“One-on-one meeting,” he growled.
“Fine!” she snapped, and I smirked when I heard music through her door.
“Cat siblings,” I muttered, thinking of the two cats I’d had as a kid who had come from the same litter. One minute they were smacking the living shit out of each other, and the next they were curled up in the same sunbeam.
“What?” he asked, frowning.
I waved him off, not trying to piss him off early in the apparent one-on-one meeting we were having. “Sorry, thinking aloud.”
“Just what we need,” he said, coming closer to the table, but I noticed he didn’t sit down, choosing to stand behind the chair across from mine.
Drama queen.
“So,” I said, looking around. “This is where you have your one-on-one meetings, eh? I thought your cabin was your office.”
“I’m not bringing everyone into my goddamn cabin, idiot,” he growled.
I smirked. “Oh? Then I guess I should feel honored that I was given the chance to come into such a sacred area with your blessing.”
He stared at me for a few seconds, his jaw ticking. “You want to piss me off, don’t you?”
“Honestly, at this point? I think you want a reason to be angry,” I said, shrugging when his eyes narrowed. “But for what it’s worth, I still wonder why you dragged me there rather than talking to me here, like you are now.”
“I…don’t know,” he said in annoyance, and I wondered if it pained him to admit that aloud.
I took a moment to consider our situation, knowing Cait had turned up her music to block out any noise and that if someone were to come in, we would sense it so long as we weren’t distracted. “Could it be because some part of you wanted me there alone with you?”
His shoulders went taut as he hunched forward slightly and glanced over his shoulder. “Don’t.”
“Or we could pretend like it didn’t happen,” I said with a roll of my eyes.
“Maybe,” he grunted.
“Right, we’ll see how long that lasts,” I said with a shake of my head. “So, if you wanted to send Carter off, and have Cait not listen in, but you didn’t want to talk about what happened last night, what was it you wanted to talk about?”
He fidgeted, his face taking on the appearance of someone who had just jammed something unexpectedly bitter into their mouth before it eased into his normal frown. “I…heard part of your conversation with Carter.”
“What, just now?”
“Yeah, and she didn’t tell me everything because she seems to think she needs to protect all of you from me, but Cait told me some of what happened yesterday too.”
“How…thorough of you.”
“Huh?”
“I already told you what happened last night.”
“So?”
“So, you’re not even trying to trust me,” I said with a roll of my eyes and easing back into my seat with a shake of my head. “Whatever, it’s only been a week. I suppose that will take time. A little baseline trust would be nice, but?—”
“Shut up,” he grunted, and I did. Not because I wanted to listen to him, but because he didn’t sound pissed, just…strained. “If I didn’t trust you, I wouldn’t have sent you out without me around to keep an eye on you. If I thought you couldn’t be trusted, I wouldn’t have chosen you to come here.”
Okay, that was new. “Wait, you chose me? I thought I was chosen for you.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Those suit-wearing, desk-riding dickheads might have a say in my budget, but they’re sure as shit not going to have a say in who is or isn’t working at my fucking outpost. The one time I let them do the picking, the fuckhead they sent got someone killed…one of our own.”
That was the first time I’d seen proof that he genuinely cared about the guys here, not just a few hints to support the theory. Not that I thought for a single minute he cared so little that he would be flippant about lives, but I could see the pain under his anger.