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I don’t need the bonds to know Smith is thinking the same thing when he meets my eye over her head and begrudgingly moves aside.
“I’ll check the rolls,” he says, nuzzling her cheek again. “I’ll be right over there.”
When he finally moves away, Remi lowers her voice into a stage whisper and shoots me a mischievous look. “He thinks I don’t know where the oven is.”
My mouth twitches into an involuntary grin. “Does he realize you’ve been leaving him food in there for a month?”
She shrugs her bare shoulder, shifting the strap of her pink dress. It’s the same one she had on that first day—at Forever Matched—and I’m not much for clothes, but maybe we should hang this one article in a frame or something.
“I don’t know,” Remi replies, all put-on innocence. “Maybe his memory is going. You know, he is old.”
She yelps, and I realize Smith smacked her ass. A week ago, she might have shrunk down if he even touched her. Now, she flashes him an indignant scowl and he walks toward the fridge with a shit-eating smile on his face.
Which is when I see that?—
Smith is in jeans.
And he doesn’t have shoes on.
Goddamn.
Remi literally fucked his brains out.
It’s a shame he’s in such a good mood on the one night Damon and I have to ruin it.
We’ve only been back at the pack house for a few hours, but he’s clearly spinning out. After greeting our girl, instead of joining her and me in the nest, he said he had a headache and went back to his own room. Smith checked on him while Remi had me occupied and told me later that he found him listening to another of her audiobooks.
Now, as he comes slinking into the kitchen, I move to give him access to her.
“This smells amazing, pretty girl,” he rasps, sidling into her other side. He nuzzles his forehead into her shoulder, scent-marking her before dropping a kiss to her cheek. “Thank you for making us dinner.”
Remi giggles, oblivious to his somber expression. “I make you dinner all the time,” she points out, bending to examine the bubbles in her gravy. “But this is my first time making Smith’s favorite, so it might be a disaster.”
She’s too modest. The meal already looks incredible, and it’s still on the stove. Rice pilaf, green beans in some sort of sticky, buttered glaze, a cast-iron full of perfectly rendered pork chops, and a pot of pepper gravy to smother them.
Damon hides his face in her hair, inhaling deeply. “What can I do to help?”
She juts her chin at a stack of white dinnerware. Which is new, just like the table she gestures to next. “Can you guys set the table? Everything will be ready in five minutes.”
Smith comes back over as D and I jump to our task. He meets my eyes across the kitchen table, his look significant.
And I don’t need a pack bond to see what he’s thinking.
chapter
fifty-seven
Remi picked my flowers to go on the table.
I don’t know why that puts a big-ass lump in my throat. But it does.
I can barely eat, staring at the light pink and violet blossoms, half-listening while Cass describes each game of our road series in grunts.
He’s talked me down a dozen times, but I still feel like I’m about to fuck everything up.
Something I feel increasingly guilty about, after coming home and seeing how absolutely fucking perfect our pack house is now. The last time we had a road series, we came home to shrouded furniture, dust bunnies, and a general air of depression.
But now?
