Page 102 of Nothing More

“I’m fine,” she insisted, even as a hard shudder gripped her.

“Yeah, no.” He kissed her again, all heat and promise, and then spun her around and marched her back toward the French doors.

Raven groaned.

“We have to put the soup away,” he said. “Or eat it.”

Her next groan was more of a laugh. “You’re no fun.”

He leaned forward to nip at the top of her ear as they walked. Whispered, “I’ll make it up to you.”

Right. Soup first.

~*~

The master suite was as lavish as the rest of the flat. Big four-poster bed that one had to hike themselves ungracefully up onto – he’d tossed her onto it, her belly squirming with delight, a giggle smothered in her palm. Layers of rugs to keep the feet warm, blackout drapes to keep out the city light, and lamps on the chunky side tables with dim bulbs, so the room was suffused with a soft, butter glow of the sort most flattering to the naked form. Across from the bed, below a wall-mounted TV, was a gas fireplace, its flames currently dancing in an orange line behind glass.

In her current loose-limbed, fucked-out state, she could allow herself the luxury of calling the suite “romantic.”

They lay side-by-side, sticky shoulder to sticky shoulder, his ankle hooked over hers, passing a cigarette back and forth and admiring the ceiling rose. Getting their breath back.

It was the sort of the moment, the sort of state, designed for sharing secrets. Confessions, and quiet reflections, and the sorts of vulnerable conversations too fragile to hold their shape in the daylight.

Before Raven could properly gather her thoughts – brain still a pleasurable puddle between her ears – Toly said, “Tenny’s right.”

“God, don’t tell him that. His ego barely fits through the door as it is.” She accepted the cig as he passed it over. “Right about what?”

“The fastest, safest thing would be for me to leave town. Stay away for a while.”

“Oh, God, you heard him?”

“He’s not wrong.” A stubbornness had come into his voice, and it sent a warning crackling down her still-recovering nerves. A desperate clutch in her stomach.No. Don’t go.

Raven sighed, rolled over to stub out the cigarette in the plate on the nightstand, and rolled back, propped up on an elbow so she could see his face. Yep, stubborn. The set of his jaw, the slant of his brows, drawn together in a show of mulish concern that shouldn’t have been possible after the way he’d just blown her back out.

She poked his cheek with a fingertip, and felt the flex of muscle in response, as he swallowed. “Now you listen to me. He’s my brother, no matter how newly discovered, so I’m obliged to love him, but Tennyson Fox is not nearly as smart as he pretends to be. Emotionally, he’s no better than a brat in short pants. He goads people, that’s what he does. Herelishesit. He was only trying to needle me, and probably you, too. I have no doubt he meant for you to overhear him. He doesn’t like people,” she huffed. “He likes hurting them. You heard him: he calls his own husband an idiot and a stupid tit to his face. The boy’sabnormal.”

Her little speech didn’t help, though. If anything, the groove between his brows deepened. He shifted his head a fraction on the pillow, so he could meet her gaze, his own terribly serious. “I’m not a bodyguard.”

Her pulse thumped uneasily. “That’s inconvenient, darling, given what you’ve been doing the past two months.”

“I’m not,” he insisted. “I never was. I never worked security for anyone.”

She bit back another sigh. “You’re being very enigmatic. Is it on purpose?”

“Misha knows that.” A wealth of meaning, of heavy memories, in that one name. Sound of it left the fine hairs standing up on the back of her neck, and she’d never even met the man. “If he’s had eyes on me – and we know he has – then he’ll be wondering why the club put me on guard duty, when it’s not anything I’ve done before, or anything I’m any good at.”

“Well,” she aimed for a light tone, “don’t sell yourself short. Youaregood at it.”

“Raven,” he said, seriously. Another name that left her skin prickling, in an entirely different and pleasant way. “HeknowsI don’t guard people.”

She allowed herself that second sigh, then, breath unsteady in her throat. “Which is why he’s assumed that I’m a means to hurt you. That I’m important to you.”

He held her gaze a long, unblinking moment.Youareimportant to me. He didn’t say, and she refused to let herself read the words in the heaviness of his gaze. But the sentiment was there, weighty as a stone dropped between them.

He looked back up at the ceiling, hands linking over his stomach, and let out a long, slow breath. “I should go.”

She knew he didn’t simply mean leave for the night. Leave her bed. He meant togo. The notion left her sick. “What if I didn’t want you to?”

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