Navarro's Promise - Lora Leigh [62]
Mica sipped her coffee.
She was going to strangle Cassie.
The moment she had the chance, she was going to wrap her hands right around her friend’s throat and just start squeezing.
Cassie deserved it.
She was hiding the truth of whatever she had sensed that day from Mica, and Mica knew she was.
“You’re not going to explain the contentment reference?” There was an edge of laughter in Merinus’s tone.
“I might explain it if I understood it myself.” Forking another piece of cake, Mica shot Merinus an irate look. “Do you always understand what Cassie’s talking about?”
“Sometimes.” Merinus didn’t sound as confident as Mica was certain she wanted to. “Does that idea of contentment have anything to do with the repeat mating tests Navarro insisted Ely run this morning?”
Yeah, that was Merinus, right to the point there.
Mica sighed wearily. “According to Cassie, she has no idea what it has to do with. As for the mating tests, Navarro simply wanted to be certain.”
“I see.” Merinus nodded somberly. “And that would have nothing to do with him nearly losing his sanity when Brandenmore escaped confinement and managed to pin you against the wall either? Or how he threatened to kill Brandenmore after he managed to free you from him?”
Merinus was more perceptive than many wanted to admit.
“What do you want to know, Merinus?” Mica asked quietly as she pushed the cake and coffee back.
She could tell when someone was fishing, and at the moment, Merinus was throwing dynamite in the water.
“Are you his mate, Mica?” she asked.
She wasn’t going to lie to Merinus. Mica had lived her life amid lies, deceptions and double-talk, and she hated it. She could mark her life divided by one event. The years of contentment and safety before the night Cassie Sinclair and her family arrived at her father’s ranch. The years filled with double-talk, lies and danger had been every day thereafter.
She understood, she truly did. There was only so much you could tell most children. But Mica hadn’t been most children, and the resentment had only grown over the years.
“So it would appear.” She shrugged, the attempt to appear casual, unconcerned, took nearly every ounce of control she possessed.
There were times she forgot Merinus wasn’t a Breed herself. She’d been a mate for so long, the mating hormone now so firmly entrenched in her body, that her senses were so much more sharply advanced that she could detect emotions herself, if not scent them.
Although Merinus was by no means a Breed. Yet.
She continued to watch Mica, making her extremely uncomfortable as her dark gaze remained intent. She wasn’t a Breed, but she was developing the senses of one, which meant she was no longer a person Mica could pretend to be calm around.
“How long have you known?” the Prima asked.
This was no longer the friend who had sheltered Mica along with Cassie when they were kids. She wasn’t the woman that cut Mica’s hair the first time, or the one that taught her to use makeup when she was a teenager, when her own mother refused to so do.
She was now the Prima, the dominant feminine force within Sanctuary, and there wasn’t a Breed male or female within the compound that didn’t inherently recognize her quiet, intuitive strength and power.
Mica glanced at the clock on the microwave. “Oh, two hours maybe?” she answered blithely. “Could be a minute more, could be a minute less. So let’s not get into the whole psychological mishmash that goes with it quite yet, if you don’t mind? I’d like another minute or two to adjust.”
There was the odd situation or two when her need for truth was almost outweighed by her need for privacy.
Breeds and their mates were just too damned nosy. And she couldn’t tell Merinus to mind her own damned business as she would most other Breeds.
“You’ll likely need more than a minute or two to adjust,” Merinus said ruefully. “It’s been fourteen