Page 57 of Final Drive

I could keep him out of it until Tyler surfaces something. It would be the correct play. It would also mean he learns I did it, and that will cost me more than Quinton ever could.

“Not here,” I say, with Zane and Beckett arguing at the television twenty feet away. “Your room.”

He comes up without a word. The room is the same as it always is. Bed, desk, weights in the corner, nothing at all on the walls. Jackson doesn’t keep things.

He shuts the door and leans on it with his arms crossed.

“Quinton tried to kiss Reese.”

His breathing doesn’t change. His face doesn’t move. Everything behind it goes flat, the way a door closes. I’ve seen him row through injuries that should have put him on the bank, and I have never seen him look like this.

“She’s fine,” I add. “She pushed him off and came to me. But he slipped and called her an Omega. He knows.”

“How?”

“We think Kinsley. Tyler’s in it now.”

His jaw works, and I can guess how many versions of this are ending with Quinton bleeding.

“I’ll kill him.”

“No, you won’t.” I step into his space. He has four inches and thirty pounds on me and both of us know he could go through me if he decided to. “You’re going to let Tyler and me find the connection. We work out what he’s actually building. Then we deal with him.”

“He put his hands on her.”

“I know.”

“He tried to⁠—”

“I know.” I put my hand flat on his chest. “I’m angry too. But if you go now, before we understand it, he plays the victim. He says you came at him unprovoked. Maybe he presses charges. Then you’re gone, and she loses one of the three people she actually trusts.”

The muscle in his jaw jumps. He’s fighting every instinct he has.

“I need you here,” I tell him. “She needs you here. Give me twenty-four hours before you do something neither of us can undo.”

He doesn’t answer straight away.

“You’re asking me to do nothing while he’s out there.”

“I’m asking you to trust me.”

“I do trust you.” His voice drops. “That’s the problem. I trust you more than I’ve trusted anybody in years and it scares the hell out of me.”

That gets through every defense I’ve still got. His hand comes up over mine, holding it there, and his heart is beating too fast beneath my palm for somebody whose face gives away nothing. My brain starts doing what it always does—sorting, measuring, looking for the safest interpretation—and I stop it.

I don’t know which of us moves first. Both, probably. Then we’re kissing with his fist in the back of my shirt, and it isn’t like the other times, rushed and quiet and half-deniable. This one is slow, and neither of us is pretending it’s something else.

When we come apart, neither of us lets go.

“I want this,” I tell him. “You. I also want what the three of us could have. And I want her to have time with each of us on her own. I know it’s complicated. I know we haven’t worked out a single part of it. I need you to know where I am.”

Jackson is quiet a while. His thumb goes in circles on the back of my hand.

“I’ve been trying to work out how to say that for months,” he says. “Kept deciding I’d get it wrong. Push you off, or push her off, or both.”

“We’re both appalling at this.”

“Yeah.” His mouth moves toward something like a smile. “We are.”