“We’re called sleuths, and no. We don’t have a leader, per se. We don’t band together in quite the way I’ve heard your kind does.” After defining their paranormal roles, Teddy had a much clearer picture of what she was dealing with.
She’d never met a vampire or a werewolf or an ex-paranormal anything, but she’d heard rumors about their kind, understood the basic inner workings of their mating rituals.
“So what happens if you won’t mate with your intended—or you can’t get your intended to mate with you? Do they turn you into a rug?” She laughed at her own joke then, the tinkle of it grating on Teddy’s frayed nerves. Somehow, she had to get away from these women and call her brothers, pronto.
Clarity was desperately needed. Cormac was a bad guy, but if what she’d felt when he’d looked into her eyes was true—if the legend meant anything at all—he was her bad guy.
But he’s a criminal, Teddy…
Of course he is. Why would finding her honest-to-God life mate be any easier than anything else in her life when it came to relationships? Remember the last one and how that turned out?
Stirring her tea, Teddy forced a laugh. “It’s frowned upon, but not necessarily enforced. Plenty of bears mate with bears who aren’t necessarily considered their traditional life mates. But the rule of thumb is probably much like yours. You know the score where that’s concerned. Procreate for the good of the group, yadda, yadda, yadda.”
Marty leaned forward, pressing her chin into her fist, her eyes glittering. “So how did you know your life mate was here? Somewhere so secluded, even remote? Denver’s pretty far away. Was it intuition? A dream? Tea leaves?”
Teddy looked past Marty to Nina’s back, where she focused her gaze as she lied once more. “Instinct, I guess.” Not a total lie. Her instincts had helped her locate Cormac, she just didn’t know at the time he was her life mate.
“You’re awfully vague, aren’t you?” Marty said in the most pleasant of ways, yet there was the underlying subtext of her suspicion in every word.
She’d purposely kept her answers vague. The less she lied, the less she had to recall. “It’s a little personal, I suppose.”
Nina swiveled around on her chair and made a face, licking her thumb clean of the remaining salt from her potato chips. “Vague means get off the broad’s back and mind your own damn beeswax, Marty. Jesus and the moose lodge. It’s not your job to figure out the direction her hormones are pointed or anything else that has to do with her. That’s not why we’re here.”
Score one for the ex-vampire Nina. She was proving useful.
But Marty waved her off in a dismissive flick of her hand. “It’s just girl talk, Nina. Something you’d know nothing about.”
The undercurrent of anger in Marty’s words gave Teddy pause. Why was she so angry with Nina and why did she care? But it gave her the opportunity to divert the conversation. “So why are you all here?”
Marty’s pink-glossed lips instantly thinned, though she quickly slapped a phony smile on and a wide-eyed expression of innocence graced her face. “Just visiting.”
Now Teddy was suspicious. Tucking her hair behind her ears, she stuck her toe in the deep end of the pool. “It didn’t sound like Cormac knew you…”
“He’s a friend of a friend.”
Nina’s chair scraped abruptly against the floor. “Look, Teddy, here’s the score. We don’t know you and you don’t know us. It’s none of your damn business how we know the big dude or why we’re here. So let’s quit pussyfootin’ around until we figure this out and someone tells us we have to be one big happy paranormal family, okay?”
Marty groaned, dropping her head into her hands. “Nina. Don’t be so rude.”
“Aw, fuck you and your rude. I’m still just as sick and tired of pretense as I ever was. Even more tired of the cat-and-mouse bullshit we play every time we run into someone with secrets. And you got secrets, Theodora. I damn well know you do. I’m just not that interested in ’em. So if you don’t want to tell us your secrets, we’re not gonna ask about ’em. But that means you can’t ask about ours either. Cormac’s with us and he’s not goin’ anywhere without us from now until we say other-fucking-wise. So deal with your own shit and we’ll deal with ours. Capisce?”
That had gone south fast. And she sure as shit did have secrets. Still, the hell she was laying all her cards on the table before she knew if these women were bad guys, too.
“So the pajama party is off?” she joked, knowing full well it would get under Nina’s skin.
“Yep. And so is braiding your hair and doing your fucking nails. Got it?”
Rising from her chair, Teddy held her head high and reached for her vest. “Loud and clear. Now, if you ladies don’t mind, I have to make a phone call. I have family waiting to hear from me and I can’t seem to get a signal inside the cabin. Is that all right, or do you want to babysit me outside, too?”
“Fuck that. It’s a million below out there in the tundra,” Nina groused, rubbing her long arms with her hands.