“Breeds can be very difficult and very stubborn,” Cassie said softly. “But he is a Breed, recessed or not. I don’t get the sense that Cullen loved his wife as deeply as you suspect, though. Not to say he didn’t love her, just not with the depth that a Breed can experience.”
Chelsea shrugged at that. Abandoning the pictures, she propped her hip against the digital table and crossed her arms beneath her breasts as she glanced between Cassie’s and Ashley’s somber expressions.
“Lauren was his first relationship after he was placed within the protection of the Breed Underground. They married six months after his arrival. It was just a few months later that she told him she had a particularly virulent form of cancer. She died just before their second anniversary.”
“How did he meet her?” Ashley asked, the compassion in her tone thickening her accent.
“She was Ray Martinez’s assistant.” Chelsea grimaced. Her uncle Ray had betrayed her entire family for most of his life, especially his daughter Claire, or Cat as everyone called her.
“She was your cousin as well, was she not?” Ashley asked.
Chelsea nodded. “Fourth cousin, actually. Though we weren’t very close.”
Lauren’s father had come from a very well-to-do family until that family had gone bankrupt and her parents had moved into her grandparents’ home. Even then, her father, an attorney, had done quite well for himself, and Lauren had always felt as though she were better than the rest of the family.
Her parents had left after Lauren’s death and, as far as Chelsea knew, didn’t even visit.
“A man as strong as Cullen would feel he had failed her,” Cassie stated cryptically. “And the tabloid stories may be far-fetched, but the bonding between Breeds and their mates is well-known. Cullen didn’t have that bond with his wife, I don’t believe.”
Lauren wasn’t one for bonds, though, Chelsea remembered.
“Before she died Lauren blamed everything and everyone in those last months,” she remembered. “Especially Cullen. Just before she died she accused him of not loving her enough. That his love could have saved her. Dad was there when she said it. He was shocked by her cruelty.”
Terran Martinez had been so shocked by Lauren’s accusations that he hadn’t even attended her funeral.
“She sounds much like Claire’s father, Ray,” Ashley pointed out.
“They were very close.” Chelsea shrugged, staring down at the table once again for long moments. “Dad once commented that they were very much alike. But Cullen loved her. He was devastated when she died.”
“No wonder,” Cassie sighed heavily. “Such guilt to put on any husband, especially a Breed.”
The looks Chelsea caught Ashley and Cassie exchanging brought a frown to her face, but she refused to ask about it.
“But now all his Breed instincts are going crazy because you were attacked,” Ashley pointed out. “That Breed is a goner for you, my friend.” She gave a quick little flip of her hand for emphasis. “Breed males are so weird with it too. You will see.”
No, she wouldn’t, Chelsea knew, though she kept that to herself. Cullen had loved Lauren so deeply that no other woman would ever compare. Especially not her.
She wasn’t super girly, she rarely wore makeup and she had no idea how to simper and charm. She didn’t want to keep home and hearth while he fought the battles alone. She wanted to fight at his side, at least for a while. She wanted to be his partner, not his secretary.
She would have settled for working Command, overseeing each operation with him. She was good at communications and logistics, but he wanted her filing and answering his phones instead. And she had hated every moment of it. Hated it so much that she’d begun resenting him for it. That was when she’d known it was time to leave.
“Draeger and Tobias’s report of the night Cullen followed you to the clubs included the information that they could smell his anger coming from him in waves,” Cassie said.
Chelsea sighed at the description. “I think I could smell it, and I’m not even a Breed.”
“Oh, trust me,” Ashley drawled in amusement. “The scent of it rolled off him. That was one jealous Breed glaring at every male you spoke to, my friend.”
She highly doubted the jealous part, but he had made it impossible to do her job.
“Every Breed there kept glancing
at him as though asking his permission to speak to me.” She rolled her eyes in disgust.
“Because they could smell his lust covering you like a blanket.” Ashley laughed. “They are animals, you forget. They would not tempt another Breed’s rage by showing interest in the woman he had so marked.”
A blush worked over her face at Ashley’s teasing comment.
“I hate those pesky noses the lot of you possess,” she assured them. “Every one of you.”