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“I don’t hate you,” he bites out.
I cock my head. “So you’re jealous?”
He angles his head and studies me through narrowed eyes. “You’re really itching for a punch, aren’t you?”
I lift both hands, a sign I mean no offense. “I’m not trying to provoke. Just to understand why you’re here instead of Dariel or Aden. Why you?”
When he turns away again, I gather this conversation isn’t an easy one for him to have face-to-face. “It has to be me. If I don’t accept you, she never will.”
“Dariel and Aden have accepted me? Is that it?” I ask, telling myself to hold off on the hope rising inside me.
Until you know why he’s here and if you have a future with Saige, don’t get excited.
He doesn’t respond for several seconds. When he does, he doesn’t say what I was expecting. “Saige is…” His voice trails off. “Tough. Tougher than she looks. From what she’s told me and Aden, even before Rylan came along, her life was shit.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask. I’m not as surprised by his statement as I thought I would be. Saige said in the kitchen that she’d been hoping Rylan was an angel sent to save her. Makes sense he’d be saving her from something.
“Saige won’t say what she needs or ask for anything either, because she thinks she should be grateful for whatever small, good thing she gets. She will never admit that she wants you or needs you because she’s telling herself that what she has with us is enough.”
Why are you telling me this?
“And you know this how?” I ask.
He’s silent for several seconds. “I know because that was once me. It was once Dariel and Aden too.”
I study him, reading between the lines. “You didn’t always share a woman.”
“That doesn’t really have anything to do with you,” he says, shooting me a rapid glance, too fast to read.
Conscious I’ve overstepped, I apologize. “I just—”
“No. We didn’t,” he answers, surprising the shit out of me that he would. “But we do now, and it’s what we all need. If Saige needs more, then I get it. We all get it.”
The hope in my chest rises higher. I don’t let it loose just yet, even if everything Kade is saying is making me think Saige and I have a future.
“So you don’t plan on ripping out my throat when I’m asleep when I stay the night?”
Slow down. You don’t even know if Saige wants you.
He snorts. “When you’re asleep? Nah, if I wanted you dead, I’d want you awake when it happened.”
It sounds like a threat, but his words make the ball of hope in my chest rise a little higher.
I stare straight ahead. “She has a habit of blaming herself for things that aren’t her fault.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch his nod. “She’s a lot stronger than she knows, and she has a bad habit of forgetting it. Sometimes she needs a reminder.”
It’s my turn to nod. “I didn’t know that. I’ll try not to push too hard.”
“No,” he says. “Sometimes she needs a push. It reminds her how strong she is.”
He reaches for the handle.
“What exactly do you need me to do?” I ask before he can climb out.
“I need you to make her happy.”
“By doing what?”
