8. Finn
Chapter 8
Finn was so fucked.
It had been years since he’d struggled to keep a lid on his shift, and it had never been the scent of someone’s arousal that caused him difficulty. Usually, Finn’s wolf only wanted to come out when he was angry, or when it was time to fight.
But the scent of Jaime’s desire had been strong since they’d walked into the kitchen, and at his suggestion of doing whatever Finn told him to, his fangs descended from his gums and dark talons now tipped his fingers, his wolf ready to take.
Ours.
He’s ours.
Finn chose not to look too hard at that right now.
Fighting back his shift, and the urge to bend Jaime over the counter and show him exactly how skilled he was in the kitchen, he grasped for a thread of self control. “Where would you like me to set up my laptop? I’ll write the grocery list, and then work on the tech report before we go pick them up.”
His question sounded choked through his fangs, and Jaime was still looking at him like a rabbit caught in a trap—but he didn’t scent fear. No, the only thing he detected was overwhelming want. When Jaime turned, Finn caught a glimpse of the bulge in his pants as he walked to a small table and found a notepad and pen.
Professional. You are a professional, and this is your client. He didn’t ask you back into his life. You’re a goddamn wolf and instead of finding a way to gently tell him that, he’s going to figure it out in a few seconds when he sees the fangs you’re sporting, you animal.
That thought slammed into him. Not the fangs, but that he’d skipped right over if and went straight to when in reference to telling Jaime about his shift.
He was so, so fucked.
He accepted the pad of paper and pen from Jaime, who said he was going upstairs to shower and clean up. Finn nodded, now completely unable to speak without revealing his fangs thanks to thoughts of Jaime in the shower, wet and slick with soap, and only a few flimsy wooden doors between them.
After several deep, calming breaths, he scrawled out enough food to feed them both for a week or so, and left the list on the counter. And if he picked the recipes he was best at to impress Jaime—the ones Andi had taught him herself—well, that was his business.
His phone rang with a call from Sheppard. He could still hear Jaime padding around his bedroom upstairs and hadn’t heard the shower start yet, so he took the phone call outside to the back of the property. He needed to look around anyway before submitting the security report.
Gently closing the glass french door behind him so he didn’t startle Jaime upstairs, he answered. “Hey Sheppard, what’s up?”
The cool spring air lifted Jaime’s scent and cooled his arousal enough that he could think clearly again.
“Did the media clear off alright?”
Finn’s mouth tipped up in a half smile—Sheppard had never believed in smalltalk. “Yeah, Monroe PD came out and set up the barricades and shooed them away. A few of the deputies were Salt Creek; they gave me some funny looks, but nothing overly threatening. Silas was inside with the client, not sure if they were able to scent him to report back to the alpha.”
Sheppard grunted in acknowledgement. “And the client, how is he? Have you met the brother yet?”
Finn’s chest tightened. What Jaime had said about his brother thinking of him as a burden just didn’t track with the way Sam Lamont had spoken on the phone this morning, or with the way Jaime had talked about their relationship last year. To Finn, he’d sounded like a devoted brother willing to do anything and pay any amount of money to keep Jaime safe. But it was odd that he hadn’t come out to see how Jaime was after the media storm this morning, or to meet any of the security team.
“Jaime seems tense and exhausted, but he’s agreed to the tech install and is fine with one of us staying here full time. I’ll let you know if that changes. We met Sam Lamont over the phone—he seems to keep to himself for the most part.” He wasn’t keen on airing Jaime’s messy relationship with his brother, but he had to say something.
“Hmm, well. He sure keeps himself informed over the phone. He told me he expects daily update calls every morning until the trial is over. Maybe he just doesn’t leave his house. Some people are like that.”
Finn gave a non-committal hum. That’s not what Jaime made it sound like, but he wasn’t privy to those details and it wasn’t his place to speculate. “Yeah, I’m not sure what’s going on there.”
“Alright, well, keep me informed and keep your head on a swivel. We can’t underestimate Salt Creek if their claws are as deep in this as it seems.”
“Will do, boss.”
Hanging up, he saw that he had a couple of new texts from Silas.
Dropping off the truck in a bit, Sheppard will follow me there to give me a ride home.
I haven’t told him that you know the client, but you should. You know he’ll figure it out anyway.
After their whirlwind of a day, Finn would cross that bridge if they came to it. He was also allowing himself to accept that the reason he wasn’t telling Sheppard was because he was afraid he’d try and take him off the assignment—which Finn wouldn’t abide.
With a sigh, he pocketed his phone and went to walk the small property and adjacent shoreline. The wooden fence flanking the house offered privacy from the road, but the back was open to the lake.
Not wanting to stray out of hearing range from the house, he only spent a few minutes scanning the surrounding tree line and thick brush that went right up to the rocky shore on either side of the property, almost cradling the private beach. Judging that approaching from either direction would be slow and potentially noisy, he headed back inside.
On the way, he noticed the small shed at the edge of the yard, but when he tried the handle he found it locked. Peering through the glass, he recognized the setup immediately.
This was Jaime’s painting studio.
Through the dusty window, the space looked hastily packed up, with canvases stacked haphazardly against the back wall and paint brushes sitting stiff and crusty in dried out jars.
“Don’t go in there.” Finn whipped his head up to see Jaime striding toward him, the back door flung open.
He quickly stepped away from the window, dropping his hands. “I’m sorry. I was just scouting out the property for the tech report and wondered if this was a space you’d want to put cameras in.”
Jaime’s face remained tight. “No, cameras won’t be necessary there. I don’t go in there anymore.”
Silence stretched, with only the sound of small waves lapping at the rocky beach and calling shorebirds between them. Finn nodded. “I’ll leave it out for now. If you change your mind and would like it to be outfitted, just let me know.”
Jaime gave a terse nod, and went back inside.
The afternoon flew by. Finn worked quietly in the kitchen dining nook to submit the security report, and scheduled the tech installation for tomorrow. They usually had the necessary equipment on hand for an install of this size.
After he finished up, he took his overnight bag filled with a few changes of clothes and toiletries upstairs and settled into the guest room, noting the sheets were freshly changed and the layer of dust that had previously coated everything was gone.
He had the sense that Jaime was avoiding him after their tense exchange about the painting studio, which was made even more obvious during their trip into Monroe to pick up groceries. They only exchanged a few words on the drive there and back, and Jaime spent most of the time staring out the window, fingers twisted in the hem of his shirt.
It had been a long day, with even more of Jaime’s privacy and sense of normalcy stripped from him. It was no wonder that he was reserved and quiet. So, Finn didn’t push him to speak, and they quietly worked around each other while they brought their groceries inside and Finn began preparing dinner.
“I hope you like Shepherd’s Pie,” he said, as Jaime came into the kitchen after Finn hollered that the food was ready.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had it. Not real Shepherd’s Pie, anyway. The frozen dinner version probably doesn’t count.”
Finn chuckled. “No, I don’t think it does. Where are your plates?”
As they fumbled around each other plating their meals and settling into the dining nook, the silence between them settled, more intimate than it was this afternoon.
“Are you ok?” Finn asked. Jaime was pushing his dinner around his plate more than he was really eating it.
Green eyes looked up. “It’s really good, I promise. I’m just tired. Sorry. I’m… not myself. Or I am, and this is just what I’m like now.”
Jaime said the last part with some bite, but Finn sensed it was directed inward. “This will pass, I promise. There’s always some other, newer, more tragic story for the media to move on to. It’s sad, but we’ve seen it enough in our line of work. Just get through these next few days, and things will quiet down.”
Finn knew he wasn’t addressing the larger threat of the still unidentified phone call and the Salt Creek pack’s potential involvement, but he didn’t want to burden Jaime more than he already was.
“It’s not that.” Jaime shook his head. “I can barely even talk about what I saw that night to the cops and to my therapist. How am I going to keep it together during the trial? Up on the witness stand, with a microphone in my face where every word I say will be thrown back at me, and everyone will be judging me and whether I am lying, or hiding something, or—” he took a great, heaving breath.
Finn reached across the table and grabbed Jaime’s hand, causing him to drop his fork. “Hey, it’s ok. Let’s take a couple slow, deep breaths, ok? There you go.”
Jaime’s anxiety attack hadn’t progressed as far as it had this morning with the reporters, but he could tell the boy was still shaken by it, a slight tremble in the hand cradled in Finn’s.
“I’m such a fucking mess.” Jaime’s voice broke on the last word, and Finn’s heart broke a little along with it.
“You’re not a mess, Jaime.”
“Yeah? I can’t even talk about talking about it without falling apart! How pathetic is that? I’m not the one who fucking died. I’m not the one who had to suffer while some monster ripped me open and sprawled my insides all over the floor!”
Finn winced and inwardly recoiled at the word monster, withdrawing his hand at the harsh way Jaime spat it.
Not because he didn’t want to touch him, but because he knew Jaime wouldn’t want to be touched by him, if he knew what he was. Of course, Jackson Bishop was a monster for what he had done. For killing Vera, and for doing it in such a horrible, frightening, and painful way. But he wondered if Jaime would ever see a distinction between that act and the fact that Finn was a wolf, too, making him equally capable of inflicting that kind of damage with his bare hands.
Would Jaime call him a monster, too?
Finn wanted to show Jaime that he wasn’t alone; he wanted to tell Jaime about his own nightmares, the ones that still lingered years after their last mission had gone so horribly wrong. He wanted to tell Jaime that both he and Silas had battled their own mental health demons after being discharged, and about the six months of intensive therapy it took for them to be able to get a handle on their shifts and not hurt themselves or others when they were triggered.
Finn wanted to tell Jaime that strength lay in enduring it, but also in wanting to be better, in talking about it with others and taking small steps every day. He wanted to tell him that strength lay in those days when the setbacks seemed the greatest, and you still chose to get back up and take the same slow steps of progress all over again, anyway.
But that would lead to questions from Jaime that Finn wasn’t ready to answer, and answers that were dangerously close to telling him that the monster prowling his nightmares wasn’t so different from the one sitting at his kitchen table.
Jaime looked back down at his plate in the ensuing silence.
Say something. Anything!
But Finn was tongue tied, torn between sharing too much and not enough.
Jaime heaved a sigh. “I couldn’t help then, and I’m terrified I won’t be able to pull myself together enough to help now, by making people believe me.” Jaime held his hands out in a helpless gesture, and dropped them onto his lap.
“I believe you,” Finn finally said. Even if he couldn’t, or wouldn’t ever be able to show the beautiful, broken, healing man who smelled right the whole truth of who he was, he could at least give him that.
“I believe you, and they will too.”