gray gaze cut away from his face to look at her brother. “Sure thing, honey.” She glanced at Sloan again as she started toward the house. “Thanks for your help with the snowman. Hope you have a good time with your sister.”
Given a choice, he’d have been happy to stay right where he was, with or without Pam’s unwanted attention. There wasn’t a romance brewing for the simple reason that he didn’t do romance. No point.
But the heat? That was definitely already on.
Chapter Four
“Here.” A longneck bottle appeared over Sloan’s shoulder, and he looked back to see his brother-in-law standing there.
He wanted nothing from Axel, but he could see Tara watching them from across the living room of the Double-C’s main house, where they’d all congregated after the New Year’s Day feast. He accepted the bottle and clinked the bottom of it once against Axel’s and turned his attention back to the football game playing on the wall-mounted television.
His hope that the other man would move along was blown when Axel sat down on the couch, too.
“Tara’s worried you’re going to book when your stint with Max is up.”
He already knew that. But he was damned if he knew what to do about it when he couldn’t even figure out what he wanted to do. He thought a little longingly of Abby’s dinner. He wouldn’t be having this conversation if he’d canceled on his sister and stayed with Abby and Dillon. But if he’d canceled, he’d just have another thing to regret where Tara was concerned. “Whether I stay or not doesn’t have anything to do with Tara.”
Axel grimaced. “Right, ’cause it has to do with me.”
Sloan picked at the bottle label with his thumb. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Neither do I. But I love my wife. And she loves you.”
“I’ve told her she needs to stop worrying about me.”
Axel laughed shortly. “Yeah. That’s going to happen. She’s finally got you back. She doesn’t want to lose you again.”
“Whatever I decide, she’s not going to lose me.” He kept his focus on the television, even though the first half of the football game had just ended. “Undercover work for me is in the past.” He hadn’t merely worked undercover. He’d been deep undercover. So deep, and for so long, that the line between reality and fiction had gotten way too blurred.
Some days—most days—it still felt that way.
The record books would show a successful conclusion to the operation. A deadly gang had been dismantled. Murdering thieves had been imprisoned.
But in the end, Sloan’s ATF career had been toast and the woman he’d loved—whom Axel Clay had been brought in to protect—had been dead.
He knew he couldn’t lay the blame for Maria’s death at Axel’s door even if he wanted to. Sloan was the one who’d set that into motion when he’d told her the truth about what he was really doing. He hadn’t wanted to lose her. But he’d lost her anyway when she’d tried going back to her old life once he’d taken his years of evidence to his bosses. If she hadn’t known the truth about Sloan, they’d have left her alone. She wouldn’t have been a possible witness in their eyes; she’d have just been the cocktail waitress they’d never had reason to distrust.
All she’d wanted to do was keep her life intact, but she’d paid a fatal price for it. Then it all seemed to be repeating itself when Sloan’s sister suddenly found herself in the same sort of danger. It was Axel who’d succeeded in keeping Tara safe. Sloan was grateful for that, but he still knew it was his fault that she’d needed protecting in the first place.
He gave his brother-in-law a steady look. “Whether I stay or go doesn’t have anything to do with you, either,” he said evenly. “Or Maria,” he made himself add. For his sister’s sake. “Tara’s good at putting down roots. I’m not.”
“You’re good at it when there’s something that matters enough to you.” Axel’s tone was just as deliberate. “You spent a lot of years riding with Johnny Diablo and the Deuces.” He scooped up his two-year-old son, Aidan, who was chasing full tilt after one of his older cousins. “Seems to me the question is what does matter that much to you?”
Sloan caught his nephew’s wildly swinging foot before it connected with his face and tickled the bottom of it, making Aidan squeal. The little whirlwind managed to climb from his dad’s lap to Sloan’s back, where he clung like a monkey. “Ride! Ride!”
Glad for an excuse, Sloan rose from the couch. “Duty calls.” He turned on his heel to give Axel’s son his requested ride.
They went as far as the basement, which was as crowded as the upstairs living room. The main house was big, but so was the extensive Clay family. They had every age covered from babies to octogenarians.
“Gampa, Gampa, Gampa,” Aidan yelled when he spotted Squire sitting amid a trio of young teenagers.
The old man handed his video-game controller to the only girl in the trio. “Infernal game,” he groused. But considering the way his face was creased with a grin, there wasn’t a lot of bite to it.
Tristan Clay, who was the youngest and wealthiest of Squire’s sons—and as far as Sloan was concerned, the wiliest—roused himself from his napping sprawl nearby. “That infernal game’s putting a new wing on the hospital,” he pointed out without heat.
Squire harrumphed. “Folks have always been willin’ to throw good money away.”
Tristan just smiled faintly, letting the jab pass.
It wasn’t often that Sloan saw Tristan looking so relaxed. He ran his insanely successful video-gaming company, Cee-Vid, but he was also the number two man behind Hollins-Winword, an international firm that dealt in private security and covert intelligence. And it was in that role that Sloan had first dealt with the man and his nephew, Axel. Before he’d gone undercover with the Deuces, he’d asked Hollins-Winword to watch over Tara. She still hadn’t quite forgiven him for not informing her of that particular fact, but since she was as happy as a clam now with Axel, she didn’t beat him up with it too often.
“Give me my great-grandson,” Squire told Sloan, and he was happy enough to push aside the memories as he detached the kid’s fingers from his hair to set him on the floor. The kid immediately bulleted toward the gray-haired man, who scooped him up and blew a raspberry against his neck. Aidan’s laughter filled the spacious room and immediately, young cousins began appearing, clamoring for similar treatment from the old man.
“I thought he was bad with his grandchildren,” Tristan commented, leaving his spot that was no longer peaceful at all to follow Sloan back up the stairs. “He’s twice as bad with his great-grandkids. The man was hell on us when we were growing up, but given the chance, he’ll spoil the daylights out of them.”
Sloan wondered if Abby’s grandfather had been similarly inclined, or if her grandparents had been stricter because they’d taken on a parental role.
They made it to the top of the stairs and turned into the kitchen. The enormous table there was covered with a dozen desserts in varying stages
