Page 76 of Guilty as Sin
“Mm. I’m on birth control.” She was sleepy again. “Call it the triumph of hope over experience.”
His low laugh was her answer. “Want breakfast?”
“Yeah. In a little bit. And my… house.” She was falling asleep. “Clothes. Bed. Out of… yours.”
The last thing she heard was, “Out of mine? Yeah, right.”
The next time she woke, she knew she reallyhadto get up. Except she still didn’t, because Jace heard her starting to try, brought her another cup of coffee to replace the cold one she hadn’t gotten to, and brought up her fully charged phone, too. “Breakfast for you in ten minutes,” he promised.
“Can you make it nothing I have to chew?” she asked. When she took a sip of coffee, her jaw hurt. “Eggs?”
“Eggs,” he promised. “Toast soldiers, no crust.”
She didn’t answer him. She was looking at a notification. Six missed calls. She turned the phone around and showed him the screen. “Good thing I already told you.”
Her phone saidPaige.“I’d have had to explain,” she said, “that I had a sister. And why she was calling me six times. I never thought.”
“Thought what?”
She was already pushing the button. It had barely rung when she heard the voice she knew better than her own, because it almostwasher own, saying, “Paige? Is it you?” on a rush of breath.
“Yes. I’m fine, baby. I’m fine. Don’t worry.”
“What happened? I’ve been trying to reach you for so long. For more than twelvehours. I thought at first that I was having a stroke, my head hurt so badly. It took me all night to realize it was you, because it wasn’t as bad as when you got shot. I didn’tknowthis time. It was like the reception was fuzzy. I finally got a room in the lodge so I could keep calling you. I was just about to start driving to San Francisco, to the airport. I didn’t know what todo.”
All of that had come out in another rush. “Hold on,” Paige said. “I’m OK. But it’s hard to talk a lot.”
“Whereareyou?” Lily demanded. “Are you in the hospital?”
“No. I’m at the scary neighbor’s. Jace’s. I didn’t have your keys. Your animals are fine,” Paige hurried on. “He checked.”
“I don’t care. What happened to your head? What happened to your voice? You’re mumbling.”
“I got hit on it. On my face some. And I’m allright.”
“Let me talk to him,” Lily said, sounding fierce as a mother bear. “If it hurts. Plus, I don’t want your version. I want the real story. I want thetruth.Wait. Does he know about me? Just say I’m your sister, and I got worried about you or something. Tell him he has to tell me the truth, or I’ll know.”
Paige sighed. “He knows about you. He knows you’re you. Here.” She handed the phone to Jace. “She wants to talk to you. Guess this means I don’t get my breakfast.”
“Nah,” he said. “I can talk and cook.” He took the phone and said, “Hi, Lily. I just realized you have the same voice as well. You and your sister have done a fair job on my brain, between you.”
He took the phone and went downstairs, and Tobias went with him. Paige sat back, sighed, listened to the one-sided conversation, Jace’s calm explanations, his low-key rendition of the night’s events. She drank her coffee, looked out the window. And thought.
Jace came back up, eventually, with the phone in one hand and a plate in the other. He set the phone down in Paige’s lap, put the plate down on the bedside table, and said, “I’m going to help Paige sit up, Lily. She needs to eat her breakfast. I’ve put you on speaker.” He told Paige, “She wants to talk to both of us.”
He got a hand behind her back—carefully—and helped pull her upright, and she might have let out a noise. Lily said, “You’re not all right. I knew it.”
“It’s superficial,” Paige said. “Honestly. He’s just babying me. Hang on. I need to eat these eggs.”
“I’m coming back. Is it going to be superficial next time? I’m coming back.”
“But that’s the thing,” Paige said after she’d swallowed her thankfully-not-chewy bite of scrambled egg with spinach and feta. Jace reallycouldcook. That was a good scrambled egg. “If you come back, it’ll be you they hit.”
“Which would be,” Lily said, “the point. As it’s my place and my responsibility. And they won’t anyway. I’ll just sell my land to Brett Hunter. It’s not worth this. The meeting’s tonight. Go tell them I’ll sell, or if you’re hurt too badly to go, have—” She paused. “You slept with him, didn’t you? Tell me you told him you weren’t me first. I don’t want to sleep with him.”
“Still on speaker,” Jace said. His blue eyes were dancing, and there was a twitch at the corner of his mouth that was a grin trying to escape. “And no worries. You’re safe from that horrible fate.”
“I don’t mean that,” Lily said. “Of course I’m safe. I meant, I didn’t want it to be me. Never mind. You’d have to be a twin. You tell him, Paige.”
