Page 19 of Ten Hammers

“Is she still sleeping?” Jack repeats. He and Gavin are both on the loveseat, and they might not be blood brothers but the look on their faces as they glower at me from across the room are identical.

Lifting my chin, I say, “Yeah. She’s still sleeping.”

“Good. Join us. Seems like you have quite a bit to catch us up on.” Jack has a mug of coffee. Takes a sip, his steel eyes never breaking contact.

I stay put as I glance at Mace. “You couldn’t get my side of the story before you told the world?”

“What is your side of the story then, man?” Gavin interrupts. There’s a fire in his eyes I’ve never seen before. His nostrils flare. I’m surprised lava isn’t pouring out of his mouth instead of words.

Raking my hands through my hair, I wonder not what’s going to appease my brothers, but what Winnie would want me to say. What she would want me to keep private.

Before I can say anything, Mace speaks up. “After she came onto me in the kitchen… well, came onto you in the kitchen, I went up to her room. You know, just to make sure she got back to bed safely, because clearly I’m a fool, because I’d actually believed she was sleepwalking–”

“But she wasn’t in her bed,” Gunnar takes over.

“Want to tell us where she was?” Gavin leans back, folding his arms across his chest.

God, he’s pissed.

“No.” Theo, from the sofa, holds up a hand to silence me before I’ve even had time to begin putting a response together. “You don’t have to.”

“Because as Mason was coming out of Winnie’s room, I was coming out of mine,” Leo picks up.

He’s leaning against the wall, and I swear my neck is getting a workout as I try to keep up with them all. It’s like they’ve got me surrounded.

Fuck, did they rehearse this?

“What is this?” I say, rolling my eyes. “An intervention?”

“A Wintervention,” Jack shoots back dryly.

Diesel, sitting by the fireplace, snorts into his guitar. Some of the other guys have to keep straight faces, too, and I hope Jack’s quip will break the tension, as he usually does.

No such luck.

“Mason told me what happened,” Leo plows on. “We decided we should look around for her, make sure she didn’t sleepwalk into the damn pool to skinny dip with Joe Jonas.”

“It was Harry Styles,” Mace murmurs.

“What-the-fuck-ever.” Leo slams his left fist into his right open hand. “When I walked by your room, it became pretty fucking obvious where Win was.” He looks down, diverting his eyes away from me. His voice is thick with betrayal. “I heard some very interesting sounds. Moaning, groaning, her crying out your name.”

“Okay, yeah, I’m sorry you found out that way–”

Jack sits up straight. His mug hits the coffee table with a thud, sloshing some of the liquid onto the wood. “We agreed, Max. Every last damn one of us agreed.”

The triplets have been silent, so I shift my gaze in their direction, hoping one of them will inject some semblance of… reason… into this conversation. Come on, Axel, at least you?

From the looks on their faces, they’re ready for a brawl. Never do the triplets look more identical than they do when they’re about to lose their tempers.

Well, shit.

“We made a pact,” Cruz says. He looks disappointed in me. Even though he’s the one still in his pajamas, eating sugary cereal. And with bedhead to boot.

I press my lips together. What can I say? I wanted Winnie, she wanted me, deal with it? You snooze, you lose?

Over the years, we’ve all had more-than-friends feelings for Winnie at one time or another. So it made sense, eight years ago, when we were all in our late teens and early twenties, when we were embarking on a career in reality television where we knew it would be imperative we all stick together and, above all else, stay a team… We made a pact that none of us would get romantically involved with Winnie. Period.

Cruz is now looking down into the cereal in his lap. “We all saw how her father treated her, dude. We vowed to be her army of soldiers, to protect her no matter what, not to ever risk being someone who broke her heart.”

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