Page 90 of Coach
Stas answered back with a little curve to her lips.
“Yes, big, bad bikers. Very scary. Anyway,” she said, looking back at me. “Irina will no longer be working here. It looks like I need to keep an eye on things from now on.”
Oh joy.
“Saul, hm?” she asked, her gaze moving over me.
“Yes.” I lifted my chin, refusing to feel intimidated. I had a feeling that Stas was the kind of person who looked for any small chink in your armor, then launched a ruthless attack through it.
“Nice pull,” she said, nodding. “Anyway. I can’t find a single decent cup of coffee in this damn town. I will be back later.”
With that, she was gone.
Feeling oddly a little safer with the brothers, I exhaled hard.
Konstantin gave me what might be called a soft look. At least for as hard a man as he was.
“Certainly, you didn’t think they would get away with it.”
“Certainly, I wasn’t thinking past wanting to get home to my dog.”
“If it eases any of your guilt,” Mikhail said, shrugging, “we would have found out who it was eventually.”
It didn’t.
But that was just something I was going to need to live with.
So I just… threw myself back into work, solely because I knew the guilt would eat me alive at home.
Then there was Saul.
And his eyes that saw too much, and his brain that shouldn’t have been able to put things together so effortlessly.
And, yeah, sexual distraction came into play.
But it was therapeutic for me as well.
After the sex, we fell into bed for just a few moments while he told me about Rafe and Steve leaving town for their new life, taking Raff and Syn with them for a road trip.
When he asked again about my face, I fed him the handy lie I’d thought up when I’d been up all night obsessing over this potential moment.
“I fell,” I told him as I got back into my clothes so we could walk back to my place and pick up Trix. It helped not having to look him in the eye when I fed him the lie. “Tripped over Trix and fell face-first into my bedroom floor. Carpet-burned thehell out of my cheek. I forgot how much that hurts,” I went on, figuring a well-layered lie was a more convincing one.
“What about your mouth?” he asked, getting up and finding his shirt too.
“Oh, completely unrelated. Can you help me with this?” I asked, deciding to distract him with clasping my bra while I gave him the slightly less believable lie about my mouth. “I had girl dinner.”
“Girl dinner?”
“When you just throw random stuff together and call it a meal. I had a cheese stick, a clementine, and a ton of chips and salsa. I cut the hell out of the corners of my mouth.”
I moved away, grabbing my shirt, giving myself a valid excuse not to make eye contact.
“You ready?” I asked, adding more cheer to my voice as I turned to look at him, a smile plastered on my face.
He didn’t believe me.
I could see it—along with no small amount of disappointment on his handsome face—but he didn’t press me.
