Page 19 of Jack of All Trades

“I have no idea. I’ve never been intimate with a shifter.”

“I have been with plenty, but they weren’t shifted while we were doing it,” Jack said nonchalantly.

Feeling suddenly jealous and possessive, he tried to move past the comment and found his anger kept surging.

Jack must have noticed. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said a little too quickly, snapping the words like he was a shark after prey.

“Are you…jealous?”

More anger made his foot a little heavy on the accelerator. “Jealous? Don’t be absurd.”

Jack leaned over as far as the seatbelt would allow and commented, “Uh, you are driving a hundred and twenty miles an hour right now.”

He forced himself to be calm after backing his foot off the peddle. “We don’t even know each other, and we’re supposed to be mates, and what? Have children? I don’t even like children.”

“Hey, I am not exactly dying to become a dad. As far as being mated? It’s gonna fuck with my job a little.”

Again, he had to bring up the fact he was a whore. How the hell would Maltin Graves deal with the fact his mate is a whore? “Can we, maybe, stop talking about that?”

“What?” Clenching his jaw, he didn’t say a word, but already, Jack read him well. “Really? Are you embarrassed of me?”

Maltin had never rolled his eyes in his life until that moment. “No! Who would I be embarrassed in front of? I don’t have friends, and I barely have colleagues.”

“Then what?”

Maltin pulled off on their exit and slowed to a stop before turning right and starting for home. “How would you like knowing I was with a lot of men?”

“Being you’re…I don’t know, a thousand years old, I’d be pretty stupid to think you weren’t with a lot of men.”

“I’m nowhere near a thousand years old! Jesus, Jack!”

The city came into view a few minutes later, and he let out a pent-up breath, his mind easing the moment he knew he was nearly home. “Jack…I’m just…this is a lot. For you as well, I’m sure.”

“Yes, you’re right. Maybe we just don’t talk about men we’ve been with for a while. Even though I’m a little curious about how sex has changed.”

Maltin heard that and suddenly burst out laughing. Jack laughed with him, and they were much calmer for the rest of the trip to the warehouse.

When they got into the loft, his phone rang, and it was the private investigator. “Already?”

Jack was bouncing nervously. “Answer it!”

Maltin fully intended to, but it was like pulling a tooth for him. Finally, on the sixth ring, he pressed the green spot and then the speaker so they could both hear as they sat on stools at the kitchen bar.

He placed the phone between them and said, “Hello, Mr. Peterson.”

“Call me Dennis, please. Well, gentlemen, I have the first answer for you. Jack was recorded as having been born at the hospital in Valleywood. Your father was there on business, and he brought your mother along. You came two weeks early.”

“I’ve heard the story. So…they are my parents?”

“It seems so, but I’m looking into something else.”

Maltin looked at Jack, whose brow creased in worry, and asked Dennis, “Is it something he should worry about?”

“I’m not sure if it’s anything at all. Like I said, I’d like to look into it before I say too much. I don’t want to put worry on you that is unfounded.”

Jack’s head moved side to side slowly. “I will worry anyway. Can you tell me something?”

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