Page 122 of Beware of Dog

“Yeah.” Shep didn’t sound convinced.

Cass glanced toward Raven, whose mouth pressed thin and twitched side to side in a tic that Cass was very familiar with: Raven was concerned, but was going to take it upon herself to inject optimism into the situation.

She clicked off the TV and stood. “Come on, darling,” she said to Toly with false brightness. “I’m exhausted. Let’s turn in. The two of you are welcome to stay.” She tipped her head in a way Cass read asplease just stay.“There’s fresh towels in the hall bath.”

Cass wanted to go home, but Tenny and Reese would be there. She wanted to be alone with Shep, and they would have more privacy here, all the way on the opposite side of the massive flat.

“Okay. Thanks.” She smoothed her hand down the back of Shep’s skull and teased the back of his neck with her nails. “You want to go to bed?”

“No,” he said, and then, shoulders bowing, “Yeah.”

He turned her loose with obvious reluctance when she slid off his lap. Followed her silently down the hall to her old room. They took turns in the bathroom, and when Cass slid between the sheets in her PJs, he stripped down to his boxer-briefs and crowded in beside her under the covers, arm going around her waist and drawing her close.

Cass twisted around so she faced him. She’d switched the lamp off, but city light filtered through the sheer drapes, a dull glow that picked out lines and old acne scars along his cheekbone in the darkness. She laid one hand in the center of his chest, where he was warmest, his skin soft, and the dusting of hair rough. His heartbeat throbbed against her palm, a trot instead of the gentle walk it should have been. She laid her other hand along the plane of his cheek, where nighttime stubble prickled against her fingertips.

“I would ask if you’re okay,” she said, “but I know you’re not.”

He turned his head, as she stroked his face, and kissed the heel of her hand. Then he settled again, and let out a deep breath that smelled of toothpaste. Ever since he’d arrived, he kept exhaling like breathing was difficult…or like he carried a physical weight yoked across his shoulders.

When he spoke, his voice was low, more rumble than sound. “Blackmon. That bastard. That pussy motherfucker. He pointed a street gang at you. He told them to…that he would paythem extra if…” Again, he wouldn’t say it. A muscle in his jaw popped as he ground it.

“But you got it sorted. Mav paid them. They’ll go away,” she reasoned.

“Yeah.” But his voice was tight, and his heart still throbbed too quickly.

His words from her birthday came back to her:nobody’s ever loved me. And now someone did, and he loved her. He’d never had an old lady, not even a serious girlfriend, and violent men had threatened her, and he was clearly having a lot of feelings about that. Feelings he’d not experienced before, and which he had no idea how to process.

She wriggled closer within the circle of his arm, sliding her leg between his, and kissed him, chaste and sweet, on the corner of his mouth. “You’re a very sweet man, Frank Shepherd,” she murmured against his stubbled chin.

He snorted. “Yeah fucking right.” But then he cupped the back of her head and drew her back in to kiss her properly.

Everything he’d choked back and hadn’t been able to say came through in that kiss. The love, the worry, the desperation. He gathered a fistful of her hair and held her tight to him, kissed her until she was dizzy and drunk on the hot, slick press of his tongue in her mouth.

When he rolled her over onto her back and settled between her legs, Cass clung to him, a welcome vessel for all the raw fury his love for her had kindled in his blood tonight.

Thirty

It was a dizzying week leading up to the wedding, and Cass found she had to force herself through her classes, worrying all the time about who would be arriving that day and what sort of drama might unfold in her absence. Tenny and Reese continued to stay at the flat, but thankfully everyone else booked hotel rooms, even her mother, who arrived with Miles and Tommy on Tuesday.

Shep picked her up from class, and she bit her lip to keep from laughing over the obvious pains he’d taken with his appearance. Under his cut and jacket, he wore a button-up blue shirt that had actually seen the business side of an iron. His jeans looked new: dark blue, stiff in the legs, without a single rip or hole anywhere to be seen. His boots gleamed in the sunlight. He’d put so much gel in his hair that it was crunchy, and though he always smelled good to Cass, he’d doused himself in so much cologne today that it burned her nostrils when she got up on her tiptoes to kiss him.

“You look nice.”

“Fuck me,” he muttered, and passed over her helmet. “Come on or we’ll be late.”

She managed to hold on to her laughter until he’d started the bike, and the growl of the engine drowned it out.

They made their way through afternoon downtown traffic to the New Yorker. Shep stood beside his bike a long moment after they’d parked, fiddling with his hair. Cass couldn’t keep back a laugh then, and he scowled at her.

“It’s cute how nervous you are.”

“Shuddup,” he said,nervously, and ducked down to peer at himself in the bike’s mirror. “I’ve never met the womanbefore, and I’ve already put a ring on you. It’ll help my case if I don’t look like I just scraped myself off the floor of a dive bar.”

She chuckled. “You never look like that.”

He shot her ayeah rightglance and fluffed his hair up in front.

Cass propped a hand on her hip. “You get that you’re hot, right?”

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