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Mia was fast asleep nearby. I took in a cautious sniff, but her heat had broken at the same time mine did. I was a bit surprised the others hadn’t carried her back to her own room, just to be safe. But, when I poked and prodded at the jagged edges of my own emotional dysfunction, there was no resentment at her presence.
With luck, she’d been too deeply mired in her own heat to take much notice of my degrading bout of pathos.
As though my thoughts had somehow reached her, she groaned and stretched, her jaw cracking on a yawn.
“Mia?” I rasped.
She blinked bleary eyes and made a humming noise in response, rolling over and elbow-crawling across the short distance separating us. I went still as she flopped half across my chest, snugging an arm around my torso to anchor herself. But the expected repulsion at the intimate touch never materialized.
I let out a slow breath, the tension flowing out of my muscles, and wrapped my arm around her shoulders as she nuzzled her face into my neck. The bruised bite mark flared beneath the touch of her cheek, but the ache that followed was worse inside than outside.
“Ugh,” she said, the sound muffled. “I forgot about the hangover that comes afterward. Why can’t I feel my arms or legs?”
Before I could try to rally some kind of teasing banter that I didn’t really feel, she went rigid.
“Oh, fuck,” she said, pulling away from me and rolling into a sitting position. “Oh,fuck! The restaurant!”
I sat up as well, a jolt of adrenaline dragging me free of my self-hatred, at least for the moment.
“What about the restaurant?” I asked. “Did something happen?” Now that I was thinking past my own humiliation, I vaguely remembered how upset she’d been when she first showed up at the nest. And... wait. The timing here wasn’t right. My heat had been a couple of days late, it was true. But hers should still have lagged mine by... what? Three days or so?
Her hands came up to cover her mouth. For a moment, it looked like she wouldn’t be able to form words, but then she shook her head sharply and dropped her arms.
When she spoke, it was a whisper. “It’s closed. Maybe for good.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Why? What happened?”
She looked positively sick—and not just from the heat hangover. “There were...cockroaches. In the dining room during service.Thousandsof them.”
Okay, so maybe my brain wasn’t working right yet. But that just didn’t make sense.
“Hang on,” I said slowly. “I know you. There’s no way your kitchen has roaches. And, even if you had an infestation anddidn’t know about it, they wouldn’t just randomly crawl out of the woodwork in the dining area with the lights on!”
Mia started shaking her head again, more slowly this time. “But theydid! Customers were screaming. It’s going to be all over social media. The health department will be breathing down our necks...”
She trailed off. All the blood abruptly drained from her face. “Oh, no.”
“What?” I demanded, a bit hysterically.
She swallowed hard. “Um... I’m also pretty sure I had sex with Emiel.”
I stared at her. “No way.”
Her huge brown eyes met mine, wracked with guilt. “Nat came to check on me. I think... Emiel carried me down to the front door to see him. I must have—” She broke off and swallowed hard. “And thenhemust have—”
“Emiel doesn’t do that,” I said quickly. “Are you sure you’re not mixing up a fantasy with reality? Or maybe you dreamed it?”
A faint meow sounded from beyond the closed door of the nest. We both turned to look at it. A moment later, it was followed by the sound of claws scratching against wood. We exchanged a confused look.
Since there didn’t seem to be any other logical response, I dragged on a pair of joggers that had been left neatly folded on my dresser, then tossed Mia the oversized T-shirt that had been lying next to them. When she was covered up, I crossed the room and cautiously opened the door.
“Mreow,” said the slender gray cat waiting outside, looking up at me with wide, yellow-green eyes. Princess trotted into the nest and immediately started winding around my ankles. After a few moments of this, she chirped in distress and wended her way through the pillows to Mia, who stared in shock as the cat climbed into her lap and rubbed her face against Mia’s chin.
“What?” she said, bewildered. “She doesn’t even like me!”
“Why is she in here, and not with Emiel?” I asked, a sick pit of irrational worry opening up in my stomach.
Mia looked up at me helplessly for a couple of seconds. Then her expression hardened, and she scooped Princess up in one arm. Stifling a groan, she clambered to unsteady feet.