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It had gotten to the point where she was in a bad mood from her nerves being rattled every time he slammed, pounded, tossed, or kicked something around the place. Tired of waiting for him to get over his tantrum, she got up and started making dinner. She decided on tacos and went to the refrigerator to gather the ingredients.
Stella had gotten the ground beef browning in the pan and had turned to the lettuce and tomato to chop it up. She didn’t like cooking, but it was better than doing nothing but watching him behave like a child.
She reached out to grab a knife from the block on the counter, when she was stopped by Trick’s viselike grip on her wrist. She looked up at him and glared. “Fuckingouch!”
He winced and loosened his grip, but he didn’t let go of her wrist. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Cooking you fucking dinner, asshole. Now, let go of me.”
“You think I’m going to trust you with a knife after what you did to Rex and Shortcake?”
Without even thinking, Stella swung out with her left fist and connected with his jaw. The man didn’t even flinch. “Fuck,” she yelled and shook out her throbbing knuckles.
Trick dragged her back to the bed and forced her onto it, cuffing her to the headboard in the process. He didn’t say a word, but he didn’t have to. The anger was clear in those deep brown eyes of his and the hard set of his jaw.
Once he was done, he returned to the kitchen, turned off the stovetop, and then left the cabin.
As Stella laid there and stared at the ceiling, she blew out a deep breath and asked herself why she thought it was a good idea to punch a shifter in the face. The man could have killed her. She tried to feel some guilt for it, but she didn’t. He was being an ass and said the one thing that would punch her in the gut, so she returned the favor.
She had done a lot of things in life that deserved her guilt and shame, but she wasn’t responsible for what had happened to his friends, not to the extent he was pinning on her. No, she wouldn’t feel bad for punching him, not one bit.
An hour later, her anger was still swirling inside of her, refusing to dim, when she first heard the tapping of raindrops hitting the roof and the walls of the cabin. The flash of lightning and almost immediate crack of thunder that filled the air seemed as if it could have been the manifestation of her mood. The patter of the rain steadily increased until it sounded as if there was a monsoon happening outside.
Stella had always liked the rain. Not being in it, but she enjoyed the sound and found it to be soothing. In an attempt to use it to cool her anger, she closed her eyes and focused on it.
But when the drops started falling onto her forehead, she cursed and opened her eyes to see that there was a leak in the roof of the cabin. Annoyed, she tried to sit up to move out of the drop radius, but her arm was wrenched by her wrist still being cuffed to the headboard. Huffing with irritation, she slid to the side the best she could, but it put her arm and shoulder at an impossible angle, which only made her anger grow.
When that motherfucking bear gets back here, I’m skinning him and making a fucking rug.
Trick
Trick knew it was an asshole thing to say before the words had left his mouth, but he couldn’t stop them from coming out. His mind had been on his brother, Rex, all day, and seeing her reaching for a knife after Rex and Shortcake had been sliced up the way they had been was too much for his shit mood to ignore.
He was happy that Rex was pretty much recovered and had been ecstatic that his brother had mated and married his woman the night before, but he was not taking it well that he couldn’t be there to celebrate with them.
As he barreled down the country road and rain began to splat onto the windshield of the van, Trick was fuming. His bear was whining inside of him, pushing him to return to the cabin and make things right with his mate, but fuck that. She was the reason he wasn’t part of the celebration.
He had sent a congratulations message to Doc and had called Rex, but it wasn’t the same. He was missing a big moment in his brother’s life. And it was something he would never get back.
Trick wanted to hate her. He truly did, but he couldn’t. He had just taken his anger out on her and let his mouth get away from him. He would go back and apologize eventually, but he wasn’t ready for that yet. No, he would drive until his anger cooled. His bear would just have to fucking wait.
When the rain was falling too hard for Trick to properly see the road, he figured it was time to listen to his bear and return to the cabin and the mate the gods had cursed him with. He wanted to believe there was a path for them to have the type of relationship he saw Rock share with Diamond, Axle share with Gorgeous, or hell, even Dragon share with Kisy. He craved it, but the more time he spent with her, the more he was missing out on once-in-a-lifetime family events and traditions. Add in the fact that he wasn’t able to trust her, and she felt the same way about him, the crevasse seemed too wide to pass. The damn bridge he needed to build would be longer than the Mighty Mac.
Sighing, he turned onto the path to the cabin and prepared himself to deal with the angry woman he’d left there. Maybe she had cooled down over the couple of hours he’d spent driving around. It was probably wishful thinking, but he thought it all the same.
After parking the van as close to the porch as possible, he pocketed the keys, opened the driver’s door, and made a mad dash for the cabin as the rain pelted his bald head and drenched his clothes.
He stepped inside and immediately kicked off his boots. Not wanting to trail water through the place, he stripped right where he stood. Once he was naked, he headed for the dresser, glancing over at the bed on his way.
Stella was glaring at him, even worse than earlier in the evening, but she was lying in the middle of the bed with her arm at a weird angle. Something about it had his bear on high alert. As he bent down and pulled a clean pair of boxer briefs from the tote that held his clothes, he asked, “Why are you laying like that?” He put his legs through the holes and was pulling them up his legs as he waited for her answer.
She took a deep breath, then she bellowed, “Because you left me cuffed here during a storm and the water from the leak in the roof was pelting me in my goddamn face, you bastard!”
He glanced over to where she normally laid on the bed and saw a large wet spot near the pillow. “A whole new meaning to not wanting to sleep in the wet spot,” he mumbled without even thinking, which had her awkwardly moving around on the bed, attempting to kick him.
Trick couldn’t help it. He laughed. The whole situation was ridiculous, but that didn’t mean the anger had left him. It hadn’t, but it was either laugh or kill her, and killing her wasn’t an option.
“You piece of shit,” she spat as she settled. “Fucking uncuff me.”
