by Selena Scott
His brow was down, his dark hair tumbling over his forehead. He looked… angry.
“You should leave, Dawn.”
He stood up from the table so fast his chair scraped. Dawn gaped at him. This was not what she’d expected at all. She’d sort of assumed his reaction would be something like the way he’d reacted to her calling him her friend. A little tender and pained and scared, maybe. But with an underlying sweetness. She was not expecting her friend’s face to turn into an irritated mask of frustration, maybe even rage.
“Dawn,” he barked when she still hadn’t moved a long moment later. “You need to leave.”
She jumped at his tone of voice, but didn’t stand up yet. “Why?”
She was utterly bewildered. Quill was often a little bit terse, course, impatient. But he was never an outright asshole.
He gritted his teeth and scrubbed his hands over his face again. “Because I’m your freaking mentor, okay? This is my job. You can’t just show up at my house whenever you feel like it.”
She stood now. She suddenly wondered exactly how old Quill was. Because in comparison to his large, irritated presence she felt young and stupid and exposed. She instantly ran an internal reel of everything about the human world that he’d painstakingly taught her over the last year —coins in the parking meters, how to tell if a melon was ripe, gassing up at a gas station. He’d never once made her feel stupid. But she couldn’t help but feel like a royal idiot right now. Just some stupid girl who hadn’t even known how to swipe a debit card before he’d shown her.
“I thought…” she said weakly and couldn’t even fully finish the sentence. “Friends.”
“Yeah, well.” He threw his hands up in the air, looking like he wanted to finish that sentence but not knowing how. He raked his fingers through his hair and paced away from her. “I don’t have that luxury, Dawn.”
“Because you're my mentor? Because it’s your job?”
He stared sightlessly out the window over his sink. There was nothing to see but black sky. “Sure. Let’s just say that’s the reason. It’s easier that way.”
Her brow furrowed. That was pretty much the most confusing answer ever. “Um. What?”
“Don’t make me— Dawn, you and me as anything other than mentor and mentee, it’s just not going to happen.” His back was to her still. His wide shoulders filled out his T-shirt unapologetically, but there was something about his strong stance, some subtle, unnameable shift that made him look distinctly defeated.
Dismay and embarrassment curdled together in Dawn’s stomach. In a moment of cruelly timed clarity, Dawn suddenly understood everything. Why she had come over the other night to comfort him when she’d thought something was wrong. Why she’d instantly added him to her ‘people I can trust’ list. Why she’d come over here to tell him, in person, that she trusted him completely. Why her eyes always seemed to stall out on his shoulders and hair and eyes.
She was an idiot. How could she not have seen this before?
How many romance novels had she read at this point? Certainly enough to have clued herself in on this long ago.
She had a crush on this dude.
He finally turned around and her humiliation was complete, because though she’d only discovered this truth moments ago, she could clearly see in his eyes that he knew. There was something in his expression that told her so. Maybe it was mostly sadness, but there was something else there, something just soft enough for Dawn to interpret it as pity.
She had a crush on Quill and he pitied her for it. In fact, he was actively discouraging her from it right that very second.
“You’re right,” she heard herself say, and was utterly shocked by the lack of a tremble in her voice. “I— don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll leave.”
Though she hadn’t grown up practicing human manners, there was an elegance and reason to them that appealed to Dawn. It was this determination not to appear as a complete mess that had her stepping calmly to his dishwasher and sliding her glass inside.
“Thank you for the juice.” She cleared her throat. Maybe if she were more comfortable with her newly discovered feelings for him, she wouldn’t have sought a way to explain them away, but she was supremely uncomfortable, embarrassed and chagrined. “I haven’t been in the human world very long, as you know.” Of course he knew. He’d been there with her practically since day one. “And sometimes I still get things wrong. How to act. What’s… appropriate. I’m sorry for pushing.”
She strode to the door and yanked it open only to jump when suddenly he was standing behind her, one big hand pressing the door back closed. She felt his breath on the back of her neck, could feel the heat from his body even through his shirt. “Dawn,” he said in a gruff voice that sent something skittering up her spine.
Some instinct told her not to turn around. She’d faced down a bear before, in the wilderness, and she knew better than to make eye contact with a bear shifter in a moment like this.
“Yes?” she asked in a quiet voice, her hand still on the door knob.
She felt his breath again on the back of her neck. Tension, or something like it, gave her goosebumps.
“Never mind,” he said lowly, dropping his hand and stepping away from her. “Drive safe.”
This time when she opened the door, he didn’t stop her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I’ve never woken up next to a woman I slept with the night before,” Orion confessed in her ear as the dawn light cracked through his blinds. He was twined around her and impossibly heavy. Diana would not have previously classified herself as a woman who enjoyed being slowly crushed to death, but here they were. Apparently Orion’s heavy-ass body had made a believer out of her.
“I’m honored to be your first,” she said drily, turning her head to the side to catch his eye.
“What?” he asked, pulling back to better see her. “Why that tone of voice?”
“Orion, I do not want to talk about the other women you’ve slept with.”
He squinted at her. “Why?”
She pouted her lips at him. “Why do you think?”
“It’s not like they have anything to do with you. Not really.”
“Oh, come on. Would you want me to talk about the other men that I’ve slept with?”
His eyes lit up with curiosity. “Yes.” Then his eyes clouded with discomfort, his upper lip curling. “Wait. No.”
She laughed at his reaction, but he was still battling through it.
“I really want to know. But I don’t want to know. I’m confused,” he ultimately decided.
Now she was really laughing. “Welcome to modern dating. Where the only thing worse than curiosity over your person’s past love life is actually knowing about your person’s past love life. Trust me. The specifics are better left in the past. For both of our sanities.”
“Well, it’s different for me, because I don’t have a past love life. I have a past sex life. But no love.” He pouted. “You actually loved some of these guys.”
He said the word ‘guys’ in the way that most people would have said ‘fools’.
“You’d prefer that I slept with a bunch of men I didn’t care about at all?”
“Yes,” he said with a resolute nod of his head. Then his eyes did that clouding over thing again. “Wait. No. I wouldn’t prefer that.” He groaned and dragged a hand over his face. “Ugh. I’m confused again.”
Now Diana didn’t have a hope of controlling her laughter. She decided that the least she could do was put him out of his misery.
“Orion, when I’m here with you, just like this, are you wishing that I was one of the other women you’ve slept with?”
“God, no. No. Are you kidding me? I’ve waited to have you like this for a year.”
Even though he’d said things like that before, his words still zipped through Diana’s system like a shot of whiskey. His desire for her was enough to make her feel warm and loopy. But his devotion to her made her downright
drunk. Threw her equilibrium off. She tightened her grip around his neck with her arms, shifted her legs so that they more firmly gripped his waist. He, still caught up in the throes of the conversation, absently hitched her leg higher on his hip, trailed his wide-palmed hand up the outside of her thigh like touching her was as natural as breathing.
Speaking of breathing, she was going to have get back into the habit of breathing normally around this man. She took a long, soothing breath.
“Right. Exactly,” she replied. “None of the other people we’ve been with are here, are they? Isn’t it just you and me in this bed?”
He grunted.
She ran her fingers through his short hair. “And for the record,” she continued. “There’s lots of ways to love someone.”
“Hmm?”
“I mean, yes, technically I did love some of the men that I’ve slept with, but probably not in the way that you’re thinking.”
His eyes lit with interest and mischief and a little bit too much understanding for her comfort. “Is it… perhaps… because you’re starting to become familiar with a new kind of love?”
“Oh, god.” She rolled her eyes at the ceiling.
“Don’t be shy, Diana.” He rolled on top of her, his eyes practically sparkling now. “You’ve been with a real man and now all those other dudes seem like nothing in comparison. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You can admit it.”
“You can go ahead and blow it out your ass, Orion,” she said, working hard to keep her face straight and her laughter inside. The last thing she wanted was to encourage him in a moment like this. The fact that he was pretty much completely accurate in his teasing assessment of her love life was neither here nor there.
“Don’t be ashamed, Di. Go ahead, you can say it. You’ve never loved anyone the way you love me. I know it’s true.”
“You’re a butthead.” She took a knuckle and worked it between his ribs on one side, making him yelp and wiggle away from her.
“Yurp,” he gurgled. “So ticklish there!”
She took the opportunity and rolled out of bed. “I’m going to scrounge up some coffee before your head gets any bigger.”
“It’s okay my love.” He rolled to his knees and placed a large finger over her lips. “You don’t even need to say a word.”
She batted his hand away with a roll of her eyes and left his laughter behind as she slipped on one of his sweatshirts and a bunchy pair of his socks and headed downstairs.
It was barely dawn, so she wasn’t surprised to be the only one in the kitchen. She was surprised, however, once the coffee was percolating, to see the shadow of someone on the front porch, pacing back and forth. The shadow looked familiar to her. She crept forward, peering out the side window.
She frowned. She knew exactly who it was. And she wanted to know why the hell he was at a client’s house at the crack of dawn. And she really wanted to know why the hell he looked so agitated.
***
Quill jolted when Dawn’s front door swung open unexpectedly. He hadn’t slept in almost twenty four hours. His fight with Dawn last night had kept him from falling asleep. He didn’t think he’d ever forget the look on her face as she’d realized that she’d been a burden to him this past year.
At least, that’s what he’d thought she’d been thinking.
In just a few cruel words he’d reduced their budding friendship into nothing more than a professional obligation and he’d watched her practically crumble. He’d never felt worse about himself than he had in those moments and considering the amount of guilt he’d been grappling with recently, that was really saying something. He’d made her feel stupid about assuming they were friends. Hell, it probably counted as gaslighting her. He had, after all, made her feel like something that was obviously and completely true had all been in her own mind.
Even though he didn’t have to be here, even though everything would be easier if he just left it alone, let their friendship fracture and fall away, even though he was proud and driven and concerned almost exclusively with his own survival, he was somehow standing on her front porch, ready to eat crow. He was ready to ask her forgiveness. To tell her that he’d been wrong. That they were truly friends. That he’d been mad and tired and exasperated when he’d told her that she was nothing more than a mentee to him.
But now, here he was blinking at his boss who had sex hair and no pants on. And yet somehow she still looked imperious and in-control as she eyed him up and down.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him.
He could have asked her the same thing —though the answer was absurdly obvious— but Quill preferred his balls to remain on the outside of his body and she had a distinctly ball-busty look in her eye right at that second.
“Um.” He cast about for a reasonable excuse as to why he was here practically before the sun had even risen. Last night I lied about my feelings for a client in order to keep her at arm’s length so that when I trick her into getting abducted into a semi-legal government program for the rest of her life I don’t feel too guilty about it. Yeah… no. Somehow the truth seemed just a touch too heavy for this early in the morning. Not to mention the fact that Diana was the last person on this earth he would ever confess that particular sin to. She cared so freaking much about the welfare of shifters that she’d probably drag him down to the police station by his tongue. “I have a meeting with Dawn.”
She made a show of looking over her shoulder at the obviously empty room. “Does she know that?”
“I got here a little earlier than expected.”
“It’s barely five am.”
“Yeah.”
Diana crossed her arms over her chest, making the large sweatshirt she was wearing ride a few inches up her legs. Good god, Quill could barely believe it, but he was blushing. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d blushed. But seeing his boss in morning-after clothes was downright embarrassing him. He’d never felt more like a kid in the principal’s office than he did right at that very second.
“You make a habit of showing up at your mentee’s houses before the rooster even crows?”
Wordlessly, he shook his head. Maybe it was the lack of sleep or the lack of coffee or the fact that Dawn’s wounded expression was playing on a loop in his brain right then, but Quill couldn’t think of a single freaking thing to say to Diana right then. Instead, he just let his eyes drop to the wooden planks of the front porch like a guilty child.
Diana sighed and stepped forward, out onto the porch with him. She let the door close behind her. “Quill,” she said quietly. “Is there something going on that you should tell me about?”
He lifted his eyes to her. For the first time since he was a kid, since he’d been brought into the internment camps, Quill actually wanted to tell someone about the Director. As a matter of survival, he’d always known that he had to keep everything about the Director a complete and utter secret. He could not, under any circumstances reveal that he secretly worked for the Director. And he certainly couldn’t reveal anything about what the Director’s program actually did to the shifters he recruited. But right now, looking into Diana’s familiarly stern face, Quill found himself wanting to spill his guts. Of every person in his life, he truly believed that Diana might actually help him. She was a hard ass for sure, but everyone who knew her even a little bit knew exactly how gigantic her heart was. She’d bust her ass to help him. If he told her what was going on with him, there was nothing she wouldn’t do to make sure he was all right.
But, of course, the visual of the Director administering euthanasia to another shifter flashed through Quill’s head. The Director had no qualms about killing those who betrayed him. And he had the weapons at his disposal. It wasn’t overkill that Watt had fled the city so quickly. Quill wasn’t surprised to hear that he was living roughshod in the forest, off the grid and looking over his shoulder.
Quill had been eighteen the first time he’d seen the Director murder a shifter. And he’d seen it four
times since then. Quill was useful to the Director, sure, but only so long as he did his job and kept his mouth shut. He was under no illusions that the Director wouldn’t kill him dead if he caught so much as a whiff of disloyalty.
Quill snapped his mouth shut. There was no telling Diana. No reason to even dream about it. No one could help him. He’d signed on the dotted line when he was a teenager and there was nothing to be done for it. He was in for life. And his life would only be as long as the Director was willing to let it be. The facts were that the Director held the end of the leash around Quill’s neck. Up to now, he’d enjoyed a particularly long leash. Just so happened that Dawn was just out of reach, the bonds of his life choking him out when he tried to reach her.
“Something going on?” He played dumb. “No. Of course not.”
She stared at him, seeing way too much. “You’re sure there’s nothing going on between you and Dawn?”
Quill almost sagged in relief. Oh. She thought that whatever was going on had to do with him and Dawn. He gave himself half a second to wish that his biggest problem were a crush on a client. Wouldn’t that be a luxury. But no. His biggest problem was being murdered by an ex government official.
“No,” he answered honestly. “There’s nothing going on between us. I mean… it’s all above board.”
Diana shifted on her feet and let her crossed arms fall. “Look, I’m obviously the pot calling the kettle black, here.” She pointed to her sweatshirt, which was most likely Orion’s. “But if you’re involved with a client, it’s just better if you tell me.”
He said nothing.
She tried again. “The no fraternization rule maybe doesn’t have to be as strict as the staff handbook makes it out to be, all right? Phoenix and Ida have made me see that romance doesn’t necessarily mean that something sneaky is going on, all right? If you and Dawn are in love, you don’t have to hide it—“