Page 160 of Masters of Secrets

Oh.

Oh.

They weren’t here to tell him something bad had happened to someone else. They were here because they thought something bad had happened to him. And it was lunchtime. They were supposed to be on a lunch date but had come to check on him instead.

His stomach growled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten since Julie’s parents’ house yesterday. No dinner, no breakfast.

“Right, um, can I get you guys something to eat?” he started moving toward the kitchen.

“Connor!” Law practically shouted his name, and Connor stopped in his tracks as his friend glared at him, flinging his hands in the air. “I don’t want lunch. I want to know what’s going on! What happened? What’s wrong?”

Oh. Right.

“Well, we can eat lunch at the same time,” Connor pointed out. It would be easier to talk if he had something else to focus on.

That’s what they did. He made them sandwiches and told them about meeting Julie’s family, and they listened. When they had to go, Iris gave him another hug, and Law assured him everything would be okay. Which was nice to hear, even though it wasn’t as if Law could make that come true for him. But considering how cynical Law often was, knowing he thought there was a chance made Connor feel better.

It didn’t occur to him until later that Law might have said that because he was going to try to make it true.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Julie

The door to the Marquis office she shared with Law banged open, and there stood the man himself, glaring at her. Julie raised her eyebrow at him. She was tired. It had been a long day of dealing with other people’s problems while trying to sort through her own, and she still needed to call Connor after she was done here tonight. She was kind of dreading it because she didn’t know how it was going to go and just thinking about it was tying her up in knots.

“What the hell, Julie?” he asked, storming in. Iris followed behind him, a lot less dramatically, but her expression was pretty blank, which was unusual since she was normally smiling.

“What the hell, Law?” she mimicked as he glared at her from across their desks. “What got up your ass?”

“You. I mean—” He flushed, an undertone of red appearing on his cheeks before shaking his head as though he could shake the embarrassment away, and Iris snickered, moving around to the side where a comfortable seat was placed for anyone who needed to sit down in the office away from the desks. “That’s not what I meant. I meant, what the hell did you do to Connor?”

Ice slid through her, making her sit up straighter and freezing her emotions. She should have realized, and she could have kicked herself for not figuring out immediately what his issue was. If she had, she never would have bantered back to him, despite how amusing his response had been, because it was none of his fucking business.

“What happened between me and Connor is between me and Connor, both in the past and anything that happens in the future.”

“Is there going to be a future?” Law asked, glaring down at her.

She didn’t like the advantage that his height gave her while she was sitting down, but it wasn’t as if it would be that much better even when she stood up, so she did her best to ignore the intimidation factor.

“Also between me and Connor. That’s an A and B conversation, so you need to see your way out of it.” Was she reverting back to grade school? Yes, she was, but it was appropriate. Law was acting like a child.

“You can’t dump him just because he was trying to impress your family. That’s supposed to be a good thing.”

Great. Now, another headache was forming at her temples. The only good thing right now was that she knew Connor wasn’t responsible for Law’s behavior, and she also knew that it would be wildly unreasonable for her to ask him not to talk about things between them with their friends. Though she might ask him to be a little choosier about which friends he confided in in the future.

If they had a future.

“No one asked him to help,” she responded coolly, holding up her hand to stop Law before he could respond. “I have very strongly established boundaries with my parents for a reason, which is also none of your business, and rather than respecting those boundaries, Connor took it upon himself to change them for me. Which is also none of your business. But since you have partial knowledge of the situation and didn’t bother to ask me about how I was feeling, the way a good friend would, and just jumped to conclusions and a side, I will tell you that it goes far beyond Connor trying to help.”

Law made a disgruntled noise, but he was no longer glaring at her. As much as she understood his protectiveness over Connor, she was getting really tired of it. They were supposed to be friends, too, and he kept jumping to conclusions about her. It felt as though there was a serious double standard at work. She was pretty sure he hadn’t done anything like this to any of his male friends—he hadn’t been this bad about Morgan and Asad, even though Morgan had been in a position to possibly need actual protecting.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The immediate apology did actually go a little way toward soothing some of her hurt feelings. Not all the way, but it helped release some of the tension that was growing in her shoulders.

“I’m just struggling because he’s so hurt, he didn’t even go into work today, but here you are going about your day as usual, and I don’t really think he did anything wrong. He might not have gone about it in the right way, but he had good intentions.”

“Good intentions matter, but they aren’t everything,” Julie replied, feeling tired and a little judged. Yes, she’d gone about her day as usual because she was distracting herself, letting her brain work through her shit in the background while she did other things. It wasn’t how everyone operated, but it was how she operated, and God, she was so tired of people misunderstanding things she did just because it wasn’t the same way they would have reacted.