32. Blaine

Chapter 32

Blaine

I stand in the shower, head down, breathing fast as freezing cold water streams over me. I'm shivering, teeth chattering, skin like ice, but the one part of me I walked into this spray to handle is staying resolutely, determinedly hard.

Ten minutes later and I'm coming to terms that this isn't working.

The offer of self-defense classes was a bad idea for so many reasons. Mainly, how do you teach someone a physical skill without touching them? The answer? Not easily. And the second?

Why had it been so arousing to see Resa and Vaughn struggling like that?

Sex hasn't been a priority in years. Going out, finding a woman I was attracted to and then sleeping with her would require more from me than I'm willing to give.

So I've spent the last five years celibate. The first of those two years, sex wasn't high on my agenda. Violet was dead and burns and scar tissue covered half my body. I wasn't thinking about intimacy. I was thinking about survival. About whether it was something I wanted at all after I couldn't save Violet.

But I've just spent the last fifteen minutes getting increasingly hard in the gym.

Now all I'm thinking about is sex and about how good it would have felt to have Resa pinned between Vaughn and me.

The cold water continues to lash me. I wrench the faucet from cold to hot, brace one hand on the wall, and give into an urge I haven't had in so long.

I wrap my fist around myself, squeeze my eyes shut, and stroke. Breath wheezes between my clenched teeth as I pump again. It doesn't take long. Resa's lean, curvy figure takes shape in my mind. As does the way she was moving on Vaughn.

I stroke myself harder, eyes squeezed tightly shut as I let myself imagine things that will never happen, but that I wish would.

Resa in my arms. Maybe she would knock my hand aside, claim my lips as she took over, stroking me as I settled her onto her back, nudged her thighs open and…

I groan, straining as I pump myself harder, wanting to extend my release for a little longer. Too late. Gasping, I slow my strokes and slump against the wall, the water washing away my come as my breathing evens out.

As I stand under the spray, guilt snakes into me. Resa is ours. But she's made it clear she isn't staying, that she intends to go back to her fiancé. We should let her. It's not like she hasn't suffered enough, but here we all are, thinking of how we can convince her to walk away from a life she must be desperate to return to.

Something pings in the next room. An alarm on my laptop.

I turn off the faucet and snatch up a towel, turning my back on the mirror over the sink before I can accidentally look at it. No one likes to see those scars. Not even me.

I quickly dry myself on my way to the bedroom and toss the towel in a hamper beside the door. In my room, I dig out a new turtleneck, sweats, and socks. Here I take my time. There are no mirrors. It's one of the first things I removed when I came home from the hospital.

My room is more office than bedroom now. Just a big bed on the right side, the comforter a lighter gray than the painted walls. On the left, I spend more time at the desk I set up with my laptop, notepad, and the pregnancy book we've all been reading since we brought Resa home from the clinic. For the first time, I was actually looking forward to going to the clinic. I didn't volunteer to wait in the car the way I did before. It wasn't easy, but I'd needed to know that Resa and the baby were okay, and for that, I'd have waited in hell.

I cross over to the black desk and I drop into the seat, press my finger on the fingerprint button to unlock my laptop and take it off sleep mode.

A couple of days ago, Garrison requested some background information on an art teacher at a community college. I had a name, so it hadn't taken long to find him on social media. A few minutes later, I had his address, his car records, and his social security number.

It's been days since Resa said she was looking for Dexter Pieter. It's Resa's case. Garrison was insistent about that. But we've all been working in the background trying to get her the thing she wants. The man is a ghost who sprung up from nowhere years ago to become the youngest ever head of the Council. I told Resa to try his assistant, but even that detail is impossible to find.

Some people are easy. They live their lives openly. Dexter Pieter hides everything.

It took me two hours to compile the background report Garrison requested on Simon Marchant, a forty-seven-year-old community college art teacher.

I've spent the last several days digging into Dexter Pieter, and I still don't know if his assistant is a man or a woman.

Whatever Rune wanted the information on Simon Marchant for, I don't know. I hadn't asked. I was too distracted by another background project I hadn't told Garrison about.

Looking into Resa's fiancé.

I told myself I wouldn't, but I had to know what kind of man she would choose for herself. She didn't say if this fiancé was an alpha or a beta, if she loved him or missed him. She's been keeping all her cards so close to her chest that I needed to know.

I didn't want to dig into Resa, so trying to find the fiancé without investigating Resa—which is exactly what I would be doing—was hard.

As a victim of Asylum, we knew an alpha abducted her from a free heat clinic. Finding reports of missing persons over the last couple of years meant the second I found her photograph, I had her full name, address, and parents' contact information from when they filed a missing person's report.

It also meant I had her fiancé's name: Henry Schultz.

Now I sit back in my seat, staring at the photograph from an alert I set up to deliver any mention of Henry to my inbox, and I ask myself why I didn't listen to Garrison. I wish it was as easy as lifting my finger, pressing delete, and wiping all memory of this picture away.

It's not that simple.

Now I've seen, I have to do something about this.

I get up, snapping the lid of my laptop down and taking it with me.

Since I can anticipate Garrison's response, I bypass any room he's likely to be in and head straight for the gym, thinking Vaughn will be there.

Empty.

I left Vaughn and Resa down here, and I wasn't in my room long, maybe thirty minutes freezing under the shower. So they must have ended things soon after.

I try the computer room next. Equally empty. No one is in the den or in the meeting room. I don't bother checking the backyard. In summer, we'll maybe go out there once. Otherwise, it's all work and no play in Lucas Security headquarters.

Vaughn's bark of laughter clues me in where he is: the kitchen. As I head that way, Garrison's low rumbling laugh comes from the same direction.

I briefly pause, prepare for Garrison's expected response, and keep going.

Garrison is sitting at the dining table, a sandwich in front of him, as is a cup of coffee and another copy of the same pregnancy book we've all been reading.

Vaughn has pulled on a dark gray hoodie since Resa's self-defense lesson. He's leaning against the kitchen island, arms crossed, as he tells Garrison about how well Resa did in the gym. Something about his raised brow makes me wonder if he hasn't figured out why I rushed out of the lesson as fast as I did.

There's no sign of Resa.

Maybe she's upstairs showering and getting dressed. She'll be down soon, wanting to talk about finding Dexter Pieter or solving the Jerome Walker case. But for now, she's not here, which makes now the ideal time to say what I need to say.

I wait until Vaughn has finished telling Garrison about Resa putting him on his ass with a sneaky trip he hadn't seen coming and which, if I didn't know what I know now, I'd ask him to tell me about it.

"Her fiancé is getting married," I say.

Vaughn snorts a laugh. "Yeah. The clue's in the name."

I walk across the room and take my usual seat. Back to the wall, where I never have to worry about anyone needing to pass by me on the way from the dining table to the kitchen. "He's getting married, but not to Resa. To someone called Emily."

Silence.

Garrison sits up taller in his seat, a line bracketing his brow. "I told you not to?—"

"Yes, you said not to go digging, but I had to know," I interrupt. "Surely you wanted to know about the fiancé?"

He doesn't immediately respond. Then he blows out a heavy sigh, closing the pregnancy book and pushing his half-eaten sandwich aside. "What did you find out?"

Vaughn joins us at the dining table.

"They worked together," I say. "He's a realtor. A beta."

I give them a second to absorb that.

"Is he ugly?" Vaughn asks.

I look at him. " Really ?"

" What ?" He glares at me. "Don't tell me you weren't wondering if he was competition before you went and tracked the guy down."

I deliberately do not answer that question.

Instead, I open my laptop, unlock it and swivel it to show them.

A long moment passes in silence as we study the man with short dark-blond hair beside the pretty, smiling blonde woman showing off her engagement ring. The engagement picture is what triggered my alert. They're not just engaged. They're jetting off for their destination wedding in a couple of weeks. It looks like neither of them wants to wait to get married.

"He looks like he might be nice," Vaughn eventually says. "Not greasy like your typical realtor. And he didn't cheap out on the ring."

Garrison raises his brow.

"I did not steal a ring like it," Vaughn denies. "But I can tell."

I was Garrison's first hire when he started Lucas Security, named for the detective who saved his life as a teenager.

Garrison doesn't talk much about his childhood, and I haven't gone digging. From bits and pieces he's said over the years, I got the impression he fell in with the wrong crowd and his cop neighbor turned his life around after saving it.

When Vaughn came looking for a job, it was after every company he'd applied to had turned him down.

He'd initially hidden his spotty past, probably as a result of those job rejections. All he wanted was one chance to earn enough money to send back to his mom and sister.

It had taken me fifteen minutes to uncover the string of arrests that led to his detention in Meadow Juvenile Detention Center.

I thought Garrison would turn Vaughn away like everyone else must have. Instead, he called the potential new hire back and told him he was giving him a week. No pickpocketing. No thefts. One week to prove himself. But he liked him.

He's been with us ever since.

I close the laptop, hiding the photograph I wish I could unsee.

Vaughn nods at it. "So, what do you think we should do about that?"

"We have to tell her," I eventually say. "They're getting married in Mexico soon."

Vaughn shakes his head. "Who says we have to tell her? There's time for the fiancé to have a painful and unexplainable death."

Garrison looks at Vaughn. "No."

"Or we say nothing. He gets married, and Resa no longer has a fiancé we need to kill," Vaughn says. "And she stays. Then we all win."

"She needs to know," Garrison says flatly.

"So she has a reason to hate betas as much as alphas?" Vaughn raises a brow. "Cause this will do it. I vote we kill him."

"This isn't a democracy," Garrison bites out. "And that is not what we do."

Vaughn leans across the table. "He hurt her. In my eyes, that's a killing offense."

In the silence that follows, I think about today.

Resa was having fun. She laughed. Vaughn was smiling. I was in the gym with someone instead of always on my own. And for a second, I had a flash-forward of Resa staying and the three of us hanging out in the gym, laughing, sparring.

Then I hear it.

Footsteps sound on the stairs. The tension in the room ramps up.

"We can't tell her," Vaughn hisses.

"She needs to know," Garrison says quietly. "The sooner the better. If she finds out we knew and didn't tell her…" He leaves the suggestion hanging.

Alphas hurt her before. Abused her. Keeping secrets would teach her another life lesson about alphas. Namely, that none of them, not even her scent matches, are worth trusting.

Her footsteps are fast on the stairs, and the ends of her hair are damp as she enters. She's beautiful in a black sleeveless dress and a smile on her lips. It grows when she sees me. "Blaine, I wanted to ask you about Dexter's assistant. I was thinking…"

She keeps talking. I'm only distantly aware of it. I'm more aware of her smile of greeting, of the way she's pulling a chair back from the table and dropping into it, talking to me with not so much as a sign she's paying my scars the least bit of attention. As if she doesn't see them, and as if me being an alpha is no longer a barrier to her entering the room.

I don't see her knife, which means she left it upstairs. Is she even aware of that?

Her voice trails off. "Blaine?" Her gaze bounces from me to Vaughn to Garrison.

None of us have spoken a word since she walked in. Garrison has shoved the pregnancy book under a newspaper. There's a quiet tension in the room that Resa notices for the first time.

"What is it?" Her smile fades. "What's wrong?"

Who will be the one to break her heart?

I'm almost not surprised when Vaughn gets up. We've had our fair share of arguments over the years about things big and small, but for a reformed pickpocket, he's surprisingly selfless.

Garrison and I are Resa's scent matches. I know Vaughn, and I know he would not want one of us to wield the axe and reinforce her negative association with alphas. Especially just as she looks like she's starting to trust us.

Vaughn returns to leaning against the kitchen island and folds his arms. He looks at ease, relaxed, but there's a tension in his shoulders he didn't have before. "We found out something about?—"

"Your fiancé," I interrupt. I created this situation. It's only fair that I'm the one who tells Resa. "I found out something about him. Not Vaughn."

She sits back in her seat. "What did you find out?"

"He's getting married," Garrison speaks before I can. I'd almost known he would. Vaughn is trying to take the heat off me and Garrison. I'm trying to take it off Vaughn, and Garrison is saying the thing that none of us wanted to say at all.

I should have known it would happen like this.

The tension leaves Resa's body and a smile curls her lips. "Well, of course he is. To me."

"No. He isn't," Vaughn says quietly.

A tiny line forms on Resa's brow. "I don't understand."

I open my laptop, unlock it, and we pass it down the table toward her.

And we watch as her expression turns blank. Utterly blank.

She shuts the lid with a soft click. After the way she stomped up the stairs when I scared her, I thought she would slam the lid down, furious.

Something about the gentle way she closes my laptop, about her easy breezy smile as if it doesn't matter, is more painful than having to replace a three thousand dollar laptop if she'd broken it.

And I wish she had broken it.

Better a destroyed laptop than her too wide eyes and the sudden rising and falling of her chest.

"That's fine. I mean, I'd disappeared." She pushes the laptop away from her.

Why hadn't I listened to Garrison when he told me not to pry? "Resa?—"

"It's fine. People move on. It's no big deal." Her smile is brittle as she stands. "Was there anything else?"

Garrison shakes his head.

"Then I'll go upstairs. I was close to finding out something about Dexter. So, I'll be doing that today."

I don't remind her she just came downstairs to ask for my help. None of us do.

You just had to go digging, Blaine.

Vaughn straightens. "I could?—"

" No ," she snaps. She swallows and continues in a calmer tone. "I just want to be alone. Thanks."

She walks out, and she's silent, but I swear I hear her heart breaking.