“Long but super smooth, thanks. I’m starving, though. What’s with this five hours in the air and no in-flight meal crap? Is that a new thing?” She dropped onto the couch with a grateful sigh. “I was ready to give myself to the pilot for another sad little bag of nuts.”
“Who are you kidding? You’re a sucker for a man in uniform. I think the peanuts would’ve been optional.”
Cat snort-laughed and nodded. “You’re probably right. I didn’t get a look at him, though, so I can’t say for sure.” She held out a handful of papers. “These are for you. The chubby little guy at the front desk asked me to bring them.”
Lacey rolled her eyes. “Awesome.”
“What are they?”
“Notes from my mother. Whoever is at the front desk probably didn’t get the memo that I don’t want them. Other than these? It’s been great. We don’t have phone or Internet here, and she hasn’t been able to get her paws on Galen’s cell number, so she’s taken to calling the front desk with scathing messages for me.” She tossed them, unread, onto the coffee table.
Galen sauntered into the room in a pair of threadbare gym shorts, scrubbing his damp hair with a towel. “Hey, did you see where my camera w—” His eyes bugged out a little when his sister stood. “Holy shit, what are you doing here, runt?” Although he sounded happy to see her, there was a split second where his face dropped.
Lacey’s heart felt a little lighter for it. Maybe he wasn’t quite ready to let go, either.
“Came to check on my girl and make sure you weren’t boring her to tears with sports talk or driving her to drink with your terrible jokes.”
He slung the towel over his shoulder, leaving his bare chest and eight-pack abs in plain view. “Let’s ask her. Am I boring you to tears yet, squirt?” There was no mistaking the challenge in his voice. As if he were daring her to tell Cat exactly what had been going on between them.
She swallowed hard and shook her head. “N-not really. We’ve been…sparring.”
He grinned and nodded slowly, still not breaking eye contact with her. “We have been doing that.”
Cat whipped her head toward Lacey, then to Galen, and back again before she held up a hand. She made a noise that sounded either like a muffled scream or like the squeal of tires coming to a halt. “Hold up.” She wrinkled her nose as if she’d just been handed week-old fish stuffed inside the dirty tube sock of a teenage boy. “You two are… Are you? Oh, ew. Just…just fucking ew.” She speared her hands into her copper-colored hair and blew out a sigh. “When?”
“What do you mean, when?” Galen asked, chuckling. “Last night. The night before. The night before that. This morning.” He’d ticked off each instance on his fingers and sent Lacey a broad wink at the last one. She groaned and buried her face in her hands.
“I meant,” Cat said, enunciating crisply while treating her brother to a death stare, “when did it start, moron.”
Galen shrugged, the picture of nonchalance as he made his way into the kitchen. “Last week. When we found out Lacey wasn’t really married.” He ignored her outraged gasp and started taking out fixings for a ham sandwich.
Cat wheeled on Lacey. “A week? You’ve been boning my brother for a week and you didn’t think to mention it? Sisters before misters, remember, Lace? We’re supposed to tell each other everything.”#p#分页标题#e#
The hurt in her voice made Lacey feel like gum on the bottom of a shoe and she scrambled to explain. “We didn’t come here with this in mind. It just sort of…happened.”
“Oh, geez, now you sound like Marty. You don’t bang someone by accident.” Lacey opened her mouth to clarify, but Cat cut her off. “Nope. I don’t need to hear any more. It doesn’t matter. You’re both adults, and you have the right to do what you want with whom you want, no matter how much it grosses me out. I wish you had told me when it first happened, though.”
Lacey nodded miserably. What was there to say? Cat was right. They’d never had secrets between them before. How could she explain that what she was experiencing with Galen felt so tenuous, so fragile that she was afraid even the slightest disturbance would make it disappear? That the time they had was so short and precious, she didn’t want to waste a second of it on the telephone justifying it. But she couldn’t say either of those things because Galen was in the room with them, and he didn’t deserve that kind of pressure from her.