Page 45 of Prayers for the Prickly

“You did do that, didn’t you?” he muttered, looking thoughtful.

“Yeah. Not my finest moment. I’ll do better.”

“I know,” he said. “You already are. You recognized your mistake before I had to point it out to you. Hell, you recognized that you’d made a mistake before I caught on that you’d done it. I’d say that’s a hell of a lot better, wouldn’t you?”

“I love the way you think.”

We fell silent for several minutes, enjoying the variety of seafood that still remained in the containers. When I’d looked up at all the choices and requested an Old Time Captain’s Feast for three, since I was willing to bet my mate had skipped at least one meal today, I’d expected to be underwhelmed by the portions they included.

No fuckin’ way had been my first thought when I’d seen the mountain of containers waiting on the counter for me. My second had been to wish I’d brought a car. Fortunately, my cousin Destiny’s mate had the same idea about what she wanted for supper, so I waited with her until her food was ready and we carried everything out together. It still took us three trips to collect everything we ordered, and she’d been giggling by the third time we’d slunk past a line of the same people.

She told me on the ride back that after seeing us, they probably assumed that we were the reason the kitchen was backed up. She grumbled out comedic commentary describing the whispered conversations that had probably been going on as we’d been running in and out.

“I mean, I’m sure we contributed in some degree, especially ordering the same thing back to back,” I remarked as we left the place in the rearview.

“Oh my gosh, we’re those people,” she said in her snottiest tone, right before we cracked up for half a block.

“Okay, why are you a lot more fun to hang out with now than a year ago when we tried to go to Bali?” she asked a few blocks from my place.

“I dunno,” I said, shrugging and turning to look at the houses go past. “Maybe it’s because we found our mates and we aren’t competing to be the first to introduce ourselves to the next new person we met?”

That’s how we’d called dibs on the guys, since she was bi. Whoever introduced themselves first got a chance to see if they were compatible before the other person got a shot. Sometimes it meant missed opportunities, and left us snapping at one another, so yeah, maybe it was easier to be around one another now that we weren’t searching for forever in the same dating pool.

“There may be some truth to that,” she replied. “Remember the volleyball player from Australia, with the strawberry hair and killer serve?”

“Zane,” I replied, his image immediately popping into my head. “Who could forget us playing two on one against him and getting destroyed because he’d declared that whichever of us scored the most points would be the one to take him out that night.”

“I’ve got a scar from that!”

“Just one? I’ve got three of them! From when you sank your claws into my ankle and yanked my leg out from under me.”

“You tripped.”

“Tripped implies that there was something in the sand to cause it to happen. The only thing in the sand was your hand right before you grabbed me.”

“Like you said, there was something in the sand, my hand, therefore, tripped.”

Considering that her logic was as sound as mine and we’d both gotten it from our grandfather, I considered the matter dropped and thanked her when she dropped me off.

“Holy shit, why are the garlic rolls all the way over there?” August asked, startling me. “Why am I just seeing garlic rolls when we’re almost finished eating?”

“Because I forgot about them,” I said, shrugging sheepishly.

“Uh huh, you forgot about them until you went to reach for one. How many of them have you eaten, anyway?”

My eyebrows shot up as I set the roll I’d taken on my plate so I could peer inside the container before passing it over. “There are two left.”

“That so doesn’t answer the question.”

“I didn’t look to see how many were in there at the start,” I admitted before taking a big bite out of the one I’d snagged. “They’re too tasty to think about, I just eat them.”

“No shit,” he said, happily accepting the remaining rolls while I nibbled what was left of mine. “Okay, so, you asked about how the chocolate played in.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re still trying to find proof that it’s tied together, but it’s too much of a coincidence that it happened the day she issued that threat.”

“Okay, what exactly did happen?” I asked.

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