What’s New Pussycat(9)

As she scratched her back on Derrick’s sheets, she pondered this predicament, weighing the pros and cons.

For the moment, she was safe and free from captivity. It didn’t appear as though Derrick was going to harm her, and while he was less than thrilled about her being here, he wasn’t booting her out in the cold either.

Check one in the column of things to be thankful for.

However, she had a life she wanted to go back to—to resume, if that was still possible. A life she often wondered if anyone even knew she’d left. In her effort to keep from engaging in messy entanglements, she’d also done a great job of isolating herself.

Speaking of messy entanglements—this certainly would qualify.

This death-sex thing… She’d heard a lot of batshit crazy in her time, but death-sex?

Check one for the get-me-the-hell-out-of-here column.

So now what, Martine? Where to go from here?

A nap. That’s where she was going from here. A nice, long, rejuvenating nap.

Stretching out, she settled into the patch of buttery sun sprawling across the bed and snuggled down against Derrick’s pillow with a sigh, letting the silence seep into her bones.

Okay, so there was something to be said for the peace of the country. No one was blaring an episode of Cops from the apartment next door and the guy across the hall wasn’t practicing his squeaky rendition of Oklahoma on his trombone.

All other things aside, she could get used to the quiet.

* * *

Derrick tried to sneak into his mother’s house in order to avoid the inevitable falsely cheerful spin she’d attempt to put on finding his life mate. He didn’t want to talk about love and happily-ever-after when it was forced on him.

This wasn’t like JC and Max and their love story. This wasn’t going to be some great romance where love conquered all. It was going to be him, forced to do something he didn’t want to do, forcing someone else into a situation that was unfair at best.

This was him doing something he didn’t believe in.

He especially didn’t want to talk about it with his mother, who still burned a candle for his father, a man who’d up and left them when they’d needed him the most, leaving Max and Derrick to handle everything.

Max didn’t believe it—he still held hope someday their father would walk right back in the door he’d walked out of. But Derrick called bullshit.

Brock Adams had left. End of.

“There’s my boy!” Faith Adams squealed just as he was sneaking out of the pantry with some extra cans of tuna for his cat.

His. Cat. Jesus.

Faith clapped her hands, her eyes bright, her smile wide. Too wide. Fake wide, like when he was a kid and he was going to have to take medicine she knew would taste like donkey’s ass, yet still tried to convince him was grape-flavored. “So?”

Rather than answer, Derrick gave her a hug, long and hard. “How’s it going, Mom?”

She leaned back in his arms, her pretty eyes suspicious. “I’d ask the same of you, son.”

He held up one can of tuna, giving her a sheepish grin like he used to when he was stealing cookies as a kid. “Just borrowing some supplies until I can get to the store.”

Now her eyes turned playful. “For?”

“Mom…” he warned, refusing to be goaded into the life-mate talks.

“Your cat!” she said on a chuckle, slapping him on the arm. “You, my fine boy, have a cat for a life mate. Wanna talk about how you’re feeling about that?”

No. He absolutely wanted to avoid how he was feeling. “Not a lot.”

Faith’s sigh was ragged and full of motherly exasperation. “Derrick, when will you learn that clamming up isn’t the way to work things out? Surely you have feelings about this you need to talk about?”

He held his tongue for a moment, pausing to give thought to how he’d respond. “You heard she hasn’t shifted, right?”

Faith nodded, her eyes grave. “I did.”

“Okay, so in all fairness, how should I feel about this? We can’t have a conversation yet. So what do you want me to say?”

Faith avoided his eyes. “That’s fair. But when she does shift, and I’m sure she will, then what? Are you going to give this half a chance or are you going to poo-poo all things romantic?”

“I don’t know about you, Mom, but being forced to mate with someone you don’t even know isn’t exactly romantic,c nor does it inspire romance.”

“Well, it did for Max and JC.”

“And I’m happy for them—for Max. Really happy. But JC’s human. That’s just a bit less like the antichrist to a werewolf. In our truest form, we’re canines. Canine as in we’re known for eating cats. We’re supposed to chase them, not mate with them.”