Page 81 of The Thief

“No wonder the skunks like you,” Lucian muttered.

Virgil snarled at him.

Bear tossed a pillow. “Will you two shut the hell up? Mercy’s trying to sleep.”

“My sense of smell is a hell of a lot keener than yours,” Lucian argued. “It smells like I crawled up inside him.”

Virgil raised his head and howled.

Both Bear and Lucian sat up. “Shhh!”

Releasing a final snort, Virgil collapsed between us. When he gave a reluctant groan that said he was done, everyone settled back down.

“Good thing you didn’t put the candle over here,” Lucian grumbled against my legs. “The bed might have gone up in flames from the gas.”

Bear rolled onto his side. “Two of us don’t belong in this bed.”

That was it. I erupted with laughter. When a tongue licked my chin, I laughed so hard that it knocked Lucian off the bed.

Chapter 14

Bear had somehow fallen asleep next to Mercy even with Lucian and Virgil crowding the bed. A pack offered protection in dark times, and Mercy was feeling like a kite with a broken string.

Damn. He couldn’t get over it. When she admitted to hiring a Vampire to scrub her memories, you could have knocked him over with a feather. Bear had known people to hire Vampires to erase traumatic moments they wanted to forget. But seventy years? In all fairness, there was no way to erase Argento and her crimes without taking it all. It gutted him to think of the unimaginable guilt she carried around.

Bear knew something about that.

It was predawn, and he headed into the kitchen to prepare breakfast. Making biscuits from scratch wasn’t hard, but he always made extra since the pack liked eating them as midmorning snacks. After finishing the last batch and cutting a cantaloupe, he washed his hands and threw his shirt into the laundry pile.

Being shirtless in the daytime was a conscious decision. He could have put on something from the laundry room, but he didn’t. Mercy’s words rang in his head, and he realized that he, too, needed to let go of the past.

Bear grabbed a couple of buttered biscuits and headed into the living room. Nearing an accent table, he switched on a lamp that Mercy and Joy had purchased during their shopping excursion. After plopping down on Melody’s sofa, he set the plate of biscuits next to him. The silence this time of the morning put him at ease. Even Lucian was usually asleep by now.

Virgil shuffled in from the hallway, wearing nothing but skimpy black underwear and a red silk robe. He yawned wide as he approached the hearth. “Last night was a trip. I fell asleep and let my wolf take over after an hour. Did I miss anything good?”

“Just Lucian falling off the bed.”

Virgil turned to sit on the raised hearth and froze when he looked up at Bear. “Holy cannoli! What the hell is that?”

Bear glanced down at his hairy chest, those old feelings from his former packmates flooding back.

Virgil marched over, hands on his hips. “Is this what you do every morning before the pack wakes up? Tiptoe around and make biscuits without sharing? Give.” He took one of the fluffy biscuits and smelled it. “You made oatmeal two days in a row, but I’m a biscuit man.”

“There’s more in the warming oven,” Bear informed him, still waiting for Virgil to slip in a joke.

Virgil sat on the hearth and gobbled up the biscuit like a ravenous animal. “You shouldn’t walk around like that.”

Bear spread his arms across the back of the pink sofa. “Like what?” he said between clenched teeth.

Virgil ate the last crumb and then dusted off his hands on his kimono, which had dragons on it. “Archer strutting around with his sculpted abs is bad enough. Now I have to compete with Mr. Universe. I’m not saying I don’t deliver the goods, but between you and Tak, I’m starting to feel like the pack runt.”

Bear scoffed. “I’m six-five, and you’re only three inches shorter. I wouldn’t call that a runt.”

“I don’t mean height.” Virgil lay across the hearth, one foot on the floor. “I’d give my left kidney for a little more of the butch gene, but alas, my absentee father blessed me with this,” he said, waving his hand down his bare chest. An average-to-lean chest that lacked hair except for a trail below the navel. “At least I got my mother’s name.”

“Do you know who your father is?”

“Do I care?” Virgil sat up. “Are you going to eat your biscuit or not?”

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