“You’re welcome,” I whispered. “But you don’t owe me any thanks. Thank you for telling me. I wish I could me—” I cut myself off, pretending to cough. Meet them? Dimitri would only want that if our mating was real. And I had no right to ask, no matter how much the thought of being treated as if it was made me yearn.
Stupid. I was so stupid.
“You’re going to be late for your meeting,” Dimitri said. “We should go in.”
But he didn’t say it in a way that meant he regretted telling me about his mom, and that was enough for me.
I got to my meeting two minutes late in the end.
But I couldn’t bring myself to regret that, either.
The way Dimitri had owned me the night before hadn’t felt nearly as intimate as those few words, that sign of trust, that he’d given me this morning. And it warmed me from the inside out.
***
“Brook, I need a minute alone with you,” Dimitri whispered directly into my ear, clearly wanting to dodge the acute hearing of the alpha weres filing out of the large conference room all around us. I shot everyone a smile, leaning into him as if he’d been saying something sweet to his mate, and I let him tow me around the corner and into a cramped filing room, even though I was inwardly seething with impatience.
After my breakfast meeting, I’d had an hour of calls, punctuated by Jackie popping in to tell me that my mother had scheduled the reception not for two weeks from now, but for this coming Saturday. That had nearly given me a heart attack, and only partially because I hadn’t even gotten Dimitri a tuxedo yet.
Dimitri in a tux. There was a mental image I simultaneously wished I could frame and glue to the wall in my brain, and erase before it made me crazy.
Then the second my last call ended, Dimitri and I both went straight to an executive strategy session headed by my father. That had taken three endless, agonizing hours, and we’d just broken for lunch. Even with Dimitri running interference, I’d been the target of most of my father’s snide remarks.
That I’d grown used to over the years, but…fuck, I hadso muchactual work to do. Three clients were waiting for progress reports, and I only had good news for one of them. First hours spent being subtly and not-so-subtly ripped up in front of an audience, and now an additional delay.
When Dimitri shut the door behind us, my blood felt like it had heated to boiling in my veins, my mind a tangled, fuzzy mess of competing priorities all demanding attention at once.
“What?” I snapped. “Seriously, what can’t wait for later? I don’t have time to eat as it is, and I need coffee, at least!”
“I’ll get you some coffee and something to eat in a minute. Brook, focus for a second, fuck!” With an effort I felt down to my bones, I lowered my phone, which had buzzed with incoming email notifications the instant I took it off silent. “This is important.”
Had he brought me in here to shove me up against one of those filing cabinets and fuck me? Because that might be worth sacrificing lunch, and even coffee—if I had to.
“Look, there’s no way to phrase this that won’t sound weird,” Dimitri said once I’d given him my full, albeit impatient, attention. “But have you noticed that your father smells funny?”
I gaped at him. “Smells…funny?Funny?” He’d dragged me in here to tell me my father smelled…funny? What next, was he going to tell me my mother was a hamster? “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
Dimitri rolled his eyes and crossed his arms, moving over a foot to block the door. Dammit. He’d anticipated my next move, which was dashing around him and escaping.
“No, I’m not, and don’t get all hung up on the word. Weird. Strange. Unusual. I’m not fucking Roget, okay? He smells wrong. And his scent changes from one time I see him to another.”
“That’s—what are you even on about?” I sputtered, rubbing a hand over my face. Jesus. I did not have time for this. “No one else has ever said anything. And he always smells the same to me. I mean, not like I’m spending a lot of time scenting my father!”
“I don’t know what anyone else picks up, because I’m not them. But I’ve always had a sensitive nose, even for a shifter. It’s kind of a mixed blessing. High school sucked.” He pulled a face at me, and I couldn’t help a half-hearted chuckle. That really would’ve been the worst. As I watched in fascination, a faint red flush spread over his cheekbones. “I could scent you touching yourself from downstairs in the kitchen,” he mumbled, his eyes focusing somewhere over my left shoulder instead of on mine. “Last night.”
A ragged, searing bolt of pure want zinged down my spine, a dull, needy ache starting somewhere south. Last night. Four of his fingers stuffing my ass, his cockhead on my tongue, the shower floor bruising my kneecaps…no, fuck, I couldn’t. I had to concentrate on the here and now.
His gaze flicked back to me, dropping to my lips, and his chest rose and fell visibly. The air between us thickened like honey.
The here and now wasn’t helping with the concentration issue all that much.
“My father,” I rasped. “We were talking about—my father.” Nothing less sexy than that. I forced myself to give Dimitri’s bizarre opinion of my father’s scent some honest consideration. If nothing else, I wouldn’t get out of here until I did. Dimitri was too stubborn. “Okay, so he smells different sometimes. And I—I guess I’m always more focused on what his scent’s telling me about his mood, not the, like, the baseline.” Shifter scents had a lot of layers to them; when you paid attention to one set of cues, and got used to discarding the others, you could miss things. That was true enough. “But he might be doing some kind of treatment for his Hensley’s symptoms, blood thinners or something,” I whispered, even though I knew no one was lurking in the hall. We would’ve heard them or smelled them there. “That would change things, right? You’d notice that?”
“Yeah, I would,” he said slowly, as if giving my words the same amount of thought. “I guess it could be that, except it doesn’t smell medicinal. It’s something…I’m having trouble defining it. Like the way magic smells. And something like the way an alpha smells. Like the way alpha magic feels, only in a scent,” he finished, sounding as frustrated as I felt by his inability to put it into adequate words. “Either way. I’ve noticed he’s more of an asshole when his scent changes like that. This morning, for example.”
Yeah, what the fuck else was new? “Asshole” had been my father’s default setting my entire life. I’d tried to take this seriously, I really had, but my phone kept buzzing in my pocket, each vibration puncturing the very last of my remaining patience.
“Dimitri, I really don’t have time for this, okay? I’m sorry. Yes. He’s an asshole. I’m sorry he ‘smells funny’ to you, and the alpha magic thing is probably just that his pheromones spike when he’s in a pissed-off mood. I need to head to my office now. We have to be back in that meeting in an hour.”
