Page 77 of Beware of Dog

“You could try.” Toly was bare-armed and barefoot and didn’t seem at all bothered by the cold. Fucking Russian. His cigarette cherry glowed, and even if Shep had almost twenty years and thirty pounds on the guy, he couldn’t deny that his absolute calm was spooky as hell. “And it doesn’t matter if you’re afraid of me. You’re afraid enough of Devin and his Foxes that you’ll listen to what I have to say.”

Shep suppressed a shudder and blamed it on the weather.

“How long have you been fucking her?” Toly asked.

“Jesus, don’t say it like that.”

“How long?” he insisted.

Shep sighed. “About a month.”

“At the club apartment?”

There was no use lying, was there? He really didn’t want to. She wasn’t some dirty secret, wasn’t anything he was ashamed of. “Yeah. We’re living together.”

That earned a single, sharp jerk of Toly’s head. “She’s not in her dorm?”

“No. She didn’t wanna stay. Some shit went down with the roommate, but that’s her business to tell, not mine.”

Toly nodded, as if to sayfair enough. “Does she know you’re in love with her?”

He hadn’t expectedthat. It shocked the breath out of him. “Yeah.”

“You told her you are?”

“Yes, goddamnit. Are we done?”

Toly held up a finger. One more thing. “What will you do if and when she decides she wants to move on to better things? To a better man?”

Punch you in the fucking face, he thought. But that wasn’t the real answer to that question. The real answer was, throat getting stuck halfway through, “Let her go with my blessing. And then eat a gun.”

Toly nodded again, and turned for the door.

“Wait. Are you gonna tell Raven?”

“No. You are. Not tonight, if you can’t stomach it. But I won’t do your dirty work.” He slipped inside and left Shep standing in the cold.

~*~

“I wasn’t trying to pressure you back there,” Shep said twenty minutes later in the hallway. He’d gone back inside after Toly, gathered up Cass’s shit and put it in her bag, and been waiting when she finally emerged from the hallway, wiping at her face but dry-eyed…and troublingly distant. “I won’t bring it up again, that design shit, if you don’t wanna talk about it.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “You okay?”

She stared down at her boots as she walked, backpack dangling from one strap, free hand toying with her hair.

Shep stopped, and touched her arm. “Cass.”

When she glanced up, he nearly took a step back. Her expression was all wrong: imperfectly shuttered, so that anguish cracked through, anguish of a kind he couldn’t begin to classify, but which he worried that he’d caused.

“Hey.” His hand shook a little, when he cupped her cheek, and rubbed his thumb beneath her dry eye. “What’s up?”

Give me a little time, he’d said, and had it really been so little? Was she already tired of him?

He didn’t realize his heart had stopped until she leaned into his touch, and then reached out to touch in return, hands on his forearm. Then it kicked back to painful life, so hard it left him dizzy.

“I don’t want to go home yet,” she said.

“Okay.” He would have taken her to damn Vegas if she’d asked. “Where do you wanna go?”

Her lashes lowered while she thought it out; they were very dark, and very long, her cheeks flushed with emotion she was trying hard not to show. When her gaze lifted, her blue eyes were the sort of imploring that men started wars for. “I want to go get a drink. Just you and me. Like couples do.”

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