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It had been six months, and there had been times she’d ached to find her own bed, to hear her momma’s laughter, her daddy’s booming voice, in person rather than on the phone.
She’d needed to heal first though, she’d thought. She hadn’t been able to shed the person she was in DC as easily as she had in the past, because the wounds that had been left in her soul had seemed to fuse that part of her to the woman she was inside. She couldn’t face her family like that. She wasn’t herself. Just as she never showed the inner woman to the world, she never allowed the agent she was while in the world to return home with her, where her dreams and laughter awaited her.
“I was too ragged,” she finally answered honestly. “If I had come home then, Momma and Daddy would have worried and Caleb would have headed straight to Arlington to demand even more answers from you. I couldn’t be me, yet. And I didn’t want them to see or to know who I was away from them.” Her eyes closed as his head bent further, his lips brushing over her bare shoulder.
“I would have avoided him just as I always do,” he promised her, the light Spanish accent he still carried washing over her senses. “I would have protected your secrets if I could have, Summer. Caleb knew them though. When we arrived here to warn him of Dragovich and see if he knew where you we
re hiding, he already had all the answers. I warned you long ago he no doubt knew exactly what you were doing.”
Yeah, that sounded like Caleb. He’d ask questions even when he knew the answers. That was just his way. And she should have known he was aware of what she was doing. He was too nosy. There had just been no indication of it, so she’d hoped he’d accepted her explanations.
Her eyes closed as Falcon’s lips moved closer to the sensitive column of her neck. In the next heartbeat she forced herself to step away from him and turn back to the bedroom, only to come to a stop.
Raeg stood leaning against the wall, just on the other side of the bed, his expression shadowed but not enough to hide the lust she could see in his face.
For once, there was no sense of anger or judgment coming from him. As though he were simply enjoying the sight of her and Falcon, of hearing them talk, their voices low. Could he find pleasure in that? Was that part of what caused these two men to share something so intimate as the women they both desired?
“Falcon knows where the guest rooms are,” she told him, uncertain now what to say, or what to do. “There’s one on each side of this suite, and they’re comfortable.”
“From the looks of things, Falcon doesn’t need a guest room,” he pointed out, though without a sense of jealousy or even his normal insulting, snide attitude.
“Falcon is not nearly that lucky,” his brother grunted, pausing to kiss the top of her head before walking across the room. “Just sometimes, when I’m a very good boy, she allows me to pet her a little.” He shot her a teasing smile over his shoulder before turning back to his brother.
Raeg still held her gaze, his dark eyes probing, intense. If he said something nasty to her, she simply didn’t know if she could handle it.
His gaze moved over her, and Summer felt her breasts swell further, her nipples aching, her sex melting. And how futile was the arousal rushing through her, flooding her body and her senses? Falcon would never take her without Raeg, and Raeg despised her. Oh, he became aroused by her occasionally, but actually touching her was something he wanted nothing to do with. He’d made that plain over the years.
“Good night, Summer,” he told her softly, nodding his head before straightening and leaving the room ahead of Falcon.
“He hates me,” she whispered as Falcon paused, then turned back to her. “Why?”
His expression softened, his pale blue eyes, normally cool even when he wasn’t, darkened with those shadows she’d always glimpsed in both him as well as his brother.
“He doesn’t hate you.” There was a heaviness to his voice that left her confused, aching to know the origin of his pain so she could soothe it.
“I think he does.” She used to hope he didn’t, had tried to tell herself he didn’t. But now? Now, she just didn’t know.
Falcon shook his head. “And I know he does not. What he does feel though, we may all have to work through eventually.” His gaze touched hers. “And that may be far more dangerous to us than we ever imagined Dragovich being.”
With that, he left her bedroom, leaving her to stand in the darkness alone as the fog reached her balcony doors, spreading over them, easing against each crack and crevice, searching for an entrance that didn’t exist.
That was how she felt sometimes, as though searching for an entrance into the hearts of two men who wanted her, but were determined to keep her from being a presence in their lives.
What had Raeg once told her? He’d join her and Falcon, if she wanted to give into his brother’s seduction, for a night or two. But she wasn’t the type of woman he’d ever give his heart to.
And how that had hurt.
It still hurt. She was certain she’d spent a week crying into her pillow whenever she was supposed to be sleeping. He’d stripped her bare with those words. And even though it had been years since he’d given her the warning, she’d never forgotten it. Just as she’d never forgotten Falcon’s warning that he and Raeg did share their lovers, and that should one of them ever marry, then she could count on the fact that it would be both of them the wife would be sharing her bed with.
And she wasn’t in the running for a wife. Raeg had made that one clear right from the get-go.
So what the hell was her problem?
She’d known him since she was sixteen, two years before he ever went to work for the senator, and they’d been fighting for just as long. He’d snipe at her and just get as mean as a feral cat. She’d scratch back, then they’d stay at each other’s throats whenever possible.
Putting away the last of her clothes, she snagged a nightie and matching robe before heading to the shower. By the time she crawled into bed, she gave a weary sigh at the knowledge that life was about to get crazy again.
Tomorrow was just going to be hell, and there was no help for it. This was what she got for waiting a year to come home, and when she did return, bringing Falcon and Raeg with her. Hell, this was what she got for giving a damn if Falcon and Raeg were with her. If they meant nothing to her, then her daddy would just give them a few warnings about playing with his little girl’s heart and leave it at that.
