Chapter 27
CHAPTER 27
WILLA
I n some dim, distant part of my brain, I’d known that my brother would find out about me and Sawyer at some point. But he’d been such a peripheral part of my life for so long, I hadn’t truly put that much thought into it. A sad commentary on the state of our relationship, perhaps, but there it was. I certainly hadn’t expected him here now , when the evidence of what we’d just done was still wet on my thighs. I realized my mistake as I watched Jace zero in on Sawyer, chill fury covering his face.
Sawyer lowered the poker and squared his shoulders. “I’ll accept whatever consequence you think is reasonable, but I’m not going to apologize.” His chin lifted in a way that practically shouted he was waiting for a punch.
Before testosterone poisoning could prevail, I skirted around him. “Both of you stop it. Nobody’s going to hit anybody, because we didn’t do anything wrong. I’m a grown-ass adult. My brother has no say in who I choose to take to my bed.”
“He’s my best friend,” Jace gritted out. “There’s a code.”
I whirled on him. “He’s my husband, so that supersedes whatever bullshit bro code thing you have going on.”
My brother was a hard man to surprise. Generally, he knew way more about what was happening in any given situation than 98% of everyone else in the room. It was a big part of how he’d done so well doing… whatever the classified stuff was he did for the Navy. But my bald announcement hit him about as effectively as a gut punch.
His jaw dropped open, his eyes going wide. “Your what? ”
I held up my left hand with Grandma’s ring. “You have a lot to catch up on.”
“Clearly. How?—”
“Nope. I am not having this conversation without pants.”
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.
“Sit. I’ll make dinner. There’s a lot we need to tell you.” I’d do better keeping my hands busy while I talked.
As I pulled out ingredients and began to chop, measure, and mix, Sawyer got out beers for us all. I spilled out the whole story, telling Jace everything about the inheritance, all the crap Mom and Dad had tried to pull, and all the reasons Sawyer and I had ended up married in a hurry. Mostly Sawyer let me take the lead, only adding in a few details here and there. By the time we’d brought Jace up to date on the latest threat, I was sliding plates of steaming food onto the table.
His response to the whole thing was a lengthy string of creative profanity. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry for not being there when you needed me. If I’d known—well, I don’t think I could’ve gotten free of this mission regardless, but I had absolutely no idea that they’d resort to such tactics. I thought they’d left all that behind once you were a grown adult.”
I lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug that looked a lot more blasé than I felt. “None of us expected Granddaddy and Grandma to leave me basically everything. Sorry about that. It wasn’t exactly fair to you.”
“It was absolutely fair. My life isn’t here. Yours is. You were the one who lived up to the Sutter name. I don’t begrudge you any of it, Wills.”
I hadn’t fully realized the worry I’d carried about exactly that until he absolved me of it. My brother was a better man than I gave him credit for.
“Anyway, I understand the marriage of convenience. It’s kind of nuts, but it makes sense. But that’s not what this is.” He wagged a finger between the two of us. “I mean, I knew she had a crush on you as a kid, but I didn’t expect this.”
“I’ve loved her most of my life.”
Sawyer had said little during all the explanations, letting me take the lead on how much and what to tell Jace. But at his quiet declaration, my head snapped toward him.
The corner of his mouth tipped up into a half-smile. “You didn’t think you were the only one, did you, Wren? Malones fall once, and they fall hard.”
He loved me. Not just now, but for years. The same as I had him. Emotion lodged in my chest like a glowing coal, warming me from the inside out.
“But… why didn’t you say anything back then?” I sputtered.
“Because you were too young back then. And Jace would’ve been absolutely right to kick my ass.”
I rolled my eyes. “Boys.” But I leaned into his touch anyway, relaxing as his lips brushed my temple.
Jace huffed. “This is…”
Scowling, I stabbed at a roasted potato. “If you dare pull some kind of he’s-not-good-enough-for-me, big-brother bullshit?—”
“Sawyer is one of my best friends. Why the hell would I think he wasn’t good enough for you?”
I closed my mouth with a click.
My husband leaned over to rub at my nape, his finger tracing my tattoo, and I loved that reminder of what was effectively our little secret.
“What I was going to say was that if you two are happy together, I’m certainly not going to stand in your way. And, not gonna lie, I’m grateful you’ve got someone watching out for you. Above and beyond all the reasons you ended up here, you both deserve all the happiness in the world. Don’t let Mom and Dad fuck it up.”
“Thank you for that. We don’t intend to. How long are you here?”
“It’s a fast trip. I’ve only got a couple of days before I have to get back.”
“Well then, we’ll just have to throw a party before you leave.”