“And he took care of them,” Tiny said quietly.
“Yes,” Mirabeau agreed quietly. “As well as my uncle.”
Tiny nodded and allowed several minutes to pass in silence, then asked, “What are we going to do about being life mates, Mirabeau La Roche?”
Chapter Ten
Mirabeau glanced at Tiny as panic and shock coursed through her. She hadn’t expected the blunt question, and responded harshly. “What do you mean? I never said we were life mates. What makes you think—”
“It was obvious you couldn’t read me in my room when you tried,” Tiny interrupted quietly, then added, “You’re eating too, which is another sign. And I’m pretty darned sure I was enjoying some of that shared pleasure in my bed this morning or last night or whatever it was.”
“You two did it last night?” Stephanie squawked.
Mirabeau turned sharply to see the girl still wore her earplugs. Her confusion as to how she could have heard their conversation must have shown because Stephanie rolled her eyes.
“I don’t need my ears to hear your thoughts,” she said overloudly thanks to the movie sound track playing in her ears.
“Yes, but we were speaking what you heard,” Tiny muttered.
“And you’re thinking as you speak,” she pointed out dryly, then shook her head. “Honestly, this life-mate business makes complete idiots out of adults. I mean, Dani’s a doctor, for God’s sake, and she’s been pretty brainless since meeting Decker. Now you two.” She shook her head again and turned her concentration to changing movies as she muttered, “Never gonna let myself get into that state. No sir.”
Mirabeau flopped back in her seat with a sigh. Honestly, teenagers were a pain. She was amazed her parents had been willing to have more than one, let alone not take very long breaks between them…like maybe a millennium or something. Certainly her time so far in this kid’s company was making her think a person had to be insane to want children. Sure, they were all cute and cuddly when they were someone else’s baby, but that was when you could send them home. Spend twenty-four hours with them, and there were messy diapers, burping up on you, and the endless crying…then they grew up into smart-ass teenagers.
“I don’t know who you think you’re fooling, Mirabeau,” Stephanie said with amusement. “I can read your mind, remember. I know you like me.”
Mirabeau grimaced but didn’t argue the point. Despite all the smart-ass comments, she did like the kid. Stephanie reminded her of herself when she was young. She’d bite her tongue off before saying that out loud though, she realized, and grimaced again as Stephanie began to chuckle in the backseat, positive she’d heard it anyway.
“So?” Tiny prompted after a moment.
It figured he wasn’t going to let the subject go, Mirabeau thought unhappily. The problem was she didn’t know what they were going to do about it. In truth, she knew that what Stephanie had said last night was right. While losing her parents and brothers had hurt horribly, she would never have dreamed of missing out on the years she’d had with them to save herself that loss. So, did she really want to walk away from what she could have with Tiny just to be sure she never suffered the pain of possibly losing him? Something that may never happen, she reminded herself. After all, she could die first, or they might die together.
However, while she thought she might be willing to go forward with it and be his life mate, there was more than just herself to consider here. Tiny too had a choice to make, and he was the one who still had family to lose. Not that he would have to give them up at once, but eventually, he would have to break away from them to prevent their noticing that he wasn’t aging.
“What do you want to do about it?” she asked finally, rather than answer.
“I really don’t know, Mirabeau,” Tiny admitted with a wry smile. “A little more than twenty-four hours ago I stood in that church in New York and told Marguerite that I had a family, one I wasn’t willing to lose even for the bliss of a life mate, but now…” He shook his head, and said with bewilderment, “They seem so far away when I’m with you. I love them, but…” He turned to peer at her briefly, then returned his gaze to the road, and said, “Twenty-four hours ago, to me you were just the gal with the black-and-pink hair. How could you become so important so quickly?”
Mirabeau had no idea. She had no idea how this life-mate business worked, just that it did, that she was showing all the symptoms of it, and that the longer she spent with him, the more she wanted to take that risk.