With that, she turned on her heel and wandered back toward the kitchen like they hadn’t made wild, incredible love.
Well, now, hold on a second. Was he that forgettable that she could just dismiss what had happened between them as though it were nothing?
No, his brain said. You hold on a second. Why do you care if you’re forgettable?
He threw the blankets off and rolled out of bed, pulling on his jeans.
He didn’t.
Then where are you going in such a rush, buddy?
He was going to figure this out before it came back to bite him in the ass, that’s where he was going. But he skidded to a halt when he got to the kitchen, his breath somewhere between his lungs and his throat.
Martine had her back to him, her curvy ass just peeking out beneath his shirt, when, spatula in hand, she turned sideways and lifted her arms to stretch. The sunlight streamed over her glossy black hair, her breast silhouetted in the flimsy shirt, plump and full.
And his mouth watered again.
Not typical for him. He was never much enamored the day after, no matter how good-looking a woman was.
Never.
When she gave one of the frying pans on the stove a shake, he had to close his eyes to block out her image.
It wasn’t just that she was sexy. It was that she, in the middle of his kitchen, left him warm, and that concept rather irritated him. She was using all his kitchen gadgets like they were her own and he didn’t mind a bit.
He was usually protective of his gadgets—especially his food processor. Yet, seeing her with his twenty-dollar spatula didn’t piss him off at all.
Huh.
“There you are,” she said when she turned around, waving at the place she’d set for him at the breakfast bar. “Sit.”
He slid onto the stool, clamping his mouth shut when she put the plate in front of him and brought her own to place next to his.
She took a forkful of egg and held it up with a smile, her eyes happy. “I hope I didn’t keep you up last night. I was a little restless.”
Derrick’s mouth fell open then snapped shut. A little restless? Is that what she was calling it? Was that code for “making amazing love”? “Restless?”
Martine cut another forkful of egg and held her hand under it, pressing it to his lips and shrugging her shoulders. “New surroundings always make for some insomnia with me.” Martine coaxed his mouth open, dropping the piece of food into it with a grin.
Insomnia? Was she for real?
And hell. Best damn eggs Benedict he’d ever had.
“I heard you in there moaning and bouncing around. I hope that wasn’t because of me. I tried to be quiet.”
It damn well was because of her. What the hell was going on?
Leaning on her hand, she looked up at him. “Clearly, you’re not a morning person. So I’m going to leave you to your breakfast and grab a shower if you don’t mind.” Without waiting for an answer, she slipped from the stool, dropped her plate in the sink, and sauntered her delicious ass right out of his kitchen. “Oh, and leave the dishes. I’ll get them after I shower,” she called.
His eyes narrowed, but he picked up his fork and scooped up some more of the eggs. Because if she didn’t want to hash out what had happened between them last night, who was he to press her when there was an amazing breakfast to be had?
Restless.
Hah.
* * *
Max slapped him on the back as he entered Hector’s barn. His smile was that of a contented man, one who was enjoying the fruition of his life mate journey far more than Derrick was capable of stomaching, and it only made him grumpier.
“How goes it, brother? Is your cat settling in?”
Pulling his knit cap over his head, Derrick strolled toward the bunny hutch, alongside Max, where Hector was busy fussing with the position of a heat lamp. The days were getting colder now, and the bunnies always came first with Hector.
Max nudged him with a shoulder. “So, your cat?”
“Her name is Martine. Martine Brooks.”
Max shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and raised an eyebrow. “Really now? So she finally shifted, huh?”
Among other things. “Yes.” His return response was tight.
Max’s eyes scanned his, probing. “So how did the first meeting go? What’s she like? Do you find her attractive?”
“We had sex.”
Boom. There it was. Why bother walking on eggshells? Martine didn’t want anything to do with him other than the mate. He wanted the same, so getting to know his family was a moot point.
Hector pulled his goggles and let them drop around his neck, his hair springing up in wild patches. “Wow, Slick. Did you even get her name first?”
Derrick frowned, not in the mood for a good ribbing. “It had nothing to do with me.”
Max cocked his head, resting an arm on top of the hutch. “Say again?”
“I said I wasn’t the one who made the first move. She was. Came right into my bedroom in the middle of the night and bam. But won’t even acknowledge it today…forget it. I don’t want to disrespect her by talking about it with you two.”
“Ahhhh,” Max said with a grin and another thump on his back.
“Ah, what?”
“Life-mate dream,” both Max and Hector replied in unison before cackling.
“Which means you didn’t really have sex,” Max reminded him with a grin.
Shit. He’d forgotten all about the legend of the life-mate dream. If your life mate were true, she would come to you in a dream.
A dirty one.
He felt less unmemorable now, and that was easing his bruised ego. Still, he called bullshit on the translation. “You two don’t believe that crap, do you?”
Max nodded his head. “I do after JC. I had the life-mate dream the first night I met her.”
Hector pulled one of his bunnies out of the hutch and rubbed its soft fur against his cheek. “You doubt, Neanderthal?”
Yeah. Yeah, he did. He’d had a hot dream about an attractive woman. Happened all the time. “I doubt.”
“Do you doubt that I was at death’s door just before JC came and saved my ass?” Max asked.
Fear washed over him. No. He didn’t doubt that. Not even a little. He’d been there the night of Max’s full-moon mate. To say he’d been worried he was going to lose his big brother was putting it lightly. JC had shown up just in the nick of time.
“Nope. I don’t doubt that. But I’ve got that part of this fucked-up curse all figured out.”
Max crossed his arms over his wide chest and made a face. “Oh, do you now? Share with the class, why don’t you? How did you come upon the answer to the curse? One no one else has ever been able to figure out?”
“To be fair, I didn’t. Martine did. What she said makes sense. She brought up some valid questions. Who says just because we mate, we have to live together? Or even stay in the same vicinity? That’s what we all believe a life mate means, right? Marriage, or our packs variation on the theme. But is that what it means?”
Hector’s mouth fell wide open and he snapped it shut. “I can’t wait to hear the kooky reasoning behind this.”
Derrick shook his head, stroking the ears of the bunny Hector held. “It’s not so kooky, Hector. Look, Martine and I mate on the full moon, right? I live. She goes back to her life. I go back to mine. We never have to see each other again. There’s nothing in the curse that says we do, is there? I’ve never heard a thing about having to play house just because we mated.”
Max pursed his lips, his brow furrowing. “In theory, that makes sense. But I can’t help but wonder if there’s a hitch somewhere. A loophole bigger than any of us has ever seen. I don’t know what it could be, but I bet it damn well exists, and I won’t have you taking risks with your life. I need you as my right-hand man, Derrick. Not gonna lose you.”
Hector pushed his goggles up on top of his nodding head. “Isn’t that always the way with thi
s curse? Something comes back to bite you in the ass. For Max, it was convincing a human he was a werewolf. He was damn close to dying that night because of it, Derrick. Or are you forgetting that the curse was designed to make it nearly impossible for you to mate?”
Derrick felt just a little smug about that. He also felt strangely proud that Martine had found a very plausible solution. “Well, I guess we outsmarted it, didn’t we?”
Hector’s head shook hard in time with his finger. “Naw. Nope-nope. I don’t believe that for a second, Derrick. Not a second. There’s more, and you’re just tempting fate by treating this cavalierly, man. The curse was made to make things hard on you and Max. To take you bitches out and make the Adams clan extinct. Period. Mark my words, there’s more.”
Derrick ignored Hector’s ominous tone when Max asked, “All that aside, you still have to convince her to mate with you.”
He gave them both a sheepish look. “I didn’t have to. She offered to do it.”
“Come again?” Max said, clear disbelief in his tone.
“I said, she heard everything we explained to her when I brought her to your house. She agreed to mate with me on the full moon to save me as long as she could come and go as she pleases while she’s here, no questions asked, and in return, I’d let her go back to New York when it’s all done.”
Hector’s goggles fell down his astonished face to his chin. He swished them around his neck with his free hand, grating out a sigh. “Jesus,” he scoffed. “How do you manage all that machismo? Does it hurt to be so charismatic—is it a huge burden? ‘Hey, stranger I found at the 7-Eleven, I need you to mate with me on the full moon, you in?’ And like magic, no fuss, no muss? You kill me, Derrick. I’m thoroughly flayed.”
Derrick wanted to smile at Hector’s stab at him, maybe even take a little pride in the fact that he had a reputation as a ladies’ man. He liked the idea that he was a free bird and everyone knew it. But he couldn’t.
He didn’t understand why it bothered him so much that he had little to no effect on Martine, but that niggle he’d felt this morning was beginning to grow. “It was her idea.”
“Why is it that women never have that idea with me?” Hector joked, settling the bunny back into the hutch.
“Because you’re not cursed to die if you don’t mate?” Derrick shot back.
Hector tipped an imaginary hat at him. “Touché. Still, I think you’d better prepare for more. There’s more, Derrick. I know there is. Feel it in my gut.”
Max gave him a concerned-big-brother gaze. “Me too. There has to be some obstacle to it or the curse means nothing—especially with a guy like you, who scores more often than the NFL as a whole. Keep your eyes and ears open, would you? Don’t think this is over because Martine agreed to the mate so willingly. You might get to skip the hearts-and-flowers stage of things, but there’s a hurdle.”
Hearts and flowers. Hah. As if Martine would be receptive to that phase anyway. She’d been pretty no-nonsense from the word go.
And why do you care if she’s receptive to anything but the mate?
Hey, over-thinker, shut up. I don’t care.
Do so.
Glaring at Hector and Max as if it were their fault he was having all this inner turmoil, he said, “I have to get to the bar. Would you mind asking the girls if they have anything she can borrow to wear? She has nothing.”
He liked her in nothing.
Jesus. He had to stop remembering her naked and willing and perfect.
“You bet,” Max called after him, but he was too deep in thought to hear the rest.
Too busy trying to convince himself he didn’t care.
Chapter Seven
She’d spent the better part of her morning and into the later afternoon online, sifting through the wreckage of her wedding planning business, when she wasn’t thinking about Derrick and last night when his hand had touched her arm
Or the way his shirt clung to his thick chest, or how much she’d wanted to crack the door to his bedroom open and catch a glimpse of him sleeping.
This had to be a physical reaction, or maybe even an overreaction to the idea that she hadn’t been near another human being for such a long period of time.
Yet her mind’s eye had gone back to him over and over since she’d sat down with his computer shortly after he left. She’d never daydreamed about anyone, let alone a man.
Well, again, let’s be clear. You were without human contact for months. Maybe you just need it more than you thought you did.
Martine shook her head. No. She didn’t like that answer at all. It was an unacceptable answer. Better to focus on what to do with her crumbled life.
Leaning forward, she began to read the messages left by the hundreds on her Facebook page from infuriated customers who’d lost bundles of money as a result of her involuntary stay in Escobar’s prison.
Essentially, her small business, Just Say I Do Wedding Planning Inc., was toast. If that wasn’t enough, her employees and vendors had all left scathing messages on her Facebook page, too, calling her a con artist.
Though, she had to give it to Lilly Guthrie, her personal assistant. Right up until just last week, she’d defended Martine while fending off some of the most hateful comments about everything from her wedding planning skills to the size of her ass.
The soon-to-be Mrs. Whitshire had some nerve calling her ass big when her intended, Levi Whitshire the Third, couldn’t keep his damn hands off it every time his fiancée had her back turned.
Lilly’s exclamation-point-filled rant about how she was sure her former boss had been kidnapped was beautiful. She declared it the one and only reason in the world she could think of why someone as reputable as Martine Brooks would stiff her employees and clients. Those words left Martine not only missing her sort-of friend, but warmed inside that Lilly had gone to the mat for her like a real tiger.
Until she read Lilly’s final post, stating that everyone was right about her beloved boss.
Lilly, according to her next Facebook post, had finally gone to the bank and spoken to the very teller Martine saw on her last day of freedom six months ago—a teller who knew Lilly legitimately worked for Martine. On the sly, and under the guise of easing Lilly’s worries her employer was dead, the teller confided her ex-boss had emptied both her personal and business accounts.
Then she’d used words like “shyster” and phrases like “scum of the earth” in her final post, and that hurt. Though she didn’t let people get too close, she’d liked Lilly a lot, had enjoyed her attempts at forming a friendship, even if they were futile.
One click to her now-empty bank accounts, chock full of overdraft fees, had proven Lilly correct. There was nothing. No trace Martine Brooks had worked hard for a living.
Martine gritted her teeth. Damn him. She’d loved her business—it had just begun to thrive when Escobar stepped in and nabbed her, the son of a bitch.
And now, apparently, she had no money left either. Her fists clenched tight against her thighs. Someone, likely Escobar, had clearly impersonated her—he’d probably done one of those cloaking spells and stolen her life right out from under her.
A frustrated tear formed at the corner of her eyes. Everything was gone—which meant, she had nowhere to go when her deal with Derrick was done.
Somehow, she’d find a way to return the money to all of her customers and her employees and vendors when this was all said and done. Until then, she had bigger fish to fry.
Like where Escobar was and if he knew she was gone yet. He was infamous for disappearing for weeks at a time once she’d done his dirty work for him. But if he had some sort of tracking spell on her in order to locate her, she would inadvertantly involve Derrick and his family.
And she didn’t want to do that. Her problems were hers alone.
A knock at the door had Martine’s ears picking up the sound of female voices. Closing the laptop Derrick had loaned her, she rose with reluctance and headed for the door.
P
opping it open, she saw JC, the woman from the day before, and another woman who resembled Derrick and Max in the most flattering of feminine ways.
JC grinned, her eyes sparkling and clear, her breath coming in cold puffs of condensation. “We come bearing gifts.” She held up a shopping bag chock-full of colorful material and the other woman held up a foil-covered tray.
Martine forced herself to smile and open the door wider, smoothing her hands over her borrowed shirt. “Come on in,” she offered, stepping aside to let the women pass.
The young woman had hair as dark as Derrick’s, worn in a high ponytail, her willowy arms and legs slender, her cheekbones sharp and defined by color from the chill of the outdoors. She stuck out her hand after dropping the tray on the kitchen counter. “I’m Natalie Adams. Just Nat is fine, though. Really good to meet you.”
Martine took her hand and smiled back, liking how their eyes met and how Nat didn’t bother to try to hide her curiosity. Her gaze was direct and clear, and Martine returned it. “Martine Brooks.”
JC held up the bag with the clothes. “And you know me. We, er, talked at my fiancé’s—well, sort of,” she said on a sheepish chuckle.
“JC, right?” she asked, waving them to the couch.
JC dropped down on the sofa next to Nat and nodded. “That’s me. Unsuspecting mate to Max, and reigning death-sex champion.”
Martine chuckled. JC had been kind to her yesterday. She wouldn’t forget that.
As everyone settled in, so did an awkward silence. What did you say to people you didn’t know at all, but who knew your very reason for being here among them was for the coitus?
How did you make small talk with that on the table?
With no warning at all, Martine found herself feeling self-conscious with these two women. It was an unfamiliar feeling—unfamiliar and uncomfortable, and so totally unlike her. She was strong, independent and had been accused of being overly confidant a time or two.
What's New, Pussycat? (Wolf Mates Book 2) Page 6