“Leave her alone, Lucas,” I warned.
He flashed me a cocky grin before raising his eyes to the TV broadcasting a tennis game.
A waitress with thick bangs, a perky smile, and an even perkier voice arrived to take our order. While I asked for a BLT and water, Sarah and Lucas ordered cheeseburgers and Cokes. I wondered if Miss Perky had been the girl Lucas had alluded to the day August had helped fix stuff up in the inn, the one who’d be really glad that he’d stayed in town. I was tempted to ask, but feared it would make me sound jealous instead of what I truly was: curious.
As though thinking of August activated the link, my stomach tightened. I rubbed it while Lucas and Sarah bickered about the music she’d played at The Den last Saturday, and the waitress returned with a pitcher. As she poured water into my glass, the door of Tracy’s opened.
The water overflowed from my glass, spilling onto the table and dribbling onto my lap. I backed away from the table so fast my chair legs scraped against the worn wooden slats. She righted the pitcher, then apologizing profusely, she grabbed a handful of paper napkins from the dispenser on the table to clean up the mess.
“It’s okay,” I said, following her line of sight, which had returned to the entrance of the place.
To Cole and August.
August was absentmindedly rubbing his abdomen. When he spotted me behind the blushing waitress, his hand froze and then lowered, fingers balling into a fist.
Yep, it sucked.
For both of us.
Cole elbowed August and pointed to our table. From August’s reluctant strides, I sensed he wanted to go anywhere but near me.
“Hey, Ness.” Cole smiled, then nodded at Sarah and Lucas before greeting the waitress by her first name: Kelly.
Kelly barely registered his greeting, her entire focus on August. “I thought you’d left.”
He scratched the back of his neck. “I’ve had to delay my departure.” His face was all tensed up, which I imagined had more to do with our bothersome link than with Kelly’s attention.
“Heard you and Sienna broke up.” She said this very softly, so softly that if I’d been human, I would probably have missed it.
August’s fingers stilled, and his eyebrows drew together. His expression, coupled with the relentless throbbing in my navel, screamed of discomfort.
I caught Sarah sniffing the air. A frown ghosted over her face. Could she smell our link? I remembered Liam saying that August had smelled like me or me like him… or something along those lines, but I assumed the smell had faded.
Thankfully, Sarah shattered the awkward silence. “Don’t any of you have jobs?”
The three boys glanced at each other.
“Ness is my job,” Lucas said, which made August swing the full force of his gaze from Kelly to the shaggy-haired shifter.
“And we’re taking a break. Weather’s way too brutal,” Cole said.
Unlike my jeans that were sticking to my skin, neither his nor August’s clothes were drenched, so they must’ve changed before coming in here. Or maybe their bodies heated at a higher temperature than mine and had already made the moisture evaporate.
Cole gestured to the pool tables in the back. “Want to join us for a game of cutthroat?”
“Thought you’d never ask.” Lucas all but bounded out of his seat.
“Ness?” Cole didn’t say Sarah’s name, but he looked at her, which surely meant he was extending the invitation to my friend.
I shook my head. “I want to catch up with Sarah.”
“We still have so much to catch up on,” she added.
Once the boys were out of earshot and the waitress had scampered away, Sarah hissed, “Why does August Watt smell like you?”
I winced. “Do we really smell alike?” I whispered.
“Unless August and you have been swapping body lotions, then yeah. Usually dudes smell like”-she waved a hand toward the seat Lucas had just vacated-“the inside of a locker room.”
“Is it really obvious?”
“To a person who knows you and your smell, yeah.”
I wrinkled my nose at her wording. I figured she didn’t mean it derogatively.
“Did you guys imprint on each other?”
I bit my lower lip.
“Shit.” Her chair creaked as she leaned forward. “So you and Liam are already over, huh?”
“No. Why would you jump to that conclusion?”
She pressed slightly away from the table. “Babe, you do understand the purpose of mating links, right?”
“I understand their purpose, but I have no plans on dumping my boyfriend to jump into another man’s bed.”
“It’s sort of unavoidable. Your body must’ve shut out all other males. My brother and Margaux are mates. He tried to resist her at first. He had a girlfriend. It lasted all of a week. You can’t resist mating links. You just can’t. It would be like trying to starve yourself and expecting to survive.”
My skin prickled with annoyance. “There are lots of mates who don’t end up together.”
“Really? Name one pair?”
“I don’t know names. I just heard about this from Frank McNamara. He mentioned someone in our pack had a mate but didn’t end up with her.”
Sarah tutted. “Well, I’ve never heard of mates who didn’t end up together. It’s biological or chemical or whatever. Plus, it’s a good thing. It doesn’t happen to everyone. I sort of wished it would happen to me.” She thankfully lowered her voice to add, “Apparently, the sex is explosive.” She waggled her eyebrows.
I shushed her with a forbidding look. “Besides, he’s leaving soon,” I added under my breath. “Distance will suppress the link.”
“Why would he leave?” She glanced over at the pool table. “Is Liam making him so he can have his dirty way with you?”
Heat snaked up my neck.
She leaned in, her long, kinky blonde curls draping over her shoulders. “Oh my gosh, that’s it, isn’t it? That’s real fucked up, Ness. No one should ever come between mates.”
“I don’t want a mate all right!” I unfortunately said this so loudly that even the rain pounding against the windowed façade couldn’t camouflage my words.
Sure enough, the boys had stopped playing to cop a look, as well as two of the men slugging down beers at the sticky bar. Not that they knew what I was talking about, but August knew, and from the shadows that fell over his strong brow, I could tell my comment had made an impact.