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.”
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 school. The freedom I’d once fought for was now gone—choked out of existence by the iron grip of responsibility—and the life I’d once run from had reclaimed me. I’d made my own choices, and while I had undeniably moved past that escapist phase of my life, there was some tiny part of me that leaned toward panic at the knowledge that I couldn’t go back now even if I wanted to.
I stared into the mirror, trying to see myself as she would see me. Tangled hair, scarred cheek, skinned knuckles. My face was too thin, my arms and shoulders too well-defined. And there was a hardness behind my eyes now, difficult to describe, but impossible to miss.
I’d seen and done things that would have put most women my age in a padded room. I’d fought for my life, my freedom, and my family. I’d been kidnapped, beaten, broken, clawed, and stabbed. I’d caught rogues, and killed killers, and I’d watched my brother die. It was hard to believe that less than a year ago, I’d been a student like Angela.
Minus the whole faulty-condom-turned-miracle thing.My mother appeared in the bathroom doorway, nervously twisting her wedding ring as I tried to finger-comb my hair. “She’s here.”
“So I heard.” I turned away from my identity crisis and smiled, almost amused to see her so flustered. My mom hadn’t blinked an eye when she’d faced down a jungle stray in her own basement, but now she looked ready to lose her breakfast. “It’ll be fine,” I insisted, while doubt rang in my head, soft but insistent. There was no way we’d come off like the average American household. The Addams Family had a better shot.
What if Angela knew something was scary-different about us, and she took off with Ethan’s baby? What if she decided not to have it?
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this.” My mother straightened her freshly pressed blouse, and the high arch of her brows managed to convey both eagerness and dread. “I mean, obviously we should help her financially, but maybe we should…keep our distance. It’s not really a good time, with you all leaving tomorrow….”
After months of waiting, lobbying, and fighting on the sidelines, our big day had finally come. Marc, Jace, and I would accompany my father to a meeting of the full Territorial Council, ostensibly for the vote that could reinstate him as council chair—or put Jace’s megalomaniac stepfather, Calvin Malone, in power. But our real reason for going was to present hard-won evidence against Malone as a traitor to our species and hopefully put him out of the running. And completely out of power.
I shoved aside my own doubts and linked my arm through hers to keep her from twisting her own fingers off. “The timing is out of our hands,” I said, and she could only nod. “Let’s just try not to overwhelm her.”
I stepped into the hall, half tugging my mother, and rolled my eyes when I saw Brian, Parker, and Vic peering through the sidelight windows. “Guys. Come on. We’re trying not to overwhelm her.”
Brian shrugged, looking younger than ever, and Vic just frowned and crossed his arms over his chest. “You really think there’s any chance of that?”
“If you guys lay off the stares and turn on the charm, yeah.” Though privately I had my doubts. “Remember, you’re normal, nonfurry ranch hands and good friends of the family.” That was close enough to the truth to be believable—if the Lazy S had been a functioning ranch. And if ranch hands were trained to protect their Alpha, patrol their territory, and take down bad guys with badass paw-to-paw combat.