I shook my head, relief slowly trickling in. “I wasn’t around when they got him. It had to be fast acting though. We weren’t separated all that long. He’s still in there, though, he responded to my…” I glanced up at Lucas, afraid to tell him too much about my wolf. “He responded to me. It’s the only reason I’m not dead.”
Lucas grunted and gave me a look that told me he wasn’t buying my weak cover, but he didn’t ask any other questions. “Bring him into my room.” He jammed his hands in his pockets and strode with purpose towards the staircase leading to the upper levels. He took the stairs two at a time and was soon out of sight.
“Isn’t he a ray of sunshine?” I grumbled.
“You two do bring out the best in each other,” Dominick reminded me.
“We do fine when we don’t have to talk.” It was filthy, but accurate. In bed, Lucas and I were a kinetic force to be reckoned with. But once we had to function like a normal couple, everything fell apart. We were a mess. “Besides, he doesn’t need to like me right now as long as he helps Desmond.”
I led Desmond up the stairs, and after the wolf hesitated a moment at the metal steps, we met Lucas in his palatial bedroom. The first time I’d been in his master suite I’d been stunned to silence by the size of it. Now neither it, nor its owner, did much to impress me.
Wolf-Desmond chose to stick by my side, lying on the Persian rug when I took a seat in the leather chair facing Lucas’s desk.
“What were you thinking, going after Peyton alone?”
“I wasn’t alone. I had Desmond.”
“You could have both been killed.”
“We weren’t.”
“Maybe not, but now one of my wolves is trapped in his lupine form.”
“Look, Lucas, if I wanted a parental lecture, I would have gone to Keaty. But I don’t think you would have liked his solution for this situation very much.” It didn’t take a wild stretch of the imagination to know Keaty would have proposed putting Desmond down. Permanently.
That was Keaty. Practical to the point of inhumanity.
“Nice to see near-death has done nothing to dampen your sunny disposition,” he said.
If I didn’t need his help so badly right now, I would have smacked the smug look right off his face.
“I don’t need this bullshit from you, Lucas. You have no idea what I’ve been through. Just help Desmond.”
“Fine.” I’d half-expected him to ask what he was going to get out of it and was momentarily stunned by his agreement. “But you can’t stay.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but he slammed both palms down on his desk, making the old wood creak in protest. “Stop.”
“I-I didn’t even say anything.”
“You’re always saying something, Secret. You can’t get through ten minutes with me without disapproving somehow. Just stop. I know you’re mad. I know you’re finding it difficult to forgive me, but you need to let this go.”
Desmond growled, and it took all my restraint not to do the same.
“How dare you tell me what I need to do. Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m your—”
“If I were you, I’d think twice before dropping that husband bullshit on me again, Lucas.”
“Is this something you learned growing up in Canada? This blatant disregard for authority? I’ve never met anyone as completely pigheaded as you before.”
“That’s only because you’ve never met yourself.” I leaned back in the chair now that the worst of his outburst had passed. “And I take offense to your Canada comment. We’re a Commonwealth country, still. If anything, growing up in Canada taught me to have a passive respect for royalty.”
Lucas, stymied by his inability to make me cower before him, took a seat in his desk chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You can’t stay,” he repeated, more calmly this time.
“Why not?” I wasn’t being snarky, just asking honestly.
“Because I don’t know if it will work, and I don’t know what extremes I’ll have to go to. You aren’t stable when it comes to shifting, and if I have to force his shift, I have no idea what it would do to you if you were in the room.”