TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 352

CHAPTER 279 OUR FIRST DINNER

CHAPTER 279: OUR FIRST DINNER

EMBER’S POV

A scream rips out of my throat before I can stop it. I flinch violently backwards, clutching the towel to my chest, my wet shoulders hitting the tile.

Knox goes from relaxed to instantly, terrifyingly lethal in a millisecond.

A deafening, inhuman snarl tears out of him as he shoves me firmly behind his massive back.

His muscles lock tight, his claws already tearing through his fingertips, ready to slaughter whoever is standing on the other side of that wood.

And then the bathroom door opens.

“I thought you two might be hungry!”

I come about a foot off the floor.

Knox’s arm clamps around me like a vice, a second snarl building in his chest, and there, standing fully in the open doorway, is Hale.

Hands clasped under her chin, beaming at us through the steam like she’s wandered into a tea

party.

“Oh, goddess,” I exhale, the breath trembling out of me in a soft, shaky rush as my racing heart

slams against my ribs.

“What the fuck, Hale,” Knox growls, the words tearing out of his throat, dark and dangerous.

She doesn’t look away. That is the thing I can’t get past, after.

She doesn’t flush or stammer or do the thing a normal person does when they walk in on

something sexual.

She just stands there in our doorway, smiling, looking between the two of us with bright interested eyes, like we are a display she’s come to enjoy.

Knox’s voice drops into something barely human, and he shifts me fully behind him, one towel-wrapped arm pinning me securely to his back

“Get. Out.”

“Don’t be like that.” She gives that little chiming laugh, completely unbothered, completely fine, and that is the part that makes my skin crawl right up off my bones. “I knocked. You didn’t hear. Marjorie’s done a whole supper, and it’s getting cold, and you can’t put the poor girl to bed on an

CHAPTER 279 OUR FIRST DINNER

empty stomach; that’s no way to treat a guest. Twenty minutes. The small dining room.” Her eyes slide to me, behind him, and do that doll-inspection thing again, head tilting. “I do hope you have something to wear, dear. We’ll find you something if you don’t.”

“Out,” Knox says again, and this time the windows hum with it.

“Twenty minutes!” she sings, and turns, and is gone, the door drifting shut behind her like nothing at all has happened.

The silence she leaves is loud.

“Knox.” My heart is going like a hammer. “How long was she-”

“I don’t know.” His jaw is a hard line, the gold still bleeding at the edges of his eyes, his hand flat and warm against my spine like he is holding me together by touch. “The water was loud. I didn’t hear the door.” And that, I can see, is eating him alive, because Knox always hears the door. Knox hears everything. “She shouldn’t have a key to this wing. She doesn’t have a key to this wing.”

“She’s your cousin,” I say, hating how much I want it to be nothing. “She’s- that’s just her, right? She’s odd. Family’s odd. That’s all that is.”

He doesn’t answer right away. He looks at the door she’d left through, and something moves behind his face that he doesn’t let me see all of.

“That’s all that is,” he says finally, and pulls me back against him, and presses his mouth to the top of my head. I feel him decide, right then, to put it away for me. To carry it himself. “Get dressed,

baby. We’ll show our faces, we’ll eat Marjorie’s food so she doesn’t sulk for a week, and then I’m

putting you to bed, and the world can wait till morning. Twenty minutes. We can do twenty

minutes.”

We cannot, as it turns out, do twenty minutes.

Because the small dining room is not small, and the supper is beautiful, and Marjorie has outdone herself with about nine dishes none of which I can name, and it would have been perfect, it would have been the warmest welcome of my entire life, except that Hale sits down at the table with us.

Right at Knox’s left hand. Like she’s always sat there. Like it is hers.

“So.” She props her chin on her laced fingers and beams at me across the candles, ignoring her plate entirely. “Ember. What a funny little name. Is it short for something? It sounds like it should be short for something.

“It’s just Ember.”

“Just Ember.” She repeats it the way you’d repeat a child’s drawing back to them, delighted, indulgent. “And you’re from- where did you say? Somewhere cold. Alaska? Goodness. And what

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