Page 34 of Desire Me
He growled as he stepped back, releasing her. “The worst kind.”
So not Elliot and King, then. Her heart took a leap into her throat. She looked at the panel but saw nothing more than a string of numbers. The loss of Saint’s heat made her shiver. “Is it safe?”
Saint seemed to realize exactly where her mind had jumped to, because he hurried to hug her before he stepped back again. “We’re safe, cariño. It’s just my sister. Or one of them.”
His sister? The butterflies came alive in her stomach for a whole different reason. “Why is she the worst kind of visitor?”
Something in the way he refused to meet her eyes had her own narrowing. “Saint?”
He rubbed the back of his head.
“Saint? She does know about me, doesn’t she?” He’d said they were living together a month before the accident. From the way he talked about them, she knew his family was all-important. Surely he wouldn’t be living with someone he hadn’t told them about.
But his sheepish glance before he turned toward the living room told her that was exactly what he’d done.
And the blows just keep coming.
Chapter Seventeen
Saint was knee-deep in shit and he knew it.
If it had been Isla at his front door, he might have come out of this unscathed. His youngest sister seemed to have a little bit of sympathy since she was closest to him in birth order. But Mercedes? The oldest of five had zero sympathy for anyone. She was a surrogate mom and treated them all like little idiots even in their thirties and forties.
“Uncle Iggy! Uncle Iggy!”
He couldn’t help but grin as Mercedes’s twins, Reina and Mateo, ran up the front steps. He was on his knees before they reached the open front door—it was either that or let them knock him off his feet. The two four-year-olds were as much a force to be reckoned with as their mom.
“How aremis bebés?” He wrapped his long arms around both slender bodies, tugged them close, then stood to swing them both around. “Did you guys come to surprise me?”
“Yes!” They screamed and squealed in his ears as he circled, and Saint knew he’d be half deaf by the time he set them down. He didn’t care. Every second he got with the little tigers was worth it.
“Stop before they throw up,” Mercedes yelled over the din. “They’re stuffed full of doughnuts, and you’re about to get decorated.”
Saint eased to a stop and lowered the giggling kids to the ground. “Keep hoping, Sis. They wouldn’t do that to their Uncle Iggy, would they? Marc, maybe”—Mercedes’s husband had been the first to marry into the family, so like Saint, he endured the brunt of the teasing—“but not Uncle Iggy.”
“Uncle Iggy?”
He should have known Rae wouldn’t cower in the back. She was as ferociously courageous as the twins. He reached for her, intertwined their fingers so she couldn’t get away. He needed the protection.
“Uncle Iggy,” Mercedes said firmly, a hint of surprise in the words. “And speaking of, would you like to introduce me, Uncle Iggy?”
Like to? No. Have to? Obviously.
“Mercedes, this is my girlfriend, Rae. Rae, the oldest of our group of hellions, my sister Mercedes.”
Rae held out her free hand, her face carefully blank. Was she uncomfortable? Angry? Waiting for the perfect opportunity to rip his balls off? He grimaced at the latter, figuring that was the most likely option. He’d need to be on his guard once his family left.
Mercedes held Rae’s hand longer than necessary, getting a good look. “Girlfriend, huh? I haven’t heard you use that word since college.”
He tugged Rae away, forcing Mercedes to release her and trail behind them into the great room. “Close the door, Sis.”
“So you don’t have girlfriends?” Rae asked under her breath as he pulled her along.
“Not till you,” he admitted.
“I see.”
He tugged Rae close and, under cover of the twins galloping through the room on their way to the kitchen, murmured in her ear, “You don’t see anything.”
