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“Then let’s order it now.”
Our meal was a relatively quiet affair. He spent a good portion of the time giving me long looks—some dubious, some probing, some cautious, and some totally inscrutable.
I’d responded several times with a questioning brow, narrowing of my eyes, or an impatiently barked, “What?” Each response from him had been a simple shake of the head.
We were piling the dishware back on the trolley on which they’d arrived, courtesy of one of the staff, when his cell phone rang.
He nabbed it from the kitchen table and answered, “What do you want?”
Ah, so it was one of his brothers. They had a habit of answering each other’s calls with mock rudeness.
His brows slowly arched. “Are they now?” he asked, a lazy menace in his tone. “Put her on.” He tapped his thumb on the phone screen, placing it on speakerphone.
“You did it,” accused Felicity, a tremble to her voice—maybe of rage, maybe of nervousness, maybe of both.
“Did what?” Dax asked, nonchalant.
“You know what,” she practically bit out.
“I don’t play guessing games, Felicity. Be direct, or hand the phone back to Caelan.”
Oh, she’d apparently gone to Caelan in the hope that she could contact Dax via him.
“My son is amess,” she spat. “Bruised, bloody, terrified. I can barely get a word out of him. He won’t say who hurt him, but it could only have been you.”
Dax leaned back against the kitchen counter. “Why is that? Surely you’re not oblivious to how many people in Redwater he’s wronged in some way, always banking on Lowe to get him out of trouble.”
“It was you,” she insisted, the shake in her voice more prominent now. “I don’t know how you managed to cover him in bruises without breaking a single bone, but only someone who’s no stranger to giving a beating would be able to do that.”
“So it must automatically be me?”
“I spoke to his friends. They told me he had a run-in with Addison.” She spoke my name like it offended her. “You punished Blaise. Traumatized him. How could you do that to him, Dax? He’s yourblood.”
“I’m not certain why you’d say that as if it means something. It clearly means not one thing to him—he would have steered clear of my wife if it did.”
A pause. “I don’t know what’s worse. That you could hurt him—a teenage boy, your own cousin—the way you did, or that it doesn’t bother you in the slightest. People are right in what they say about you. You have no soul.”
Anger rushed through my veins.Bitch.
His lips hitched up. “The thought of a teenage boy being harmed upsets you, does it? How easily you forget the times you came to me asking that I scare off someone who gave Blaise trouble. They were boys, too. They were someone’s son. That didn’t bother you.”
She spluttered. “You stay away from Blaise.”
“You keep him away from Addison.”Or he’ll paywent left unsaid but was heard in Dax’s tone.
There was a slight shuffling sound, and then a male sigh drifted down the phone.
“They’re gone,” said Caelan. “I would have told them to fuck off when she came banging on my door asking for your number, but I didn’t want them showing up at your place. Grayden was trying to calm her down but it wasn’t working. I think he only came with her because he was worried she’d do something to land herself in shit. What exactly happened between Addison and Blaise?”
Dax relayed the incident, his voice remaining calm even when anger occasionally flared in his eyes. “Felicity is seemingly convinced that I’m responsible for whatever happened to Blaise,” he added.
From what I’d observed, he never said anything over the phone that could link him to any crime. Neither did his family, so I wasn’t surprised when Caelan responded, “Maybe whoever beat the crap out of him was banking on that. It was inevitable that someone would choose to teach him a lesson at some point—he’s made a lot of enemies.”
“That he has,” agreed Dax.
As he continued to speak with his brother, despite the dark emotions still roiling in my system, I found myself wanting to smile. Why? Because a few weeks ago, Dax wouldn’t have put the call on speakerphone. Hell, he might have even left the room to take the call; might have afterwards given me a bullet point version of it.
Tonight, he’d included me. Such a minor thing for others, but not for him. Not for this guarded, self-contained person who didn’t like—or feel the need—to involve people, even if his personal business in that case somehow related to them. He was just so solitary, such a go-it-alone individual.
