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Avoiding eye contact was a surefire way to let me know he was uncomfortable.
“Don’t tell the twins what you saw in my backpack last night,” he said quietly. “I don’t want them to laugh.”
Damn, so we were acknowledging the pastel-blue, pink-eared elephant in the room. But not without him putting another dent in my ticker. God-fucking-dammit, I felt for him. Because I knew exactly what would happen if someone laughed at him for having a stuffed animal. Danny would put that person in the hospital and hide his own hurt.
“I would never do that to you, kid. Your secret is safe with me.” I scratched my neck absently and squinted downward, warring with myself, warring with my fucking brother. His voice in my head. Was Danny a Little? Was he even remotely active in kink? Was it something new to him? Should I offer an olive branch to make him comfortable? In theory, I could let him know I understood him. That I was intimately familiar with the fetish and—
“Thanks. And now we’ll never talk about it again. Deal?”
Uh…
“I think it’s sweet.” Sorry, I couldn’t help it. I wasn’t ready to put the topic to rest.
Danny got irritated. “I said I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“And I didn’t agree to your terms.” I shrugged. “For the record, it’s no laughing matter to me—”
“I already know that.” He cut me off abruptly and returned to the fire to check on the bacon. “I met your brother, remember?”
True. More than that, he’d met my brother at Clara Hill. Even if Danny hadn’t been exposed to anything nefarious, the implications were clear as soon as you arrived. It was a grand estate from the Gilded Age, no dungeons on the ground floor or anything, but it was highly likely he’d seen something else. BDSM equipment being carried through, a consensual slave walking by, someone kneeling for another, and so on.
Hm. And if you weren’t involved in BDSM yourself, that would look very strange.
Danny had to be at least somewhat familiar with kink.
“What else do you know, Danny?” It was time to get it all out there. I’d agreed to be his mentor and instructor. The least he could do was practice some honesty. “You wrote all those notes about me. You met Arden. You spoke to Kane and God knows who else.”
He shook the skillet with unnecessary force and shuffled around the bacon with his knife. “Your family history is public once you know your dad’s last name, which I obviously got from Arden. He didn’t change his, did he?”
I was with him so far; he didn’t have to get snippy with me. It was the rest I wanted to know.
“I overheard you once, okay?” he said impatiently. His temper was getting the best of him, as usual. His defense mechanism. “I was gonna make a call in the courtyard, and you were there, talking to…whatever, I guess some submissive or someone who had the hots for you.”
I frowned and stiffened.
“You told him to stop calling you Sir because you’re not a Dom or whatever,” he muttered. “That’s it, I swear. Then I met Arden and figured you’re not a stranger to kink but that it’s not for you.”
I remembered that call now. Fucking hell. Someone who had the “hots” for me, yeah, sure, and someone who couldn’t take no for an answer. I’d never played with Patrick. He’d dated a friend of mine—and not very faithfully. But Danny was wrong. I hadn’t told Patrick I wasn’t a Dom. I’d said I wasn’t his Dom. Then I’d hung up on him, pissed I’d called him back in the first place. Not that I’d had much of a choice. He’d been leaving messages for me through Robin, and she’d gotten fed up.
I groaned internally, recalling what Arden had said. That Danny must’ve misunderstood something.
I sighed and ran a hand over my head.
“Can we let this go now?” Danny returned to the counter with the skillet. I just watched him. He pulled four plates from the cabinet. Two slices of bread on each, two eggs, and a few thick strips of bacon.
Last but not least, four tin mugs filled with coffee.
I dodged his question. “Did you see the twins on your way back?”
He nodded curtly. “They’d just reached the dirt road when I pulled up.”
“Am I gonna be impressed by their appearance?”
“Probably, but they must’ve committed a minor felony to find a ball cap from the University of Michigan in the middle of the night.”
I let out a chuckle. Excellent. Those felonies were all right.
So they were in “Venezuela” as students. Good route for two boys their age.
