Page 86 of Ruthlessly Mated
“No, I don’t think so. I…”
“He was. I was saying you can’t go back to your home town and he said you don’t know me very well and I have to talk to you, but this is…” He looks at me and exhales roughly. “Stupid.”
“My favorite color is yellow,” I say, throwing him a bone. He is so out of his depth and clearly not in sight of his comfort zone.
“Oh. Good. What. Er. Not sure what favorite colors are for, but glad we know them.”
“Yes.”
“Is the sandwich good?”
We are being awkward as hell and it’s weird and it’s kind of cute, but I also don’t know what’s really going on here.
“Yes, thank you.”
“Good. You can’t go home because your town was razed to the ground, burned out completely. Everyone was slaughtered and their bones scattered by wild animals. So you have to stay here. Okay. Good talk.”
“What?” I stop eating. “What?”
“Yes. Tragic. Sorry. Vampires are evil. Very bad things happened. Okay. So. You’re good to stay here now?”
I try to understand what he’s saying. The words are easy, but the ramifications are deep and terrible. I truly thought that the town still remained; even my parents’ house would still be there, with another family living in it. I never thought Alexander would have erased the whole place. It is like my life as I remember it, the brief period of warmth and safety, is gone. Forever.
“That’s how you tell me…”
“I should have gotten Damon to do it, but he still doesn’t like talking, and Tailor refused, he said I was the one who knew and therefore I was the one who should tell you, and…”
Tailor
I’m listening in with Damon. Maybe we shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe we shouldn’t have placed bets on how badly this is probably going to go.
“So Tailor set us up,” Kita says. “Wow. He’s such a piece of shit. And to be honest, I don’t like the way he dresses. Please. Waistcoats? How pretentious.”
Damon is smirking now. I am wearing a waistcoat, of course.
Conroy looks confused. I don’t think he’s noticed anything I’ve worn since we met. He’s a fan of details when those details involve war, or money, but he would happily wear the same forest green sweater and denim pants and combat boots day in and day out from now until the end of time.
Before I can stop myself, I am striding outside. “Waistcoats are not pretentious, they are a stylistic choice, young lady, and given that I am one of the vanishingly small number of mates you have who does not want you whipped within an inch of your life, it might be time to think about speaking about me with a little more respect…”
I trail off as I see a very amused grin spreading over her pretty face.
“You knew I was listening.”
“Of course I did.” The smile disappears as she throws the remnants of the sandwich at me, and my very nice tweedwaistcoat is covered in mayonnaise and tomato and chicken, none of which improve the pattern at all. “You set him up.”
“I was trying to get the two of you to talk.”
“We don’t need to talk. None of us have ever talked. That’s what makes this work. If we start talking to each other and sharing feelings beyond fucking or fighting, who knows what we’d start telling each other.”
I really thought Conroy was the most emotionally guarded person in our little pack, but now I see very clearly that Kita is far worse than him. She doesn’t fight with him so much because they are different. She has friction with him because they are far too similar.
“We have to get to know one another. We have to share our joys and our sorrows.”
“We all need matching waistcoats,” she cuts in, narrowing her eyes at me.
She’s reacting worse to this than she would to being just straight up fucked without warning. We have trained her to accept sexual domination, but we haven’t taught her to share the deeper parts of herself.
“That’s enough,” Conroy interrupts her. “There’s no need to be rude to Tailor. He’s trying to help you. He’s trying to make us all healthier and better. And you have no right to speak to him that way.”
