Bitten (Once Bitten, Twice Shy #1)(28)

Forcing herself to concentrate on what was going on around her, Katherine quickly realized that everyone had turned toward Bastian when the waitress had finished asking her question. She fought the urge to roll her eyes when she realized that they waiting for him to order first. He was their so called alpha after all. Ugh.

But Bastian surprised her – and the others too if their gob smacked expressions were anything to go by – when he looked in her direction. It was clear that he was offering to let her go first.

When Katherine stubbornly kept her mouth shut, however, he began to look frustrated. As the silence stretched on, his shoulders tensed and she could see clearly that he was clenching his jaw.

"Well?" he demanded shortly.

Katherine narrowed her eyes, suspicious of the respect he was showing her. Was this his attempt at chivalry? She hadn't forgotten how he'd treated her thus far. Or before for that matter. Before everything.

Katherine bit her tongue and forced herself to blink away the tears that immediately sprang into her eyes as the image of her bleeding father once again assaulted her vision. She didn't even want to think of her mother and how she... how she had gone.

How could she eat when her insides were such a jumbled mess?

"I'm not hungry," she managed to spit out. She felt stupid that she had to keep repeating herself, but she wasn't about to attempt to eat. Her stomach quivered at the very thought of food – and not in a good way.

"What was that, dear?" the waitress asked as she leaned forward, straining to hear.

The sight of Bastian's balled up fists was the only indication that he, at least, had heard her – though Katherine had no idea why her refusal to eat upset him.

"I said," Katherine enunciated loudly, both for the waitress's benefit and for the sake of riling Bastian, "that I'm not hungry."

The woman shrugged before turning her attention towards Bastian. "And for you, honey?" she asked, her voice developing a more flirtatious inflection. She blinked furiously in a way Katherine suspected she thought to be attractive, but Bastian missed it, his blue eyes refusing to remove themselves from Katherine's form. Eventually, he turned to look at the bottle-blonde grandma.

"She’ll have the ham and eggs special – extra ham – with a large glass of milk," he ordered smoothly. "As for me, I’m keen on…"

Katherine didn’t hear the rest because she was too busy staring at the man, in disbelief that he had the gull to order for her. A sort of self-righteous fury began to build in the pit of her stomach and she knew her heated cheeks must have been painted an angry red.

If he felt her accusing eyes fixated on the side of his face, Bastian made no effort to acknowledge them. Was the man deaf? She had said countless times that she wasn’t hungry!

Katherine waited tensely for the others to order their food. When the waitress sashayed away, she immediately addressed the man. "What was that?" she demanded.

"What was what?" he asked, feigning ignorance.

"You know what! Why did you order for me? I said that I wasn't hungry."

The man's dark eyebrows raised incredulously. "Of course you're hungry."

Before Katherine could retort, Zane interrupted their argument from his spot across the crowded table. "He's right you know. By my calculations, you haven't eaten in over twenty-four hours. And those with our... well, our condition... have particularly ravenous appetites."

Zane's words only angered her further. He – no, they – were not supposed to make sense. But the cold rationality of Zane's statement could not be denied. And that, coupled with the smugness she could practically feel coming off of Bastian in waves, was quickly making Katherine see red.

She was only vaguely aware of Sophie clearing her throat across the table over the ringing in her ears. "Bastian," she spoke quietly, "you have to understand that Katherine has been through quite the ordeal. It probably feels like all of her choices have been stripped from her. And when you took away yet another one by ordering for her-"

Katherine had enough of being talked about like she wasn't even there. "Stop trying to psycho-analyze me!" she shouted across the booth, not caring if she was drawing attention to herself. "I'm sitting right here!"

"As if we could forget," Markus snorted, apparently not satisfied until he'd inserted himself into the argument as well.

Katherine turned her heated glare onto him, but said nothing more. She was too ticked to even open her mouth.

Her angry stare, however, spoke volumes.

The next few minutes passed tensely. Everyone was quiet and it seemed to Katherine as if they were merely waiting for her next outburst. Their silence, however, wasn't as gratifying as she’d thought it might be. Instead of feeling proud that she'd managed to shut them up, she only felt more weighted down. And disappointed in herself that she was letting them get to her.

When Katherine heard the footsteps of the waitress returning, she was almost relieved to see the gum-smacking flirt.

Or she would have been if the footsteps had belonged to her.

Instead, when she looked up from uncomfortably studying the table, she was forced to meet the eyes of a stranger.

The man was tall with wild-looking hair that was pulled back into a sloppy ponytail at the nape of his neck. Despite his casual lean against their table, his leer caused Katherine to discreetly pull herself closer to the booth's padded wall. She estimated him to be around Bastian's age, maybe a bit older. And she wasn't sure how, but as soon as she saw him, she knew. He was one of them.