TWENTY-ONE
Felix
I shouldn’t have caredabout any woman like this. Maybe if I told myself I didn’t enough times, it would sink in. That’s how brains worked, right?
Not so much, it seemed.
We’d all come up to our apartment together after grabbing dinner, unstated tension still simmering between us. I was sitting on the sofa in the common room, flipping the quarter I always carried in my pocket over and over. Normally I used it to decide which of two options that seemed equally exciting I should pursue. Right now I felt like I had no options at all, but something about the flicking motion kept me vaguely distracted.
Darius had gone into his bedroom. The booming of a hip hop beat that reverberated through the door said all I needed to know about his mood. He drowned himself in rhythms and aggressive lyrics when he was particularly peeved and trying to detach himself from the world around him.
Lucan had sat down at the desk across from me, because of course he had. He was flipping through a notebook and scrawling a few words in it here and there, but every couple of minutes he stopped and looked at the gold figurine he’d set off to the side of the wooden surface. I didn’t think he was seeing anything useful in its gleaming form, but each time his mouth tightened a little more.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I said abruptly, because I’d never known how to keep my mouth shut.
Lucan lifted his gaze to consider me a lot the same way he had the statuette. “What?” he asked, as if he couldn’t figure out what I was talking about.
I rolled my eyes at him, pretending more nonchalance than I actually felt. “Her stealing that thing. It didn’t seem like she was hurting that badly for cash. There was plenty in her wallet when I checked her purse the other night when we went looking for her. And even if she was, you said she’d just gone out yesterday evening—why wouldn’t she have sold it then instead of leaving it in her room where she could get caught?”
I hadn’t thought I was talking that loudly, but apparently Darius’s hearing was better than I’d anticipated. The hip hop abruptly cut out, and his door swung open. “What are you going on about?” he demanded in a terse voice.
I hadn’t meant to bring him into the conversation—well, technically I hadn’t really thought through having the conversation at all—but I guessed I was stuck now.
“We know Anthea’s a smart cookie,” I said. “Nothing about the theft makes any sense.”
Lucan sighed. “You’re making too many assumptions. She might have tried to sell it last night and not found a buyer, so she brought it back and hid it again. She might have known she had a buyer but not been able to arrange the hand-off quickly enough.”
“She might have been planning to take it on a trip to Mars,” I shot back. “How the hell does it make any sense for her to stealthatanyway? Anyone in the family could recognize it at a glance. If she’d grabbed something more generic, like a watch or one of the diamond rings, she could have made a case that it was hers. Heck, a ring would’ve been a lot easier to hide, too.”
“Maybe she didn’t see a watch or the rings,” Darius growled. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve been over this. The most important thing is that she came here under false pretenses, looking to dig up information for her brother to use against us. If she was willing to lie to our faces like that, put on such a good act, who knows what else she’s capable of?”
We had talked about that before. He had made very similar points. But they still didn’t sit totally right with me.
Darius glowered at me. “You’ve got to stop thinking so much with your dick, Felix. Holly was right about her, even if she was seven years early with her accusations. We should have steered clear no matter what sob story Anthea gave us.”
It was true that one of the images that kept darting through my mind was the feel of Anthea’s hand around my cock while I’d had her pinned against the wall just across the room. The little breathy noises she’d let spill out of her with more abandon now that she hadn’t been pretending to be unaffected like she had during our coat-closet interlude. The smell of her, thetasteof her… so much more of her I’d wanted to taste but hadn’t gotten the chance to yet…
But that didn’t matter either. It didn’t matter that she drew me to her like I was a moth and she was the flame, tangling up my emotions in ways no other woman ever had. Except—
“Do you really think it was just a sob story?” I said. “You were pretty convinced after you talked to her that she was telling the truth about her husband. And her take on what happened with Holly made a hell of a lot more sense than what we’d figured. Shesoundedlike she really was confused and angry at us.”
“She was probably telling the truth about both of those things,” Lucan put in with flat certainty. “That doesn’t mean she wasn’t using the truth to steer us away from other truths she didn’t want us seeing.”
I frowned. “She said she was trying to settle the war and make peace. I don’t like that she lied to us, but do you really think she was trying to hurt us?”
“She was trying to stop her fuckwad brother from getting hurt,” Darius muttered.
Maybe that was also true. But I was pretty sure the two men in the room with me sometimes—maybe even often—sawmeas their fuckwad brother, and yet they’d still be there for me no matter what.
Anthea had also said we’d have done the same to her if our positions were reversed. I wasn’t sure she was wrong about that. After all, we’d launched a campaign against her over something that’d happened seven years ago when she was only sixteen, banding together without hesitation to run her through the wringer.
The decision had blown up in our faces, but I couldn’t see how that washerfault.
I sucked my lip under my teeth, resisting the urge to gnaw at it. I didn’t know how to get those thoughts across to my brothers in a way they’d listen to. I wasn’t any kind of authority figure between the three of us.
But I did know that for the whole day with Anthea gone, not knowing what was happening to her or where she was now, a hole inside me that I hadn’t even known was there had only yawned wider and emptier.
Why the fuck were we being so protective of the whole family anyway?Dadhad screwed us over by listening to that Griffin prick rather than his own sons, by cutting us out of his plans. And all Darius cared about was getting back into his good graces instead of recognizing that the old man’s respect maybe wasn’t worth what it used to be?