Page 4 of Dead Serious with Benefits
The guest deflated immediately because no one needed to see Jace or Dom show how dangerous they looked. I didn’t think he intended to threaten her, let alone actually try to hurt her. He was, however, the type who was willing to use the idea of potential violence to bully his way into getting what he wanted. The problem was that Moira had demonstrated why that was a bad idea. The guest seemed to agree and turned away, muttering words I couldn’t make out, but Moira rolled her eyes at them.
She waited until he was gone before returning to the front desk and catching Maureen’s attention. “Charge him for the night before he gets over his bruised ego and thinks ahead enough to lock his card. Then call Travis up here so you can take your break.”
Maureen nodded with a grateful smile. Moira spotted me, and her anger disappeared. “Well, hello, stranger. As usual, I didn’t see you lurking there.”
“It’s not lurking when I’m standing out in the open,” I said, letting her hug me. She wasn’t usually affectionate, but for reasons I couldn’t explain, she had always been warm and affectionate toward me. I wasn’t affectionate, but wasn’t against it if someone wanted to be. “And don’t tell him I said it, but Mason is right, it is a joy to watch you work.”
She sighed. “Mom has him working behind the bar right now since the bartender had to call in. Otherwise, he’d be underfoot and causing trouble.”
Jace huffed. “He was your problem before I came along. I’m not going to save you just because he’s being an ass.”
Micah snorted. “What are you fighting about now?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“You sound too much like your uncle.”
Dom laughed. “That’s not the same thing as saying he’s wrong, just so you know.”
“Don’t start,” Jace growled.
In all fairness, from someone as big as Jace, who admittedly had a mean face, it would have been threatening to most people. Even if you ignored the fact that he and Dom were about the same size and Dom was more experienced in fighting, there was one other thing that made any hope of Jace intimidating the family ridiculous...Jace was a soft touch. He wasn’t hard on the outside with a squishy inside. The man was grumpy, angry, and ill-tempered inside and out, but he had a good heart. For the past couple of years, as part of the family, he’d shown a quiet but rock-solid devotion toward all of us, even those he didn’t interact with much.
“It’sreallyhard to even think about flinching when I’ve seen you swoon at my brother,” Dom remarked, plucking a fry from the container in front of him with a smirk. “Oh look, here comes the ‘I’m too manly and angry to swoon’ protest.”
Jace glared at him before turning his attention back to Micah and tapping the table next to the tablet. “Back to your schoolwork.”
Micah huffed. “It’s summer, aren’t I supposed to be having fun?”
“That’s what normal kids are doing. You, however, have decided you don’t want to be normal even with all the damn opportunities you’ve been given,” Jace informed him in a dry tone. “And you’re the one who wanted to sign up for these classes. I don’t care if we can afford to pay for it; letting it go to waste is stupid. And you’re weird, not stupid.”
“Of course I’m weird. Look at my family,” Micah protested as he resumed what he was doing.
Moira turned back to me with a sigh. “It’s hard to argue with him when he’s right.”
I hummed in agreement. We were a peculiar family. My adopted mother, Matilda, had Moira and Mason with her late husband before he died. Shortly after, she became pregnant with my other adopted brother, Milo. A few years later, she met and fell in love with my adopted father, Marcus, and had taken his son, Elijah, under her care like he was one of her own. Dom and I were both the same age and had been adopted, Dom by Matilda when he’d been much younger after his parents, close friends of Matilda, had died, and me after she and Marcus got married.
To an outsider, it was a confusing mess. There were adopted brothers, directly related siblings, a half-brother, and a stepbrother, each of us having different connections. That didn’t even include the fact that our ages also threw people off, but only because they were trying to track how we were related.Generally, I told people it was easier to take our ages out of the equation or focus on them and call us brothers and a sister.
However, things had become more convoluted in the past couple of years. Jace had dated Moira and didn’t know until a couple of years ago that they had a kid. He only found out when he’d come to the hotel to confront Mason, someone he’d had an ugly rivalry with since they were teenagers. I still wasn’t quite sure how it happened, but after that, Mason and Jace had started...spending time with one another, and now they were two years strong, if still prone to arguing. They never broke up, but I didn’t know how they managed to be a loving couple and always get on one another’s nerves.
And then last year, near the end of winter, it was revealed that Elijah and Milo were in a relationship. It wasn’t a problem; there wasn’t a drop of blood shared between the stepbrothers, so it didn’t cause moral outrage. It also hadn’t been a total surprise; the two met when they were young, when Matilda and Marcus started dating seriously, and they’d been intensely close ever since. There had been plenty of jokes about them being a couple, which was helped by Milo being gay, but also slightly hindered because Elijah was straight...or had been anyway. Still, looking back, it was clear that despite the jokes, there was a thread of truth behind them since not one of us had been shocked to learn about it.
So yes, Micah was not wrong about our family being weird. The oddest thing about the rest of us was that Dom was essentially a celebrity but came back here without fanfare or attention seeking, and I had purposefully sought out a career that focused on death. So far, only Moira had nothing truly odd about her, or at least about her chosen life. She couldn’t help that her ex-boyfriend and twin brother had fallen in love, or that her stepbrother and half-brother had decided to have a relationship.
“See any good bodies today?” Micah piped up, and I winced.
“Micah,” Jace hissed, his head snapping up. “Those ‘good bodies’ are people.”
“Were people,” Micah shot back, arching a brow so wryly reminiscent of Mason it was uncanny, like he was daring Jace to get mad at him.
Jace’s face went stony, and he stood up. “Alright, enough. Up, let’s go.”
“Go where?” Micah scoffed.
“Where I say, you’re old enough to know when to be respectful, and when you can run your mouth. And since you’re choosing not to use your brain, you’re going somewhere without distractions,” Jace growled, leaning forward. “You weren’t raised to be like this.”
