Page 60 of Won't Back Down
Jace covered his face with both hands and groaned. “Oh God. Please don’t put that image in my head.”
I snatched my bra from his fingers. “Grow up, Jace. You show up with zero notice, you get what you get. We’re going to go get dressed, and we’ll be back down in a few minutes. Can I trust you to behave, or do I need to leave Roy on guard duty?”
On a long exhale, he dropped his hands. “I’ll behave.”
“Stand down, Roy.”
My pooch gave me some side-eye at the command, so I paused to scruff his ears. “It’s okay, pal.”
Roy sat, no longer at full attention, but evidently not willing to trust my word enough to leave Jace to roam freely in the house. Let my brother feel the full power of canine judgment. Served him right.
Sawyer stayed quiet as he followed me back upstairs. I couldn’t read the quality of his silence, and it was beginning to unnerve me. Did Jace being here change something for him? Did he regret the lines we’d crossed in that bed? Damn Jace for just showing up.
“Could he have worse timing?” I muttered.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure it would’ve been a whole lot worse fifteen minutes ago.”
For a few moments, I imagined what it would’ve been like if Jace had caught us in the throes. That was a level of mortification I didn’t ever want to experience. “Fair point.” I moved into the bathroom. “But seriously, he’s completely out of communication for more than a month, and now he just shows up here without so much as a phone call or a text?”
I started to shrug out of my robe and stopped when I caught Sawyer watching me. Being naked with him, being intimate with him, hadn’t felt weird. But this? Cleaning up after, while my brother waited downstairs? This felt awkward.
I really wanted a shower, but there wasn’t time, so a quick clean-up would have to do. My hands were shaking as I held a washcloth under the faucet, more from agitation than anxiety. Undoubtedly, there’d be confrontation involved in the explanations we were about to give. I hated confrontation. And why wasn’t Sawyer saying anything? He’d been talky as hell during sex.
Big hands closed over my shoulders. “Wren.”
I met his gaze in the mirror, watched as he nudged my hair aside to press a soft kiss to the tattoo on my nape. The gesture was both comforting and arousing. Then he turned me to face him, the ghost of a smile playing around his lips. “It’s going to be okay. Obviously, this isn’t the ideal way for this to have come out, but he’ll understand. We’ll make him understand.”
I bit my lip. I loved this man. More than anything, I wanted to keep him. But I also understood that his relationship with Jace was essential. Jace was more than his friend. He was family. All the Wayward Sons were. And much as I was ready and willing to defend our marriage, I didn’t want to screw that up for him.
His hands skimmed from my shoulders down my arms. “Raincheck on that bath, okay?”
Some knot in my chest loosened. That didn’t sound like he planned to walk back on this new physical side of our relationship. I mustered a smile. “Holding you to that, Mr. Malone.”
We finished cleaning up and dressing in fresh clothes. Downstairs, Jace sat at the kitchen table, hands laced behind his bowed head. He looked up as we came into the room.
“How the fuck is it that I sent you as my backup, and you ended up married?”
“What do you mean, you sent him?” I frowned and looked at Sawyer.
“I was the one who was stateside when Jace got the news about your grandfather. I was the one who could come, though I would have even if he hadn’t asked me to check on you. I didn’t set out to keep it from you, it just never came up.”
Filing that under the heading of Things To Talk About Later, I turned to my brother. “Okay, not that I’m not happy that you’re safe and in one piece, but what the hell are you doing here? You can’t bother to send an email or a text or even a carrier pigeon for like six weeks, and now you just show up without even knocking?”
“First off, I did text. You didn’t answer. I went by the cottage. Bree is the one who told me you’d moved up here.”
I retrieved my phone from my purse, where I’d left it on the counter. There were, indeed, multiple unread text messages.
“And I did knock, but it’s a big house, and the door was unlocked, and I didn’t know…” He waved a hand to encompass what we’d obviously been doing.
Okay, so he had tried. That took a little of the wind out of my sails.
“I’m sorry I didn’t give more notice.” He winced. “Really sorry. But I didn’t have a lot of notice myself. I’ve been traveling for nearly forty-eight hours to get here.”
Now that he mentioned it, I could see fatigue etched in the lines of his face. Dark scruff covered his jaw, and there were lines around his blue eyes that hadn’t been there the last time I’d seen him. My temper deflated.
“Have you eaten?”
He blinked. “At some point. A while ago.” As if to punctuate the point, his stomach gave a massive growl.