18. Playing House
Chapter eighteen
Playing House
The next morning, I came downstairs to find all three brothers waiting.
They were in the kitchen, Callum by the window, arms crossed, watching the preserve. Jasper at the table, coffee in hand, deceptively relaxed. Eli leaned against the counter, glasses catching the light, expression unreadable.
When I walked in, they all turned to look at me. The weight of their combined attention was almost physical.
In passing moments it had hit me. In the yard, across tables. But never like this—never all three, never focused. The air in the kitchen had a quality to it I couldn't name: dense, charged, the specific pressure of a room where something important was about to happen.
My eyes traitorously found Callum first.
He was still watching the preserve, or had been a moment ago, and now he was watching me with that dark, steady attention that made it hard to remember what I'd come downstairs for.
I knew what I had with Jasper. I knew what ‘to be continued’ meant and what it cost him to wait.
I also knew that the warmth I felt every time I was near him was real and good and worth protecting.
I also knew that I had just looked at Callum Voss before I looked at his brother, and the guilt of it landed in my stomach like a stone dropping into still water.
I dragged my eyes to Jasper. He was watching me with that particular warmth, and something in his expression shifted slightly, careful, taking stock, and I wondered if he'd noticed the order of things.
Then I stopped wondering about it, because I needed to be a functional adult.
"Good morning," I said, trying for normal. "Did I miss a meeting?"
"Jasper told us," Eli said directly. "About your ex. About why you came here."
I shot a look at Jasper, who shrugged unapologetically. "They needed to know. We protect our own."
"I'm not—"
"You are," Callum said. His voice was flat, certain. "You've been ours since you dropped that lamp in the driveway."
Silence.
I stared at him. He stared back, unblinking, uncompromising.
"That's a lot of claim," I managed, "from someone who barely speaks to me."
Something flickered in his dark eyes. "I don't speak because words are inadequate. They do little to portray what I feel."
The breath went out of me.
And immediately, immediately, before I'd even processed the sentence, I thought: Jasper.
The almost-kiss. The knuckle-kiss. The crazy hot sex that started on the stairs, continued in the hall and ended up in a tangle of sheets on my bed.
All of it sitting right there in my chest. And here was Callum saying something that cut straight through every wall I had, and my body responded before my brain could intervene with a list of reasons why it shouldn't.
A person with consistent emotional priorities, I thought, would not be feeling this right now.
I was not, apparently, that person.
"Okay," Eli said, stepping in before the moment could stretch further. "Here's what we know. His name is Marcus Webb. He's staying at the Bayou Inn, room 12. He's been in town for three days."
I blinked. "How do you—"
"I told you we have resources." Jasper's voice was casual, but I could hear the steel. "We know he's been asking about you. We know he's been watching the studio, the coffee shop, the routes you take through town."
My stomach lurched. "He's been watching me?"
"He's been trying to." Callum's jaw tightened. "He's been watching you. We've been watching him."
"That's—" I didn't know what that was. Terrifying. Reassuring. Overwhelming.
The rational part of me noted that we have resources and we've been watching him were not things ordinary people said.
That the ease with which three men assembling intelligence on a stalker within days of his arrival, before I'd even confirmed he was here, was not a thing ordinary families did.
I filed it in the folder that was getting very full, the one labeled things I'm not ready to name yet.
"We're handling it," Eli said. "He won't get close to you."
"One: you can't promise that, no one can. And two: Why wasn’t I informed Marcus was in town?."
"We saw no reason to disturb your peace.
" Callum pushed off from the window, moving toward me with that predatory grace.
He crossed the kitchen and stopped in front of me, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to hold his gaze.
Close enough that I could smell him, cedar and something earthier that I was starting to recognize as simply him.
The kitchen felt smaller. My pulse did something it had no business doing.
Jasper, I thought, deliberately, like pressing a thumb to a bruise. Jasper is eight feet away.
It helped for about four seconds. Which was exactly how long it took Callum to meet my eyes and hold them, and I felt that pull, that gravitational draw I kept noticing and couldn't explain. Like a mooring line, it drew taut between us as if he were keeping me from being lost at sea.
"Whatever this man thinks he's going to accomplish here, he's wrong. He doesn't know what he's dealing with," his voice was quiet and deadly.
There was something in his tone, something dark, ancient and certain, that made me believe him.
"Okay," I said again. It seemed to be the only word I had left. "Okay."
They had a plan. Of course, they had a plan.
Eli walked me through it at the counter while Jasper refilled my coffee without being asked; my order, exactly right, the same way they both always seemed to know these things without being told.
Callum returned to the window. He stood with his back to the room, watching the treeline, and I found my gaze returning to him despite every reasonable effort to the contrary.
The breadth of his shoulders. The particular stillness of him when he was focused on something. The way the morning light caught the line of his jaw.
I looked away. I looked at Eli, who was precise, measured, and explaining Marcus's likely patterns with the confidence of someone who understood both strategy and human behavior. I tried to focus on the words. Reminding myself that I was an adult.
"He'll return to the studio," Eli said. "It's where he found traction. People who operate the way Marcus operates go back to their last point of contact." He adjusted his glasses. "We want him comfortable. Comfortable people make predictable moves."
"And when he makes his next move?"
Eli's expression didn't change, exactly, but something behind it did. Something cool and certain that didn't match the button-down and the careful voice. "We'll be there first."
I looked at the three of them, this improbable, deliberate triangle of protection, and felt something crack open in my chest that had nothing to do with fear. Gratitude, maybe. Or something larger than gratitude, something I didn't have a name for yet.
"Thank you," I said. "All of you."
Jasper's mouth curved. Not the full grin, something quieter, more real. "You don’t need to thank us."
"I want to."
He looked at me across the kitchen, and there was something in his eyes: steadiness and that particular quality of attention he'd always given me, the kind that made me feel like the most important thing in whatever room we shared.
My chest ached with it; with how much I didn't want to do anything to lose that.
And yet.
I made myself stop the thought before it finished.
* * *
In the week after, I noticed Callum was around more.
Not obviously, he was too subtle for obvious. But he was there. Parked outside the studio when I left late, his truck a familiar silhouette in the evening light. Walking past the coffee shop at the same time I was inside, or in the general vicinity of whatever errand I was running.
I let it go for three days. On day four, I cornered him in the backyard.
He was working on the fence, shirtless in the afternoon heat, and for a moment I forgot what I'd come to say.
The muscles of his back shifted as he moved, gleaming with sweat.
His jeans hung low on his hips, and when he turned at the sound of my approach, I got a full view of his abs, sculpted and defined, a trail of dark hair disappearing beneath his waistband.
"Are you following me?" I managed, dragging my eyes back to his face. "Or Marcus?"
I had been thinking about Jasper on the walk over here. I had been specifically, deliberately thinking about Jasper because I was trying to be a person with a functioning conscience.
That lasted until Callum turned around.
He didn't flinch. "No."
"Callum."
"I'm not following you." Something in his jaw tightened. "I'm... maintaining awareness of where you are."
"That's following me."
"It's different."
"How?"
"Following implies pursuit. I'm not pursuing. I'm—" he stopped. Tried again. "I'm making sure nothing else pursues."
I stared at him. He stared back, bare-chested and unapologetic. A bead of sweat traced a slow path down his sternum. I noticed it the way you notice a match striking in a dark room, suddenly, completely, against your better judgment.
This is disloyal, I thought. This is exactly what a disloyal person does.
The problem was that my body had not received the memo about loyalty.
"Stop," I said.
"I'm not going to stop."
"I didn't ask—"
"I know you didn't ask. I'm doing it, anyway." His voice was flat, certain. "He's in this town. He's watching you. I'm going to be watching back."
Something flickered in his expression, not quite an apology. "I'll be less visible. But I'm not going to stop."
He walked away before I could argue, disappearing around the side of the house, and I stood in the afternoon heat with my argument still half-formed, the sun on my face and a guilt that felt specific, complicated and not entirely about Marcus.
At the edge of the yard, something moved.
Low to the ground, shadow-colored, there and then not there. I blinked, and the treeline was just the treeline; green and still, cicadas loud in the heat. Whatever I'd seen, or thought I'd seen, was gone.