Page 58 of An Unending Claim

His lips curved a little and he mouthed, “No promises.”

“Apparently, my habit of wiping my trail is going to bite me in the ass,” I admitted in a disgruntled tone. “Although the whole reason I did it was to hide from Xavier, so who the fuck knows what I should have done.”

“What are you talking about?” Jase asked, scratching his head, clearly confused.

Tanner gave him a thirty-second rundown of how he and Lisa had figured out who I was, starting with the disappearance of my hospital records.

Jase looked impressed when he turned back to me. “You’re quite the onion, Peyton Dyer,” he teased.

Apparently Nathan didn’t like Jase’s level of admiration, because he growled in warning and Jase immediately shut up.

“Neanderthal,” I muttered.

Nathan just shrugged, and I huffed. “You know, it’s kind of annoying the way you just admit to your flaws like that.”

Tanner and Jase both made slight choking noises, and when I glanced over they were both struggling to hold in laughter. I pointed at them and glared. “I hate every one of you.”

Nathan tangled his hand in my hair and yanked my head back—not hard enough to hurt—and winked at me. “Too bad you’re stuck with me.” Then he kissed me, and I melted like ice cream in the hot sun. My panther purred and the sound vibrated in my chest, making Nathan smile against my lips.

When he pulled back and released my hair, I sat there in a daze for a minute. Until Tanner broke the mood with a dramatic sigh.

“We don’t have time for your raging hormones, kids. Save it for make-out point and focus.”

Nathan pinned him with a scathing glare, but Tanner just grinned. Their relationship always fascinated me. Almost everyone would be shaking in their boots if Nathan leveled them with a stare like that. Jase was looking decidedly uncomfortable and he wasn’t even the one in Nathan’s crosshairs.

“Anyway,” I went on as my mind cleared of the sensual fog, “I think he’s going to try to spin this one of two ways. Either he’ll accuse me of lying about my injuries and being B’s inside person, the hacker he’s been working with—I’d even go so far as to predict that in his deranged version of events, I killed Hamna—”

“What the fuck?” Jase and Tanner both exclaimed at the same time, their shocked faces mirroring each other.

“I bet when Dana and Scott are finished, the reports will have just enough evidence to lead them to me.”

“No way,” Jase disagreed with a shake of his head.

“Bet you a hundred bucks,” I challenged.

He grinned. “You’re on.”

“Can we stay on topic, please?” Nathan sighed. “My mate needs to eat and I have phone calls to make.”

“What’s your other theory?” Tanner leaned back and stretched his legs out, crossing his ankles and setting them on the coffee table.

My face screwed up in disgust as I thought about the other option. “There’s the very slight possibility that he’ll try to get to me by playing the protective grandfather card.”

Nathan’s wolf flashed in his eyes and he growled angrily. I didn’t disagree.

When his silver eyes returned to mines, I arched an eyebrow at him. “What about you? Any ideas?”

“Not any that are solid enough to talk through yet. I need to think on them a little more.” He lifted his chin at his enforcers. “Tanner, I need you to focus on KBO again for a few days.”

“Of course,” Tanner replied. “Goes without saying.”

“Jase, I need you to relieve Asher at the north security booth. I already let him know you are coming.”

“Done,” Jase agreed as he stood. Then he and Tanner said their goodbyes to me and left.

“Are we crazy?” It was a rhetorical question, but Nathan answered anyway.

“No. When you look at all the evidence at once, it’s such a jumbled mess that it’s impossible to see the connections. But when you break it down and take it point by point, there are no coincidences that big.”

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