“Right. Do that.”
As she scurried off, Darius sighed and swiped his hand over his face. In that moment, he didn’t look angry or suspicious. He looked… worried. Maybe even slightly pained.
My stomach flipped over. I’d assumed from the conversation that they were looking for me, because what other “she” in the house would he be determined to track down, but would he really be that concerned about my whereabouts? Aboutme?
I propelled myself forward and emerged into the hall. Darius’s head jerked up. His expression snapped into a mask of stern authority, but I didn’t think I’d mistaken the brief flicker of relief that’d passed through his eyes in the first instant his gaze had rested on me.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he growled, but at the same time that gaze was sweeping over me from head to toe as if checking for… injuries? What the hell did hethinkI’d been doing?
“I wanted to be sure I’d get some time alone,” I said. “The basement seemed like my best bet. Then I accidentally drifted off. It’s been a long day. What’s the emergency?”
“Those pricks told me they looked all through the— Fucking idiots.” He huffed and motioned to another lackey who’d popped into view, pointing me out. The guy’s eyes widened, and he scampered away, presumably to let whoever else was on the lookout that I’d been found. “I wanted to talk to you. About something important.”
Important enough that he’d launched a house-wide search. I cocked my head, keeping my own emotions carefully under wraps as if our earlier conversation hadn’t happened at all. “Well, I’m here now.”
As if on cue, Felix rounded the landing on the staircase and leaned over the bannister to peer at me. “Ah, there you are, Firebird.” He spoke as languidly as he usually did, but he was studying me with unusual intensity.
What the hell had gotten into these guys?
I held out my arms. “Yes, I have arrived. If I’d known I’d become such a celebrity, I wouldn’t have waited so long.”
He scoffed and turned away, and Darius glowered at… his brother, rather than at me. Okay, something was seriously strange here.
Before I could prompt him to get on with his important talk already, the eldest Rosano brother ushered me over to the staircase, grasping the back of my arm but with more care than when I’d arrived from my trip around the city a couple of hours ago. “Will you come upstairs? I think this should be just between us. We can go to our rooms again—or your room, if you’d rather that.”
Between a rock and a hard place. I hated the memories the guys’ rooms stirred up, but there’d been plenty of recent encounters in the guestroom that I’d rather not dwell on either. At least the guys’ lounge area was larger and didn’t contain a literal bed. If I was going to be in close quarters with them, I’d rather it not betooclose.
“Your rooms are fine,” I said briskly, and pulled ahead of him to walk on my own.
When we reached the common room, I stepped to the side of the door, wanting to stay close to it for an easy escape route if I needed one. Darius didn’t object. Lucan looked up from where he was sitting at the desk, his hands poised over the keyboard of his laptop, and the same relief I thought I’d picked up on in Darius’s reaction flashed across his face.
He closed the computer and stood up to come around the side of the desk. As he leaned against the edge, crossing his arms over his lean chest, his brothers filled out a semi-circle around me. Darius stayed right in the middle of the room, while Felix sank down on the arm of the sofa. They all fixed their gazes on me as if they were trying to pierce through my skull with their thoughts.
“All right,” I said. “Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on, or are you just going to stare at me while I start making random guesses?”
They glanced at each other, and Darius squared his shoulders. “We need to talk about the morning you left.”
I frowned at him. “What do you mean? I haven’t been out except this evening.” Well, and the other night too, but I wasn’t going to bring up that stealthy trip even if they already knew about it.
His jaw tightened. “Not now. The last time you were here. After we…”
He trailed off, looking so bizarrely uncertain that suddenly I was pissed off all over again. They’d used me and tossed me aside, and now he was getting all coy about actually saying what we’d done?
“After we all fucked,” I said flatly. “When we were teenagers. That’s what you’re talking about?”
Darius winced, and a flare of the anger that was more his typical expression these days came back into his eyes.
Before he could speak, though, Felix answered me in a drawl. “That would be the thing.”
I folded my arms over my chest but refused to give in to the urge to outright hug myself. “What about it?”
“Afterward,” Darius said in a growl. “You woke up before us and went out—and you ran into Holly.”
I blinked. “She told you that she talked to me?” I wouldn’t have thought she’d have admitted to spilling their secrets. And if she had, why were they acting like there was any kind of mystery here? Although maybe she’d only told them that I’d decided to leave and not why.
The edge in Darius’s voice sharpened. “Of course she did. Did you really think she wouldn’t? We needed to know.”
“Well, then, I have no idea what this conversation is supposed to be about,” I snapped. “You’re already totally filled in, and it obviously didn’t make any difference to you.”