Page 67 of Beau and the Beast

Both were good guesses.

"If that's the case, I'm glad that you were the person," she said. "Is there anything you need that you don't have? It looks like you're making great progress on the manuscript."

She expected him to say that no, all of his needs were being met, that everything had been taken care of. Instead, he looked off into the distance for a long moment of silence.

"Thereisone thing," he said.

"Tell me and we'll make it happen."

"I'm worried about my brother," he said seriously.

"Is he in some sort of trouble?"

"I don't know," Beau said, shaking his head. "That's the problem. There's no way for me to know here because I can't contact him, can't have the internet."

Violet was tempted—so tempted—to raise the bans that they had put in place for Beau. He was honest and good, wasn't he? No one could fake the type of goodness that he'd brought to the condo. Why would he do anything to expose Wolfram when he'd been working so diligently to try and break their curse?

But some shrewd part of Violet stopped her from saying it, from breaking all of the stipulations that she and the rest of the staff had put in place.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I can't change the rules that we made. We did it to protect Wolfram. I'm sure you understand."

"Of course," Beau said, raising a hand. "Of course, that wasn't even what I meant. I just—I hoped that someone could search for him. Noah Blake, 25—I can give you any sort of information that you want. I just was hoping that you or Geoffrey or James could put his name into a search engine and make sure he hasn't gotten himself arrested or hospitalized or... worse."

Violet nodded. "We can do that. Certainly. I'll get Geoffrey to search for him everywhere he can think of once we go back inside. Truth be told, I believe he hacked into Noah's files and personal computer after Noah blackmailed us."

Beau laughed at that, throwing his head back and shutting his eyes. "God, he'll be pissed about that," Beau said. "He always insisted that nobody could ever hack him and I always said he was too full of himself."

Violet smiled. "He sounds a lot like Geoffrey. Maybe in another lifetime they would've been fast friends."

Beau nodded.

"If it will make you feel more at ease, we'll certainly do whatever we can to make sure that you're brother is happy and healthy."

"Thank you, Violet."

* * *

When Beau returned from lunch, he smelled like fresh air.

“You’ve been outside,” Wolfram said before Beau had even walked through the door entirely. Wolfram closed his eyes and drank in the scent of it, unashamedly breathing deep and savoring it—car exhaust and ozone, bird feathers and sunshine baked into the fabric of Beau’s clothes, into his hair.

“I had lunch on the balcony.”

When Wolfram opened his eyes, Beau was seated across from him at the table.

Oh no.

His hair was windswept and his cheeks were pink, just barely kissed by the sun. He looked renewed, like a drooping and forgotten houseplant a day after it had been watered and set into a sunny spot.

It was going to be absolutely impossible to ignore how handsome he was.

Beau’s shirt hung open, too, the sweater from earlier in the morning gone. Several inches of tantalizingly smooth skin were visible below his graceful long neck. Wolfram had never seen that much of his skin before. It was going to be torturous not to stare.

"I feel like there's a huge chunk of your life we haven't touched on yet," Beau said, shattering his reverie. At least it didn’t look like he’d noticed Wolfram’s predatory gaze.

"Oh?" Wolfram said lamely.

Wolfram did a quick inventory of things. They'd talked about Wolfram's childhood, his relationship with his parents when he was young, his school years, college, his first few years of working in the real world. That left very few large "chunks" as far as Wolfram was concerned, and those left over weren't his favorite topics.

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