Page 44 of The Piece You Stole

DARIEL

Leandro takes his time surveying us, hunger stirring in the depth of his green eyes. “So, how does this sharing work, then? You take turns with her, or you just fall into bed together and see what happens?”

You’re an idiot for bringing him here, Dariel. Why didn’t you choke the information from him and leave him behind?

But I know. Saige. Something warned me that I needed to get back to the city. Now.

He does nothing to lower his tone, and because he doesn’t, it cuts clean through the barely audible tire squeals and yelling from a big screen TV hanging on the far wall. It’s one of those ‘live’ cop car chases with an emphasis on the drama so I have my doubts about the live part. Real or fake, it has the chef in grease-stained chef whites entranced as he peers out from the kitchen hatch. The volume is on low so, fortunately, we’re saved from the full effect of a guy screaming his outrage about the sheer recklessness of such a dangerous pursuit through the city streets.

The waitress, a tiny blonde thing, nearly gives herself whiplash, jerking her head this way. Her half-hearted attempt to wipe a smear of ketchup from the plasticky table is forgotten, as from feet away, the interest stirring in her brown eyes is impossible to miss.

She’s not the only one who glances toward us in this late-night breakfast place, a fifteen-minute drive from the Cerberus. A young couple, stinking of sweat and booze, blinks alcohol-glazed eyes in our direction before they turn back to the wide-screen TV. At nearly three in the morning on a Friday night, it doesn’t make any sense to me what they’re doing here when they’re five minutes away from falling asleep in their chicken and waffles.

Leandro leans toward me, not because he wants to tell me something and have no one overhear, no, the bastard raises his voice as he continues. “Because, I have to tell you, brother, the first feels more comfortable. But the second?” He blinks, and his wolf peers out at me. “The second calls to the animal inside me.”

Shut the fuck up.

Movement out of the corner of my eye makes me lift my gaze that way.

The waitress snatches up a handful of menus we don’t need and makes a beeline toward us, one button undone from the top of her pale pink diner dress, and if I’m not mistaken, a fresh slick of frosty pink lipstick coating her lips. When she had the time to do that, and where she was hiding the lipstick in her painted-on dress, is a mystery.

She’s not ugly. But nothing about her appeals to me. Everything about her is too…something. Too loud. Too…desperate for my attention. I want someone who isn’t working to get me to notice them. Someone who pulls at my attention without having to say a word. Someone like…

No.

I return my attention to the matter at hand: Get rid of the waitress with the hungry stare.

Whatever reason you’ve decided to play hero to Saige is a later problem.

I give the waitress a hard stare. The heady, sweet scent of feminine arousal fills my nose, and she walks with a little more sway in her hips. Any older and she’d have thrown her back out with the way she’s flinging herself about.

Some women like a hard stare. They like to be ordered to do things or told what to do. Others like the attention of more than one man at once. Unfortunately for us, this woman whose gaze hungrily bounces between me, Kade, Leandro, and Aden, looks like she likes all three.

I prepare for her arrival with my patience already stretched razor thin.

Kade’s refusal to put on the t-shirt he carried with him had the tiny blonde waitress practically elbowing another in the face to be the one to escort us to our seats. Now, as I observe her trotting eagerly toward our booth, it isn’t difficult to imagine her finding some way to fall into Kade’s lap when she gets here.

What the fuck Kade is playing at?

So much for his insistence that Saige was the one who’d complete us. Yet here he is, back to flirting with a waitress he must know is only waiting for him to invite her to the back and bend her over a box in the storage room. It’s not the first time it’s happened, but I’d thought, from Kade’s determination to go after Saige, that it would be the last.

Turning from the waitress, I pierce Leandro with a stare. “We’re here to get him sober.” I nod toward Aden, who is on his second black coffee.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t take the opportunity to get to know each other,” Leandro murmurs with an innocent smile I don’t trust for a second.

“We’re not on a date.” I drag Kade’s untouched coffee cup to Aden’s side of the table. “So shut it.”

A six-hour car ride with an older brother who barely stopped to breathe as he droned on and on meant it was a miracle I hadn’t leaned over, flung open his door, and kicked him out. If, between his meaningless waffle, there hadn’t been the occasional useful nuggets of information, things we can use to free Saige, I’d have done it and not looked back.

I should’ve let Kade kill him at the bar. Saved myself from this headache.

“Uh, I think I’m good,” Aden says, pointing at his half-full coffee cup.

I take in his still bleary red eyes and shake my head. “You’re not even close to being good.Drink. We need you with a clear head.”

Because if Leandro was right about Rylan Treveiler, it’s going to take every one of us to get Saige away from a man I wouldn’t trust with a goldfish, let alone a living, breathing person.

“It’s just so fascinating.” Leandro sits back in his seat, his face twisted in something that approximates fascination. I see it for the deception it is. He’s getting to me, and he knows it. Which means he’s going to drag this out until I’m ready to throttle him. “How can you share a bed, and these men don’t even know you have a brother? Or a mate?”

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