18. Out Of Reach #3
"You were unconscious against the window and shaking, it was past midnight, and your best friend owns a van and a standing grudge against every Alpha in this county.
" I keep my hands in the dishwater, calm, letting her run the anger all the way out, because she's owed it and because it happens to be the correct anger.
"You're right. It's a rule. I'll own it clean — I made a call that was yours to make.
Next time I hand you the phone, even if you're half-asleep and drooling on my window.
I mean that." I pull the drain. "But I'd make the identical call again tonight, because the alternative was Marlowe's high beams in your driveway at one in the morning and a full scene on your lawn, and you'd had a lifetime's worth of scenes already for one day.
So both things are true at once. I broke a rule.
I'd break it again. And you get to be angry at me about it for exactly as long as you'd like. "
She opens her mouth. Closes it. The citrus fades back down under the roses, grudging every inch of the retreat.
"I hate that that's reasonable," she mutters.
"Most reasonable things are hateful," I say. "It's usually how you can tell."
She hangs the dish towel over the oven handle and lines the edges up so they match exactly — a woman putting her small world back in order one right angle at a time — and when she turns around, the humor's banked low and there's something sharper standing behind her eyes. The negotiator, back on the clock.
"Can I ask you something real," she says.
"You can ask me anything. I reserve the right to be annoying about the answer."
"The federal thing. The declaration." She folds her arms. "The paperwork said any pack on your registration has to consent.
Has to release you, or physically appear, before eight-seventeen tomorrow morning.
In writing. On the record, under penalty.
You signed that like it was a grocery list. Like you had it entirely handled.
But Sawyer — that's less than a day. You cannot get a fence permit pushed through this town in a day, and you're sitting here telling me you can get a whole entire pack to sign off on you temporarily bonding to a near-stranger by sunrise? "
"I can," I say.
"How. Nobody moves a pack that fast. Packs are slow.
They argue. They hold votes. They call meetings about the meeting—" She's spiraling out into logistics, which is what she does when she's frightened, the exact way I read the room down to the studs when I'm frightened.
"You're that sure. Why on earth are you that sure. "
And there's the door I keep bolted. She's got her whole hand on the knob and doesn't even know she's touching it. I dry my hands slowly on the towel she just squared away, and I feel her clock the stall the second I start it.
"That," I say, "is a long story. It's late.
And you've got a government to stare down at dawn on an empty tank of sleep.
" I nod at the bottle on the counter. "Tell you what.
There's half a bottle of that left. Some other night, when the world isn't ending on a published schedule, you pour me the rest of it and I'll spill you the whole ugly pot of tea.
Every last leaf. You've more than earned the story.
Just not at—" I check the clock over her stove "—twelve-forty in the morning, the night before the biggest fight of your year. "
"That's a dodge."
"It's a rain check. There's a difference."
"There's really, truly not."
"Go to bed, Blooming Apricot." Gentle, but it's a door swinging shut, and we both hear the latch catch.
"I'll take the couch. I've slept on considerably worse than a couch that smells like you.
It'll be the best night's sleep I've had in five years, and I'll resent every minute of how much I mean that. "
She looks at the couch. I look at the couch. We both, at the very same moment, take the honest measure of the couch.
It is not a couch a grown Alpha sleeps on.
It's a loveseat with delusions of grandeur — short, deep, mounded with roughly nine hundred decorative pillows and one suspicious lump that might be a bed for a cat I've seen no other evidence of.
My feet would clear the far arm by a foot and a half.
I'd wake up folded like a lawn chair someone gave up on.
She knows it. I watch her run the math and lose the whole thing to her own conscience.
"Oh, for—" She pinches the bridge of her nose.
"You are not sleeping on that. You'll throw your back straight out.
Then you'll be useless at the deadline, and I need you upright and signing things, not moaning about your spine at a federal officer.
The bed's a — it's a king. There's room.
You can have the far side." She points at me, fierce, both cheeks flaming.
"One side. Your side. I sleep like a corpse, I do not move a muscle all night, and you will extend me the same courtesy.
You stay on your half. There will be a demilitarized zone straight down the center.
If any part of you crosses into my airspace, I will personally dissolve the temporary pack bond and let the federal government sort out the wreckage. "
"Understood," I say gravely. "Demilitarized zone. I've held a hard line before."
"I mean it, Devereaux."
"I know you do. It's deeply attractive. That's a wholly separate problem I'll be managing quietly on my own half of the bed."
She makes a strangled noise and marches off down the little hall, and I follow at the respectful distance of a man who values his continued survival, giving her the ten-second head start she so obviously needs.
It is not enough head start. By the time I reach the bedroom door she's in fast-forward — yanking the duvet square, kicking a laundry basket bodily into the closet, sweeping a paperback, a jar of hand cream, and a pair of reading glasses off the nightstand and into the drawer in one practiced motion.
She does not, in her haste, clock the pillow. Her pillow. The one nearest my assigned side.
I clock the pillow.
"So," I say, conversational, propping a shoulder against the doorframe. "Not to alarm you. But there is a neon-pink object on your pillow, and I feel fairly confident it is not a bookmark."
Amber freezes. Follows my gaze. Makes a sound like a tea kettle achieving low orbit.
"That's—" She lunges for it. "That is a — it's a neck massager, it's for my — I carry tension, in my—" She's got it in both hands now, this frankly ambitious piece of hot-pink silicone.
She is dying, departing this earthly plane in real time.
I have never once in my whole life held a straighter face.
She hurls the thing into the nightstand drawer and slams it shut on the evidence.
The slam engages something. From inside the drawer comes a low, industrious, deeply unmistakable buzz.