AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“If I want to wait, we can?” Sadie asks.
“That’s your choice. Not mine. You don’t need my permission.” She follows Sadie’s gaze to me. “Nor his.”
“Please say we’re done for today,” I say. I can’t watch her suffer anymore.
Sadie cracks a smile, and I swear it takes a sledgehammer to my heart. My mate’s suffering yet she would put the investigation above herself if I asked. “Wuss,” she calls me.
“Stubborn.”
She doesn’t miss a beat. “Meanie.”
“Smarty pants.”
“Hard-headed.”
“Fair enough,” I concede.
Dr. Bomani stands and heads for the door. “Let’s save couples’ therapy for another time, shall we?”
I don’t tell her she’s wrong. Hell, maybe I have been wrong about this whole mating connection. If the marshals could move me closer, I could spend the rest of my life trying to be the man that my mate deserves. She might not have to know that I’m a fox’s bastard. Or knowing Sadie, she’d say being one kind of shifter’s no better than another. The woman can keep secrets, that’s for sure. And what a woman.
She stands and wobbles on those heels that could double as ice picks. I offer her my arm, expecting her to scowl or slap at me. To my surprise, she takes it.
“Come on,” she says, “I know a place we can go to work out our differences.”
Dear gods, I don’t care if she’s talking about a bed, a wall, a freakin’ rock in the middle of her poison garden, so long as she lets me kiss her again.
14
SADIE
“Nymphs shouting at each other and jabbing their spears in the air,” Nolan says. “This was your idea of working out differences?”
He sits next to me by the flames. His auburn hair catches glints of the firelight, shining copper and gold, and I want to trace the freckles on his cheek. Instead, I’m bandaging the cut on his forehead. “Fight training works out a lot of issues. It’s not the Hack and Ale, but it’s still a party.”
“As long as it gets your mind off the memories, we’ll call the evening a win.” He presses his back against the outside wall of Stone’s forge like he’s the iron holding the damn place up. “Hell, you didn’t even make any of the pigtails cry when you beat them all at stick fighting.”
“But they made you cry,” I tease although I’m not sure how he managed not to tear up when a Nymph missed the mark he was holding for her by a good three feet and smacked him square in the nuts. Not to mention the prior jabs to his chest and gut. When he ducked to grab his balls, she clobbered him in the head. Thus, the cut I’m patching.
He grunts, and I swear he packs a wallop of feeling in the sound. Hell, he’ll probably be black and blue tomorrow, and the Fates shame me, but I sort of want to take a peek. Before I can let my brain go too far on that thought, he says, “Let’s hope the world never needs the pigtails to save it because we’ll all be doomed.”
“I don’t know. She took you out pretty easily.” I dab on more antiseptic. Is the wound clean? Yeah, but I like watching him squirm.
He hisses. “Ow, what are you using to clean that scratch? Battery acid?”
“You never know what STD might jump off a Nymph onto you.” I switch to a soothing salve that I keep stocked at Stone’s school because no regular first aid kit will suffice when Gorgons and Furies decide to beat the crap out of each other with training weapons. “Any known allergies other than wolf’s bane?”
He eyes me suspiciously. “Why do you ask?”
“Relax, if I’d wanted to poison you, you’d be dead already. The salves stocked here are shifter safe.”
“For all shifters?”
Weird that he wants to know since he’s a boring old wolf, but… “Yeah. Not that it matters. Every shifter species is the same in the end—part human, part beast, all a pain in my ass.”
“You really feel that way?”
“I don’t rank shifter species like you wolves do although I don’t see you treating me different now that I’m not human with witch tendencies.”
