“I know Trey’s a few fries short of a happy meal, but it doesn’t mean he’ll hurt me.”
“How can you be sure of that? His wolf goes feral for God’s sake.”
“But even feral he doesn’t hurt me.”
“And you expect us to believe that’s because he’s your true mate, right?” Caleb snickered. “There’s no way I can believe that.”
Shaya appealed to her with a look. “Taryn, we watched you, at nine years old, slip into a state of depression. It was like being around a zombie. You existed but you didn’t live. It was all just mechanical. And we understood why – you had just lost the other half of your soul. It was a shock that you even survived it, no one thought you would. I mean, I know you two hadn’t mated but you had still formed a connection and you were so young.”
“It hasn’t occurred to you that maybe the reason I lived was because that connection – solid and true though it was – just wasn’t the connection between true mates? That maybe the reason I reacted so badly was because I’d just lost my best friend and my mom in the same accident?”
Caleb lowered his voice as he spoke. “Look, if your dad’s right and you did this to get away from Roscoe…well he’s dead now. You don’t have to keep this up. God, you could have come to me, I’d have mated you. I still will if it’s what you want.”
Taryn smiled. “Caleb, that’s sweet and all, but do you really think I’d ask you to enter a permanent mating with someone you thought of as nothing but a friend – an annoying friend at that – ending any chance of you having a life with your true mate?”
He shrugged, suddenly seeming uncomfortable. His voice was even quieter when he spoke again. “Who says I see you as nothing but a friend? Maybe I just hadn’t acted on what I felt because it would have felt like I was betraying Joey.”
Taryn rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Right.”
“So you hadn’t wanted to mate with Roscoe?” asked Shaya.
“Not particularly, no. I thought he was kind of vain and overly flirtatious – you know how stuff like that annoys me. I don’t know how my dad or anyone else can claim that me mating with Trey – someone who had been a stranger to me before that day – has anything to do with that. Maybe if I had the power of mind control and could hypnotise him to believe and claim that I was his true mate, then yeah sure.”
“Obviously you guys believe you’re true mates, I saw for myself what happened,” said Shaya. “But isn’t it possible that it was just a really strong case of lust at first sight? ’Cause, you know, I’ve been there – it’s powerful.”
A loud, sharp, metallic ‘tock’ sound had Taryn looking up. She smiled at her relatively new friend who was perched on a branch high in the tree to her left. “Hey, big guy. Come on down here.”
“Oh no, Taryn please don’t,” whined Shaya. But it was too late. The huge glossy black raven was already on the table.
Caleb frowned. “What is it with you and birds? Why do they always like you?”
Taryn shrugged one shoulder. “Isn’t he gorgeous?”
“I don’t like crows,” whined Shaya, leaning back in her seat.
“It’s a raven.”
“Well then I don’t like ravens.”
“How can you not like them? They’re so intelligent and beautiful. Look at the way his feathers shine a kind of metallic violet in the light.” He made a series of guttural croaks that had Shaya flinching.
“Aren’t ravens an omen of death and disease?”
Taryn rolled her eyes at the nervousness in her friend’s voice. “For God’s sake, Shaya, it’s only a bird.”
“And a scavenger, did you forget that part? Wait, does it only have one leg? And hang on, did it just bark?”
Taryn chuckled. “Ravens can imitate a whole variety sounds, even a human voice.” As if to back her up, he made a series of gurgling and croaking noises followed by another bark. “See, LJ’s cool.”
Caleb made a choking noise. “LJ?”
“Yeah, as in Long John…Long John Silver, the sailor cook with the one leg?”
“Oh. Right.”
“Ravens only have one mate too, you know,” she said as she watched him return to the tree.
Caleb sighed. “I don’t care what you say, Taryn, there’s no way I’ll believe Joey wasn’t your true mate.”
Of course he wouldn’t, the opinionated SOB. “Just because I’m mated now doesn’t mean Joey means anything less to me than he did before. That bond we had doesn’t mean any less because he once filled a place inside me. It’s not that Trey’s replaced him, because Trey has his own place.” Not one word of that had been a lie. Now that she’d mated with Trey, he did have his own place. He just wasn’t filling it.
Shaya ran her hand through her hair, sighing. “I want you to have this, Taryn, I really do want you to have this. I’m just worried that somewhere along the way you’ll think, ‘Hey, I was wrong, he’s not my true mate at all’. Then you’ll have lost two mates. Where would that leave you? I don’t want to ever again see you in that state. And, well…For God’s sake, Taryn, how can you not be petrified of him?”
“He’s a walking time bomb, Taryn, he’s -”
Taryn held up her hand. “Look, Caleb, if you’re here to try to turn me against my own mate then you might as well save your breath to blow up your doll.”
Grinning, he shook his head and took the hand that Taryn had held up. “I want to say I’m happy for you but…well I’d be lying. I don’t want you mated to a psycho. Just swear to me that you’re happy here. At the end of the day, that’s all that really matters.”
In some ways, Taryn was happy. These people – with the exception of Greta, Kirk, Brock, Selma and Hope – didn’t treat her like she was inferior just because she was latent. She didn’t feel like an outsider or someone who needed to be constantly on the defensive. The atmosphere here was the total opposite of the one she had grown up in and she found it refreshing.
She had become close friends with Lydia as she spent a lot of her time helping her with her graphic design business. She was a great person to be around as she entertained Taryn non-stop with her little eccentricities and her habit of saying whatever the hell she thought. Taryn wouldn’t have thought that someone like that could be so suited to the very sensitive Cam, and yet Lydia was.
When she wasn’t with Lydia she was often with Grace who was helping her improve her cooking skills, or sometimes Rhett who was teaching her how to hack. Tao was of course often there, but as her friend just as much as her bodyguard. He was very easy to be around, he wasn’t complicated, he didn’t brood, and he didn’t blow hot and cold. Trey could learn a few things from him.
She also found that she got along pretty well with Marcus, which kind of surprised her because ordinarily she tired of flirtatious people. And Marcus was extremely flirtatious. When he turned the full force of his huge impish grin on you there was no holding back a blush. Maybe it was because he gave some fantastic shoulder massages that the flirtatiousness didn’t bother her…? Very possible.
She hadn’t realized that he and Trick scratched each other’s itch from time to time until she stumbled upon them having some fun at the lake. Damn that had been hot and it had taken all her self-control to leave rather than stay and watch. Apparently they had known she was there as Trick later teased her about it and still continued to do so on occasion. Trick was a tease in general. He seemed to get his kicks from making people blush or feel uncomfortable, but as he targeted Selma and Kirk a lot, Taryn was totally fine with it.
Although Ryan didn’t talk much and mostly communicated through grunts, Taryn rather liked him. Unlike everyone else, she spoke to him as though she actually expected him to respond until eventually he began to talk to her a little. She wasn’t surprised to find that Ryan was quite intelligent, even more so than Rhett. He was very big brotherly with her, as opposed to Dominic who often asked her what color her underwear was and tried to look down her shirt a lot. He was the worst perv ever and constantly hit her with dirty chat up lines which he didn’t need to use – just one look at him had females drooling. He seemed to just enjoy being a perv, and yet it was impossible not to like him. Dante was another person who was impossible to dislike, but behind his laidback ‘I don’t take life seriously attitude’ was an astute, diplomatic, extremely observant person.