this, I knew that instinctively. He wouldn’t bring it up again, and he wouldn’t let me talk about it, either. “You’re right that it’s not my problem, because it’s not a problem for me. Shit, I don’t mean that it’s not a problem—of course it’s a problem. Not that your mother’s a problem! Fuck, I’m sorry, I—please forget all of that and let me start over!”
Dimitri turned back to me slowly, his hand relaxing on the door handle and the bicep beneath my fingers unbunching a bit. The sad twist to his lips made my heart ache, but when he looked at me, I didn’t see anything but understanding in his eyes.
“You know, a lot of problems could be solved by people just giving each other the benefit of the doubt,” he said quietly. “That was about as clear as mud, Brook.” My cheeks heated, and I bit my lip, and—my breath caught as he reached up and smoothed his thumb over my mouth, releasing that bit of flesh from my teeth. His hand dropped before I could do something incredibly stupid, like kiss it. “But I think I understand what you mean anyway. You don’t think having a human mother’s some kind of stain on my character, right? And you don’t look down on someone for not being strong. Physically, I mean. She’s the strongest person I know in other ways.”
I shook my head vehemently, afraid my voice would crack if I tried to speak.
What an asshole I’d been, pitying myself for my Hensley’s—which amounted to little more than an inconvenience, honestly, or would if my family didn’t treat it like a deep, deadly secret. And turning up my nose at Dimitri’s need for money. To be fair, he’d owed sixty grand. But how much of that had been borrowed to pay for his mother’s care in the first place?
I’d be willing to bet every penny of it.
Dimitri smiled, still a little forced, a little tense. But a smile all the same. “I have a sister, too,” he added. “She’s not pregnant, though. And your excuse works just fine. Thanks. For covering for me.”
