by Amelia Jade
Erika leaned back at that. “That’s a very good point. Tells me you’ve done some serious thinking about it.”
“I have. But after the way he acted tonight…I just don’t know. I’m not sure how I feel about having him around. He got so possessive and controlling, as if he expected me to just do whatever he said.”
“And that’s not you at all,” Erika said, bringing a chuckle to both of them.
“No, not quite,” she agreed, the smile lingering for a moment before it faded back into the neutral features of one lost in thought.
“If he relaxes and doesn’t try to be controlling, then I think I’ll let him be around. It’s only fair; it’s his child too. But if he tries to control me or the baby, then he’s done. He’s gone, not allowed.”
“That’s fair,” Erika said. “After all, you’ll be mostly raising it. If he wishes to partake, then he’ll have to adapt to that situation.”
Kelly nodded.
“Now, what do I do about Gray?”
Erika waved it off. “Give him a day to cool off, then find him and just tell him what’s going on. He’ll feel like a big dork and want to make it up to you, and you two can go on with things. Just remember not to keep him in the dark ever again. It never works out.”
“No kidding,” she agreed.
“I’m serious though. I’m more open and up front with Harden than any relationship I’ve ever been in. We’ve told each other just about everything, so that there are no surprises, no unknowns. It’s odd, I’ll admit. But it’s made our bond so much tighter because of it.”
Kelly nodded. “No secrets. I can get behind that.”
“Sweet. Now, how about we get some sleep?”
“Done deal. All that crying has left me exhausted.”
She rose and made to head out the door. “Thanks for this. I’m really sorry.”
“Shut up. And get into the spare room. You’re not going home now. Stay here, then you can tackle Gray tomorrow on a full stomach.”
“Are you sure?” she asked uncomfortably, not wanting to impose.
“Shut up.”
“Okay,” she said meekly and followed after Erika, grateful to have someone like her to call a best friend.
Chapter Eighteen
Gray
He sullenly stood at the guard desk, his eyes hooded and staring straight ahead.
“What do you want?” he snapped as the figure approached him through the front doors.
The shifter, a young female, shuffled to a halt and looked around uncomfortably, obviously not enjoying being the object of his wrath.
“I was just wondering where I’m supposed to go?” she asked. “I just arrived.”
“Papers,” he growled.
She held them up and he snatched them from her hand, giving them a cursory read over. He didn’t need much. Gray knew everyone that came through. It was his job. There were only a few dozen shifters ever in Cloud Lake at any given time, so it wasn’t exactly a huge feat, but he made sure to know all about the new arrivals.
“Room 213,” he half-snarled, shoving the papers back to her and looking past her, making it clear as daylight that he was done with her and she should move on.
The young woman looked left and right at the two staircases that curved up the outer walls of the lobby, unsure of which one to take. Another growl from Gray sent her scurrying to the nearest one, more interested in getting out of his sight than taking the right one.
Footsteps padded up behind him.
“Hey man,” Hector, one of the other guards, said, his hand landing on Gray’s shoulder.
Gray spun with a vicious motion of his shoulder, throwing the arm off him.
“What?”
Hector backed up, eyes wide. “Whoa. Easy there. Friendly, dude. I’m not your enemy.”
Gray just turned around and continued to stare out the front door until Hector got the point and backed off, heading deeper into the motel to do something else. Once again Gray was left alone with his thoughts. He barely managed to suppress the urge not to destroy the oval desk that he stood behind. Mainly because he knew if he leveled it, he would be the one who had to rebuild it. Wasn’t worth that, despite the overwhelming urge to destroy something, anything.
Another shifter came in through the front doors, one of the random Cadians who were visiting Cloud Lake. They approached Gray, but one closer look at his face and they altered course immediately, heading right for the stairs and their room, whatever question or greeting they had planned dying on their lips. He didn’t care. Gray wanted nothing more than to be left alone right then.
More footsteps approached from behind.
“I thought I made it clear to leave me alone, Hector,” he snapped, not even bothering to turn around.
“You did,” a deep baritone replied tautly.
Gray spun as Andrew approached. He didn’t say anything, just stared at his boss and waited for him to speak. The gryphon shifter came to a halt several feet away from him, his eyes boring into Gray’s, taking in his demeanor and body language.
“What?” he growled.
Andrew shook his head. “My office. Now.”
“I’m on duty,” Gray said, standing his ground. “I have to man the front desk.”
His friend snorted. “Right. Because you standing there like a rabid dog barking at everyone is exactly what we need out of you.” His eyes hardened. “Get in my office.”
There was no give in his tone. It was an order, from boss to employee, not friend to friend. The severity of that reached out through the haze of anger surrounding Gray, but all it did was make him more mad that Andrew felt the need to intervene that way, instead of as his friend, or just not at all. This wasn’t his business, dammit. This was Gray’s and it was his personal life. He didn’t have to tell Andrew anything. Why couldn’t the damn gryphon mind his own business?
Something of this thoughts must have made its way to his face, because Andrew’s eyes glittered with barely contained fury. “Now,” he said, his voice ice cold.
Gray snapped up, his back straight. “Yes, sir,” he said smartly and followed Andrew back into the hotel with near military precision.
The door closed behind him, but he declined to sit, instead standing at attention behind the chairs while Andrew took a seat.
“Sit the fuck down,” Andrew snarled.
Gray shook his head. “I’d prefer to stand.”
“It wasn’t a fucking request. Get your ass in one of the chairs, now.”
Defiance bubbled up inside of Gray, urging him to tell the gryphon where he could shove it, but at the last moment he got a hold of it and decided it simply wasn’t worth it.
“Yes, sir,” he said sullenly, pulling back one of the chairs and sitting down.
The chair didn’t even make a pretense of being supportive. It simply exploded the moment Gray leaned his weight onto it, depositing him on the floor amidst a cloud of flimsy wood particles. His legs and arms erupted in a thousand tiny bits of pain as shards of wood opened minute holes in his skin as he scraped along them.
Gray began to tremble as his rage built to a towering inferno, a culmination of everything that had happened the night before and his inability to react properly to it. He stood, grabbed the second chair and flung it against the wall, watching with childlike angry satisfaction as it disintegrated as well, leaving little more than remnants on the floor.
There was a long moment of silence as he stood facing the far wall, shoulders heaving as he breathed hard, trying to rein himself in before he destroyed the rest of the office.
“Feeling better?” Andrew asked in a gentle yet slightly reproachful voice.
“Not quite. But if I add your desk to the pile, I might.”
“Go ahead. It would give me an excuse not to do paperwork for a while,” his friend said with a little laugh.
And it was his friend who replied, not his boss. The moment of tension between them was gone. Gray turned to look at him, trying to keep the ang
uish off his face.
“What’s going on?” Andrew asked softly.
Gray shuddered.
“I thought…I thought I had it all figured out,” he whispered. “But I was wrong.”
“Wrong about what?”
He didn’t want to reply. Didn’t want to voice his pain, to put words to what had happened the night before. Part of him thought that perhaps if he avoided talking about it, he could refuse to acknowledge that it had happened. That he’d been wrong.
“Gray, it’s me. Andrew. You can trust me, my friend.”
The soft-spoken words slipped through the defenses he’d been building, and urged him to speak up, to tell his friend what was going on. To seek another opinion.
“I went to Kelly’s last night,” he said, the words coming out haltingly. “I chased some sort of lurker around, but he lost me in the rain and because someone yelled at me, thinking I was the peeper,” he grumbled. “After that I went over to her place.” He steeled himself. “And she was with another shifter.”
Andrew didn’t reply at first. “Were they, uh, involved, when you got there?” he asked.
Gray shook his head. “No, but, you know how you can tell that someone has a connection, that there’s something going on between them?”
His friend didn’t reply, but he nodded slowly in understanding.
“Yeah. It was like that.”
“Are you sure they were romantically together?” Andrew asked.
“What the hell else would he have been doing there at that time?” Gray shot back.
The gryphon considered that for a moment in silence before speaking again. “Who was it?”
“It was—”
Gray stopped himself with a frown.
“What is it?” Andrew asked.
“I don’t know who it was,” he said with a shrug. “Someone I’ve never seen before.”
Andrew’s head snapped up, focusing on him.
“What?” Gray looked around him, trying to figure out what was up, what he’d missed.
“You don’t know him?” he said slowly.
“No. Must be a new guy.”
Andrew shook his head. “You must be distraught about this, my friend.”
“Of course I am,” Gray snapped back. “What, did you think I was just laughing and singing lullabies over here?”
“Obviously not, you ass. But stop and think for a moment. You, Gray, the senior guard here in Cloud Lake, do not know who she was with. An unknown shifter.” Andrew snorted. “You’re so serious about your job, you always know everyone in town. But you don’t know this guy, and it’s not bothering you?”
Gray rocked back in surprise. Holy shit. It was true, he had been so wrapped up in his moping over Kelly that he hadn’t even considered that aspect. Andrew was right. Gray was heavily involved in the traffic of shifters to and from Cadia. He knew them all.
But he hadn’t known the one there with Kelly.
“How could I have been so stupid,” he breathed, angry with himself.
He went over to the pile of wood and stomped on it a few more times in disgust.
“I even chased him across half the complex!” he raged. “Right into her arms!”
Andrew rose and came around the desk to clap him on the shoulder. “It’s fine, my friend. She’s your mate. If I were put in that situation, I’d be the same I’m sure.”
Gray shook him off. “No.”
Andrew started to speak, but he cut him off. “She’s not my mate, Andrew. How could she be, if she was with someone else?” He shook his head. “That doesn’t matter right now anyway. If this is the same guy, I need to go back to her place, try to get his scent, and track him down. Call me petty, but shipping her new boytoy back to Cadia would bring me immense amounts of satisfaction.”
Without waiting for his boss to respond, he spun on a heel and strode from the office and out of the embassy.
It was time to remember who he was, and why he’d been appointed as the senior guard in Cloud Lake. And it was past time that Gray showed this pumped-up wannabe that he wasn’t the biggest, baddest bear in town.
Chapter Nineteen
Kelly
Two days later, she was still imposing on her best friend.
“It’s fine, Kel, trust me. You’re not bothering us at all,” Erika reassured her. “You can stay as long as you need to.”
Harden, Erika’s mate, nodded from across the table, his mouth full of pancakes.
“I should really get going though,” she said, spearing a chunk of pancake and smearing it through some leftover syrup. “But when you keep cooking like this, it’s damn hard.”
They all chuckled, though none of them thought for a second that Erika’s cooking was the reason she was staying. The truth was that Kelly had overstayed her welcome despite their assurances, and it was past time that she got up off her ass, stopped moping around, and tackled her problems head-on.
Which sounded great in practice, but in reality wasn’t anywhere near that easy for her to just jump up and do. She knew. She’d been trying, and failing, hence her elongated stay. Now though, her manners were finally starting to overwhelm her reluctance to confront her life. She was imposing on Erika, who had been more than generous, and she needed to stop pushing it. Which meant sucking it up, and getting shit done.
Starting now, with asking for advice.
“How do I do this?” she asked abruptly, without any segue to the new topic.
“Talk to him,” Harden said immediately. “Just go over to the embassy, find him, corner him in a room alone, and tell him what’s up.”
Erika reached over and swatted her mate. “It doesn’t work like that, you big dummy.”
Harden looked back and forth between the two of them. “Gray is male, is he not?”
Kelly nodded slowly. “Yes?”
“Okay, and of the three of us at the table, which one of us is also male?”
“Sometimes I wonder,” Erika replied with a snicker before becoming serious. “Okay, and your point is?”
“My point,” Harden said, ignoring the pointed tone, “is that I know how to deal with these things as a male, and I can give you better advice. The easiest way to achieve this will be to just hunt him down, trap him, and tell him that he’s going to listen to you, that he owes you that much, and after that, he can make his decision. He’ll have no choice; his pride won’t let him. Then you tell him how he’s being a dumbass over this, and he’ll be cool, and forgive you, and everything will be okay.”
Kelly considered his words. “And if he isn’t okay with that?”
“Then me and the boys will go down to see him,” Harden said flatly. “We’ll convince him to see reason.”
Erika made an exasperated noise and stood up from the table, gesturing at her. “Come on, let’s go chat in the other room. We’ll leave the caveman here to his own things while we figure this out.”
Harden just shook his head. “Me Harden, know talky talky with dumb dumb. You woman, no get.”
Both women fixed him with glares, and he immediately bent over his food, shoving huge forkfuls into his mouth.
“That’s what I thought,” Erika said, sticking her tongue out at her mate and giving him a wink.
Kelly admired that about them. They could disagree with each other on topics, but at the end of the day, their love was so strong that it could easily withstand them, and in fact made them a better couple because of the disagreements. It was something she’d seen more clearly after spending a few days in close proximity to the two of them, and it made her realize it was something she wanted as well, a bond that was flexible and bendable like theirs, willing to accommodate things on the fly as they happened.
Before they could go, Harden’s hand shot out and caressed Erika’s swollen stomach. His eyes were closed, ear cocked in her direction. At one point his hand stilled and he just sat there listening to it. His lips curved upward in a beatific smile of supreme satisfaction.
“Our son is
lively today isn’t he?” Harden said softly.
“Yes, he is,” Erika said, resting her hand on top of his.
Kelly slipped from the room while the two of them shared a moment, and furiously wiped away the tears building in her eyes. That was something else she’d seen during her time here, the sheer love Harden had for a child that wasn’t his.
Our son, he’d called him. Even though Harden’s not his biological father, he still considers the child his.
That was something else she wanted. It was what was tempting her to give Jacen a shot. To have a father figure, someone who cared for her child that strongly. She knew he would be invested in its future, and that was something she craved. Gray…she didn’t know if Gray would be that person. He hadn’t seemed afraid of the fact that she was pregnant, but then neither had he shown himself to be capable of that father figure role.
That’s because you didn’t really give him a chance to, either. You never really talked about it, besides asking if it threw him off.
It was true. She couldn’t blame him when she’d not made herself available to him in that concept. It simply wasn’t something that they’d discussed yet, so she couldn’t allow herself to form an opinion on that subject until they had. But she made a mental note to have that discussion as soon as she resolved this current issue between them.
“Sorry about that,” Erika said, coming into the half-finished sitting room in her walk-waddle that had become commonplace as she got into the later months of her pregnancy.
The two of them settled down into the chairs, plush single-seat recliners. It was all that they’d put in the room, as work was still being done on it. The outer walls were up and insulated, and a sub-floor was down, but that was about it. Other parts of the house, including the nursery, were much higher in priority. Kelly also knew this was one of the rooms Harden and Erika had hoped to tackle before she’d shown up.
“I promise, I’ll be out of your hair soon,” she said. “I’m leaving shortly. I just need to know how to best go about this.”
Erika gave her a long look. “Don’t you ever let him hear that I said this, but I think Harden may have a point,” she admitted.