watched me in concern as he pulled them on, and the look Marc shot him could have frozen lava. But Jace was unfazed. “I’ll get her fixed up. You go get her a clean shirt.”
“I am not leaving you alone with her. Here.” Where Jace and I had…connected. On the living room floor.
Jace rolled brilliant blue eyes. “Like I’m gonna hit on her while she’s upset.”
“If memory serves, that’s when she’s most…receptive,” Marc spat.
My temper flared and my hands curled into fists, but I kept my mouth shut. He’d survived being cuckolded—I could survive his anger.
Jace stomped into the kitchen and slammed his hands flat on the countertop, staring across the island at Marc. “You can take this out on me if you want, but leave her the hell alone.”
“You talk to me like that again, and I’ll take this out on your face,” Marc growled through clenched teeth.
“Go for it.” Jace stood straight and spread his arms, inviting the first blow. He wanted to fight, but he wouldn’t start it because he knew that would piss me off.
Marc was trying to piss me off. To hurt me like I’d hurt him.
And his tongue turned out to be just as sharp as mine.
“No.” I should have been encouraged by the fact that I didn’t have to raise my voice to stop them, but in that moment, I was kind of seeing the cup as half-empty. “Unless you want to tell my dad that I beat the snot out of you both, you better lay the hell off.” I looked up from the bottle, cold and wet in my hand. “I can’t go in there wearing Ryan’s blood, and if I borrow a shirt from either one of you, someone’s going to ask what happened to my own.”
“Fine.” Marc nodded toward the front door. “Jace, go get her a clean shirt. She has another one just like it.” In fact, I had several button-down black blouses, useful for both work and play.
Jace shrugged. “And what should I say when someone sees me rooting through her drawers, or even just coming out of her room with a shirt?”
“Damn it,” Marc swore. No one would question his presence in my room, or his possession of my shirt—in a good month, I lost a couple of articles of clothing in the line of duty, and at least one more to the force of nature that is Marc and his impatience. He slammed one fist into the countertop, then took off for the door without another glance at either of us.
When he was gone, Jace ran water in the sink, then sank onto the couch next to me with a steaming, damp rag. “Do you, um, want to take that off?” He was staring at my bloodstained shirt. “In the most platonic sense of…stripping.”
“I shouldn’t.” Not until Marc was back. But I could hardly stand the scent of Ryan’s blood on me. It reminded me of what I’d just done to him, and what he’d let happen to me. So I twisted away from Jace and unbuttoned my blouse.
He gave me space to move, but I felt his gaze on me like a palpable heat, and my heart beat faster.
My hand shook when I dropped the soiled cotton on the floor.
“Here, lean back,” Jace whispered, and when I didn’t move—when I couldn’t, for fear of shattering my fragile self-control—he slid one strong hand behind my neck and cradled my skull, tilting my head back with gentle pressure.
He wiped the back of my jaw with the warm, wet rag, and his pulse whooshed faster with each movement. He closed his eyes, and my heartbeat spiked with panic. There was no platonic touching between me and Jace. Not anymore. And I’d already learned that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of…Marc’s fury and pain.
“I got it.” I took the rag from him and perfunctorily cleaned my neck and chest, while he stared at the floor, obviously determined not to watch. To think about something else. When I was done, I dropped the rag on the end table and turned to lean against the couch arm, my legs folded beneath me to keep distance between us.
Jace frowned at me, his intense gaze searching mine. He’d found something else to focus on, and I could already tell I wouldn’t like the change of subject. “Do you really dream about it? About being in that basement?”
I stared into my lap, where my fingers tried to twist one another into knots, until Jace’s hand closed over them. “You think I’d make that up?”
“You never said anything. Does Marc know?”
I nodded. “How could he not?”
Jace inhaled deeply, and I heard his pulse speed up. “If sleeping alone makes it worse…you don’t have to sleep alone.” I looked up with one brow raised, but he rushed on. “I’m not asking for anything. I’m just saying…I’m here.”
My heart ached, like it was too full to fit in my chest, and I blinked to keep him from seeing that. “Yeah. Until Marc kills you.”
“I’d like to see him try.”
“I wouldn’t.”
Footsteps clomped up the stairs, and Jace moved a foot away on the couch. The door swung open and Marc took us both in. He scowled, but made no comment. We hadn’t broken the rules—technically.
“Here.” He tossed the clean shirt at me and I stood to put it on. “You better hurry. Angela just turned into the driveway.”
Chapter Two
I jogged across the backyard toward the main house, Marc and Jace on my heels. We burst through the back door, and they passed me when I stopped in the guest bathroom to make sure my shirt was straight and there were no leaves in my hair. I had gotten all the blood off my neck, but I had to wash my hands to get Ryan’s scent off my right fist, which was when I discovered I’d split two of my knuckles on his face. Crap.
None of my fellow cats would give it a second thought; they’d assume I’d assaulted the hanging bag without my gloves again. But Angela…She probably wouldn’t know what to make of my split knuckles, not to mention the thin white line bisecting my left cheek. At least my sleeve covered the long, zigzag of new scar tissue on my left forearm—that was one less question to answer. Assuming she was bold enough to actually ask.
Her engine growled out front, and my pulse spiked almost painfully. Why was I so nervous? Well, truthfully, everyone was nervous. It isn’t every day you meet your dead brother’s pregnant girlfriend. A human girlfriend, at that. And she had no idea that we weren’t completely human, so a good deal of the ambient tension had to do with hiding our little secret, so she didn’t run screaming into the…broad daylight.
The rest of it had to do with the baby. Ethan’s baby, whose existence we’d only discovered the day we buried my brother. A tiny piece of him we’d had no reason to hope for. The grandchild my parents never expected.
That baby was a genetic miracle, and we desperately wanted Angela to like us. To want to include us in her child’s life.
Yet my own nerves went beyond that. They were a complex mix of jealousy, nostalgia, and relief over my near miss with a tragically mundane life.
Angela would be my first up-close look at anything resembling normalcy since I’d left grad
