Page 83 of Mason

I blink. “Hide what?”

He gives me a flat look. “That you and Mason are fucking.”

My stomach drops.

Mason, to his credit, doesn’t react at all. Just tilts his head, waiting for Clay to continue.

Clay sighs. “I get it, okay? You don’t want to rub it in my face. But I’m a grown man. I can handle knowing that for once, my sister is sleeping with a guy I actually respect.”

I swallow hard, glancing at Mason, but his expression is unreadable.

Clay shrugs. “And by the way?” His gaze flickers to Mason. “I agree with her.”

Mason’s shoulders go rigid.

“She should go back to work,” Clay clarifies. “We can’t just sit in this house and pretend like life isn’t moving forward. She needs normalcy, and you need to let her have it.”

Mason’s hands clench into fists at his sides, and for a second, I don’t think he’s going to give in.

Then he exhales sharply, runs a hand through his hair, and mutters, “Fucking fine.”

Victory thrums through me, but before I can celebrate, Mason levels me with a dark look and warns me to be on high alert at all times.

“We still don’t know who burnt your house down,” he reminds me.

I snort, giving him a small shrug. I still think it was just one of those random acts, possibly even a wiring issue that the fire department got their knickers in a knot over.

“If we’re doing this,” Mason says, his voice low and uncompromising, “we’re doing it properly.”

I cross my arms, already bristling at his tone. “Meaning?”

His smirk is infuriatingly casual, but his eyes—his eyes aren’t. There’s nothing casual in the way he looks at me.

“Meaning,” he drawls, tilting his head, “you can’t very well go to work in my old sweats and T-shirts.”

And just like that, I know exactly where this is going.

Mason takes me shopping.

Not the casual kind of shopping where we wander from store to store, picking out things as we go. No, this is an operation. A mission. A meticulously planned extraction of every item he deems necessary for my new life.

I try to keep my exasperation in check as he dismisses half the racks with a single glance, his standards impossibly high, his expression dark and brooding as he steers me toward only the best.

It’s not about the clothes.

It’s about control.

It’s about the fact that he can’t stand that I’m going back to work. That, for the first time since this war began, I’m stepping out of his protection, out of his reach.

So instead of fighting it, he does the next best thing.

He armors me in his own way.

The bags stack up in the back seat of his car, evidence of his reluctant surrender, and when we stop for lunch at a little bistro outside the mall, I can feel the tension still rolling off him in waves.

Mason doesn’t eat like a man enjoying a meal.

He eats like a man on high alert, his eyes constantly scanning the streets, watching, assessing, tracking the flow of pedestrians like he’s expecting something to go wrong at any second.

---