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“She’ll kill me if I try to sleep there,” Sienna said.

“She likes me. You can take my room until she decides to move.”

“I’m not taking your room, Bauther.”

She called me Beck when she wasn’t pissed at me.

“It smells so much like you that I won’t be able to sleep anyway. It’s yours.” Without waiting for a disagreement, I carried her bag into my room and set it down on the end of the bed.

When I unzipped it to start putting her things away, I halted, staring down into the duffel.

There were bags of blood in it. On top of her clothes.

Charlie Tobin’s blood.

Hershel Ott’s blood.

Login Jacob’s blood.

“You didn’t drink mine after you opened the bag?” My voice strained as I struggled not to growl at her again.

“Of course I didn’t. I would be addicted to you if I drank your blood.” She took the bags, and another half dozen beneath them. “If you get rid of them so I’m forced to drink from you, I won’t forgive you.”

“I would never do that.”

“I don’t believe you.” Her bluntness was fucking painful.

I was glad she told me the truth, though.

Painful truth was a hell of a lot more important than kind lies.

Which, in hindsight, was what I’d given her.

A kind lie that we could have casual sex without being mates.

I hadn’t technically lied, but I had kept the truth from her. I should’ve listened to everyone who told me that was a shitty idea.

“I’m sorry,” I admitted to her. It was the truth. “If I could go back and smack myself upside the head for not telling you the moment I caught your scent in that bar, I would do it. And I’d tell you the truth.”

“In the bar?” Her gaze was critical, like she didn’t believe me.

“I planned on asking you out as soon as I learned Ox was coming to meet you. I hoped I’d learn if you were my mate when I did. You washed the lotion and perfume off your hands, so I finally caught a hint of your scent beneath the soap’s smell. That confirmed what you were to me.”

“You really didn’t know before that?”

“No.” It was the truth. “I’ve suspected since the first time I met you, but I was trying to give you space. Just protecting you settled my wolf for the most part.”

She stepped out of the room with her blood bags. When she came back a few minutes later, I assumed they were in the freezer. And while I’d itch like mad to throw them out, I knew I had no real option but to leave them for her.

When she decided to drink from me, it had to be on her terms. But she would decide to drink from me eventually, even if I had to spend the next few months or years proving to her that I was trustworthy first.

“If there are no rules, I can do whatever I want,” she said casually.

“Yes.”

“Perfect.”

Her bitter smile told me I wasn’t going to like the reason she’d asked for clarification on that.