Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
bloom
After a stop at the hotel so Maverick could wash the blood off his body—it was a lot of fucking blood, very little of it his—we were back on the road.
He was driving.
I’d planned on taking the wheel again so he had time to heal, but he’d literally carried me to the passenger seat when I tried.
He had put my sweater back on to hide his shoulder wound from me after he showered. I’d told him he didn’t need to, but he ignored me. And there was now a bloodstain on the shoulder of it.
“You never gave back the bloody sweater I left in your office,” I said as the realization struck me.
It was 1 AM, and we’d been on the road since 12:30. Half an hour down, three and a half to go. More, if we stopped for food at another gas station. Considering the map said we’d be at our location in five minutes, I assumed we were going to.
“I framed it as a reminder to be more careful with you.”
I gave him a deadpanned look. “You didn’t.”
“Nah, it’s in my room with the rest of your laundry. Thanks to the blood, it still smells like you, and the scent is a little different than your typical. I’m not returning it.”
“Should I ask how many other pieces of my clothing you have in your room?”
“Probably not.”
I’d take his advice.
“How scarred are you from that?” He gestured behind us, and he didn’t need clarify that he was talking about the fights.
“I’m fine. I grew up being told about the terrible things vampires are capable of, remember? Our parents start showing us gruesome pictures around four years old.”
“I forgot about that.”
“It’s fine.”
Maverick pulled up in front of a building that definitely wasn’t a gas station.
“Is this a twenty-four hour diner?” I looked over at him.
“Yup. I’m dying for some pancakes.” He patted his chiseled abdomen. The scent of his blood grew stronger with the movement, and I hated that it made my fangs descend.
I’d just drank from him. I shouldn’t have been craving blood yet.
He opened his door.
I followed suit. “I don’t think the bloodstain will ever come out of that.”
“That’s because you’re shit with laundry. Come here.” He tucked me up against his side after I exited the car, lowering his nose to my hair and inhaling deeply. “I changed my mind. I want you instead of pancakes.”
“Come on.” I towed him toward the entrance. He dragged his feet, just to make my life difficult. “You’re a huge pain. Emphasis on the pain.”
“Emphasis on the huge,” he corrected.
“Emphasis on the huge and the pain.” I pulled him through the door. Though it was unlocked, the place was a graveyard. “We might have to make our own pancakes.”
A flustered-looking woman strode out of the back, her makeup smeared and her eyes bright. She smelled like sex.
She’d totally been hooking up with someone in the back. Probably the chef, considering the scent of stale grease clinging to her skin.
“We’ll take two plates of pancakes, and a stack of eggs and bacon.” Maverick held up two fingers. “Wolf-sized.”
“You’ve got it.” The woman looked him up and down slowly. The pink sweater and the bleeding shoulder didn’t seem to faze her. “No mate mark yet, huh?”
I resisted the urge to flash my fangs at her. If she was trying to hit on him immediately after fucking some dude in the back…
“Food would be great.” Maverick didn’t bother trying to charm her.
The woman nodded and walked into the back again.
“Is she a werewolf?” I asked.
“Nah, she’s human. The chef’s a wolf.”
“The one she’s screwing?”
“Yup.” Maverick led me to a booth, and waved me onto one of the benches. I took a seat, expecting him to sit across from me. Instead, he plopped down right beside me, draping an arm over my shoulders again.
“You’re never going to stop bleeding if you don’t stop moving your arm,” I said.
“It’ll heal eventually.”
I sighed in response. It was like the man wanted to be hurt.
Since he wasn’t concerned about his pain, I leaned my head against his chest and closed my eyes. The week I spent barely sleeping had officially caught up to me.
“Do you mind if I call Sutton?”
“Is that your ex’s name? The poisoner?” I didn’t lift my head from his chest. Mostly because I was tired. Partially because I didn’t want him to see jealousy in my eyes.
“Yeah. She’s not in the business anymore. I think she became a grocer or a fashion designer or something.”
“Those are extremely different potential careers.”
“We didn’t stay in touch.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“We dated right after the war ended. She wanted to be done with all things vampire and werewolf. I needed to figure out how to run the Alpha Pack without becoming as fucked up as my predecessor.”
“How romantic.”
He flashed me a grin. “It wasn’t. We were only together for a few weeks before she disappeared, and we barely saw each other.”
“You were ghosted? By a woman?”
“Yup.”
“Wow. I like you so much more now. Tell me you were heartbroken.”
He snorted. “I wasn’t, and I don’t think that’s a compliment.”
“I like her more too, now.” My eyes stayed closed. “Did you miss her?”
“Honestly, no. Our personalities didn’t mesh well together. She needed a lot of time alone. My pack was my life, and it was a mess that required constant energy and attention. When I wasn’t dealing with it, I needed someone to decompress with, and she wasn’t there.”
“TMI.”
“Not sexually. I needed someone to talk to about the difficult things. Rhone still hates her for not being there for me.”
“So I’m not the only reason you haven’t called her.”
“No. And you’re not going to be the most opposed to having her in Vast, either. He’s going to be pissed.”
I nodded. “As far as this thing between us…”
“Our relationship.”
“Right. Do you see it going that way, too? Because I know you’re obsessed with the way I smell, but you and I don’t exactly talk about the hard stuff. We’re barely friends.”
“We may barely be friends, but I’ve seen you with Harper. She’s going through something, and you’re there for her at all times of the day and night, even when you have a shitload of work to do. I can’t imagine you would treat your mate any differently.”
My face warmed.
He wasn’t wrong.
And he didn’t seem suspicious about Harper’s struggle, which was really, really good.
“Assuming I loved them, yeah,” I said.
“You’ll fall for me eventually.”
I smiled. I shouldn’t have liked his confidence, but I did. “Will I?”
“Yup. Much like your ears, I am—”
“If you say irresistible, I’m going to smack you.”
He lowered his lips to my ear, and I elbowed him in the side when I smelled his skin fucking burning again.
“Irresistible.”
I smacked his leg. It couldn’t have hurt even a little. “I swear, you have to stop burning yourself on my earrings.”
“Take them out, and I will.”
“I’m too tired to keep arguing about this. Just call your ex.” I waved a hand toward the phone.
He was right about me falling for him. I would, eventually. He was irresistible. I was already addicted to his blood… and his personality. I couldn’t imagine it would take more than that to fall for him.
I wasn’t the one who would want to end our relationship.
He was going to want to kill me when he found out that I was hiding Harper’s condition and the fact that she’d drained Steven. Given our connection, I doubted he would be able to do it himself, but Rhone? He would definitely snap my neck for the secrets I’d kept.
Maverick scratched my back lightly for a few minutes, instead of picking up his phone. It felt incredible.
I hunched over the table, closing my eyes, and started to doze off a little.
“We never had that conversation about labels.”
“Do we need labels?” I mumbled.
“Not really, but I think you want them.”
“Do I?”
“Yup.”
“Alright. Hit me with it.”
“In werewolf terms, we’re fated. Since we’re not rejecting the bond, we’re well on our way to being permanently mated. Hence me calling you my mate, even though we’re not technically official.”
“Mmkay.”
Maybe labels were a bad idea.
It was a hell of a lot worse to lie to your mate than to the guy who’d bitten you in your office and thrown you in a cage before locking you in an apartment for a week.
“In human terms, we’re engaged. You’re my fiancée. I’m yours, too.”
He’d said that before. I just hadn’t taken it seriously.
“I don’t have a ring to throw at your face when I’m mad at you,” I said into the table.
“Werewolves don’t wear rings, so I didn’t think about it,” he admitted.
I guess rings would make shifting difficult. They didn’t even wear shoes. Might lose a finger if they tried to shift with a ring on.
“Alright. So we’re engaged,” I said.
“Yup.”
“You know that’s insane, right?”
Maverick chuckled. “A little. In a good way.”
“Kind of.”
“Kind of?” He tickled my side, and I laughed.
“You do know I never actually agreed to this, right?”
He tugged me closer to his side, his hand lingering on my hip afterward. “Want me to propose? Like a good little human?”
“Of course not.”
“How do vampires make it official, when they’ve decided to take a mate but haven’t bitten each other yet?”
My face warmed. “We follow human traditions.”
“So if you were with Timber, he would propose.”
“The jealousy with which you say his name gets more ridiculous every time, Mav. You do know I haven’t had feelings for him in a long time, right?”
“I know.”
“Then yes, if I was with a vampire, we would live together and he would propose before we sealed a bond.” My nose twitched, the scent of pancakes finally filling my lungs.
“You should call Sutton before we eat. She probably has to make a flight, and we need to find the murderer before anyone else dies.”
Maverick didn’t look thrilled about it, but he picked up his phone. It was against his ear and ringing a few moments later, and I heard a muffled, women’s voice answer just before it went to voicemail.
“What do you want, Maverick?” She sounded like she’d been asleep.
Should I have been alarmed that she answered his call in the middle of the night?
Probably.
“I need a favor,” Maverick said.
“No thanks.”
“Have you been on the internet recently?”
“No. I prefer not to watch the news. It’s usually depressing.”