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together on several occasions, dating back to when Mari was an eighteen-year-old senior in high school and they had been prohibited from making the commitment that, at that time in their lives, neither of them was sure they even wanted.
    "No, Andre didn't come and he wasn't there when we got there." Thank God, she thought to herself. Wouldn't that have been an interesting confrontation? One of the reasons she always kept enough money to bail Tek out of jail in a savings account that she carefully never touched in a credit union she never went near. Tek would have handed Andre each of his body parts to take home in a separate bag within a matter of seconds.
    They'd never asked each other for fidelity, and, because she knew more than she might have as the former Alpha's daughter about the types of shady activities the club got up to, she knew he would probably never remain faithful to any woman for long.
    And she hadn't become a nun herself, either. She'd had her share of flings, although, since moving back to Hamden years ago, she had lived more like a nun than at any other time in her adult life. She hadn't quite been able to make herself be physical with another man when Tek was always right across town.
    Abby sounded concerned about that. "Oh dear, I thought he would be or I would have taken you home myself. You'd had quite a bit of tequila, if I remember correctly – not that I hadn't, too, of course. But I hate the idea that you were trashed and all alone."
    "I wasn't alone," Mari explained quietly.
    The long beat of silence on the other end of the phone told her that Abby had finally put two and two together. "Don't tell me that Tek stayed."
    Mari cleared her throat and said right back, "Okay, I won't." He didn't. She had stayed with him. She wasn't trying to start anything, wasn't trying to be belligerent, but neither was she going to back down from the truth that they had been together.
     

Chapter Three
     
    "Mari! You know how Cash feels about you and Tek being...together."
    "And I've told you before that my brother does not dictate with whom I share my bed. My father tried it, as you may remember, and it didn't work for him, either."
    She could hear Abby's long-suffering sigh. "They're just trying to be protective of you, to keep you safe. You know how...wild and violent Tek can be."
    Mari rolled her eyes. Sometimes Abby drank entirely too much of the pack's Kool-Aid. "It's more than that, Abby, and you know it."
    That shut her up. Abby liked being wrong about as much as Mari did, and she hated having it pointed out to her even more.
    "Well, when the pack leader tells you not to do something, you shouldn't do it."
    Mari couldn't help laughing. "Right, and what about that antique morganite ring you bought when Cash said you two needed to buckle down so that you could get together enough money for a down payment on a house? And the money you spent at the tables in Vegas, after Cash told you flat out that he didn't want you gambling except for slots because you tend to lose your head and then your shirt? And what about the Frenchton puppy you spent twenty-five hundred dollars on when you could have saved a life and gotten a stray from the Humane Society for a couple hundred bucks? And the –"
    "All right, all right," Abby said, pursing her lips in annoyance. "You've made your point. But, at least what I do just affects his pocketbook. It doesn't affect the club – the pack – itself."
    "That's a very naïve viewpoint. You don't think that you spending Cash's money willy-nilly as you sometimes do, doesn't drive him to do things to make money that puts everyone else in the club in danger?"
    That earned her another sigh, this time of pure exasperation. "Dammit, Mari, stop pointing out the flaws in my arguments!"
    "Yeah, that'll work. It worked well, too, when I tried to get my father to get the pack to go legit. That didn't end so well, so I think I'll stop."
    That was an enormous understatement, and the both of them