“You two know each other?” Mirabeau asked with surprise.
“That business with Vincent and Jackie,” Tiny said solemnly.
“Oh yes.” Mirabeau nodded at once and smiled apologetically at Marcus. “You and Christian arrived in time to help with the turn and what followed.”
Marcus nodded. “I saw the two of you at the big multi-wedding as well, but you were both a bit distracted and then gone, of course, on your secret mission. I’m glad that worked out all right.”
“There were a couple of close moments, but it turned out better than all right in the end,” Tiny said with a grin, slipping his free hand through Mirabeau’s.
Marcus nodded as they shared a smile and muttered, “I should be so lucky.”
Mirabeau glanced to him quickly. “Jackie told us about you and Divine. She might be Basha, but no one’s sure.”
Marcus grimaced and nodded.
“But Jackie says she’s pretty sure that if Divine is Basha, she can’t be rogue like Lucian thinks,” Tiny added solemnly. “And I’ve never known Jackie to be wrong. Things will work out.”
“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Marcus said, running a weary hand through his hair. He shouldn’t be tired, he’d just woken up for God’s sake, but he was as exhausted as if he hadn’t slept at all.
“It’s the situation,” Mirabeau said sympathetically, as if he’d spoken his thoughts aloud. And he might as well have, he supposed. His mind was apparently an open book right now to everyone.
“Yeah, well, we’ve all been there, so can sympathize,” Tiny said gently.
“Yeah,” Marcus drew out the word and then asked wryly, “Do you think you could stop doing that and maybe only address things I say out loud?”
“We could try,” Mirabeau said with amusement.
“I’d appreciate that,” Marcus assured her.
“Why don’t you come over here and stick some Popsicle sticks in apples and we’ll try to sort out how you can convince Divine that she is your life mate and should accept you as hers,” Tiny suggested, waving him over.
“She knows she’s my life mate,” Marcus muttered, accepting the bag of Popsicle sticks Tiny held out to him and then moving in front of an empty tray with a basket of apples beside it. “At least she should after last night.”
“I’m afraid the issue isn’t that she hasn’t accepted that he is her life mate,” Mirabeau commented, taking a stick from his bag and showing him how to stick it in the apple and place it on the tray. It was a pretty simple procedure. Still, examples were always good.
“No,” Tiny agreed, moving back to stirring his pots. “It’s convincing her that she can have him.”
“She can have me,” Marcus assured them, stabbing an apple. “Anytime, anywhere, anyhow.”
“Yeah. I feel you, buddy,” Tiny said with amusement.
Mirabeau rolled her eyes as the men shared a wry smile, and then said seriously, “But she doesn’t think you’ll want her for a life mate once you know she’s Basha Argeneau.”
Marcus stiffened, his head slowly turning to the woman. It was Tiny who said with surprise, “You’re sure she’s Basha?”
Mirabeau nodded solemnly. “It’s right there in her thoughts, plain as day.”
“I didn’t get that,” Tiny said with a frown.
“You haven’t been an immortal for long, sweetheart. You might not be reading everything clearly.”
“Yeah, but Jackie and Vincent didn’t read that and Vincent is four or five hundred years old,” Tiny pointed out.
“But I’m older,” Mirabeau pointed out quietly. “And it’s possible that wasn’t on the top of her list of concerns when she arrived at Jackie and Vincent’s. After all, Marcus was hurting, she was hurting . . .” Mirabeau shrugged.
“But it is now?” Marcus asked with a frown. “On the top of her list of concerns, I mean.”
Mirabeau nodded. “She wants you as her lover and life mate. That’s on the top of her mind right now. That she wants you, but doesn’t think she can have you. That she has to escape. That you would turn from her anyway if you knew she was Basha. She knows you’re a spy for Lucian.”
“How the hell did she find that out?” Marcus growled, stabbing another apple, a little too enthusiastically this time. He snapped the stick.
Mirabeau took the apple from him to remove the stick and replace it. “I’m not sure. I guess she could have read Jackie and Vincent, but I don’t think that’s it.” She was silent for a minute, and then shrugged and said, “It doesn’t matter. The point is she knows you were sent here by Lucian to find her. She also knows Lucian is on the way here and she’s desperate to escape.”
“What do I do?” Marcus asked quietly.
Mirabeau shrugged. “You two need to spend time together doing more than fighting or having sex. You need to gain her trust, Marcus. I think Jackie’s right and she isn’t rogue, or at least not intentionally. But you need to get her to trust you so you can find out what’s what.”
Marcus was silent for a minute. He knew Divine—Basha, he corrected himself, had been feeding off the hoof despite the Council’s banning it. But she hadn’t known about the ban. He wasn’t sure that was enough to get her off the hook for it, but surely it had to be a consideration. He couldn’t imagine she’d done anything else that would label her a rogue.
“About that,” Mirabeau said, and Marcus peered at her blankly. He hadn’t said anything. Oh right, he recalled, she could read his thoughts.
“About what?” he asked finally.
“The rogue thing,” she said with a grimace.
“What about it?” he asked warily, suspecting by the way she was avoiding his eyes that he wouldn’t like what she was about to say.
Mirabeau hesitated and then heaved a deep sigh. “Well, Lucian and the boys had Leonius sometime back. About two years ago. They raided a hotel in Toronto, and caught Leonius. Well, actually, they shot him,” she corrected herself. “Through the heart with an arrow. He wasn’t going anywhere.”
Marcus narrowed his eyes when she paused again. He knew the story, but asked anyway, “And?”
“And someone took him. Just picked him up and carried him off while everyone was busy with his victims.”
“Someone?” Marcus questioned grimly.
“Yeah, well, they didn’t know who at first, but Mortimer, the head of Lucian’s Rogue Hunters—”
“I know who Mortimer is,” Marcus interrupted impatiently.
“Right. Well, he reviewed all of the hotel security tapes and it was a woman. Cameras in the stairwells showed a blond woman carrying Leonius up to the roof. I saw them. There were no really good pictures of her face, but from what I saw, it could have been Divine. A blond Divine.”
Marcus didn’t comment, but his heart was sinking. He’d discovered last night, while his head was under Divine’s skirt, that her hair was not naturally the color she presently wore. Her hair was dyed.
“And then there’s Dee,” Mirabeau added.
“Dee?” Marcus asked. “The mortal victim and kind of co-conspirator to one of Leonius’s sons?”
Mirabeau nodded. “She described a woman connected to Leonius named Basha, an ice blonde . . . who was his mother,” she finished apologetically.
Marcus was so startled by that one that not only did he stab at the next apple with enough enthusiasm to break the stick, but he missed the apple entirely and broke the stick in his own hand. Cursing, he dropped the apple and jumped back, holding his injured hand by the wrist.
“Okay. No problem,” Tiny said soothingly, at his side at once. The big man took his injured hand, quickly removed the stick, and wrapped a dish towel around the wound, then turned to open the small bar-sized fridge and retrieved a bag of blood for him.