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“No?” he said, laughing.
“Low-hanging fruit,” she replied, with a resolute shake of her head. “It’s beneath me.”
“My funny girl,” he whispered before they broke apart and joined their families for Thanksgiving dinner.
Please enjoy the following brief excerpt from CAT’S CONQUEROR, book 3 in the Loring Family saga.
Chapter 1
CASSIEL
Cassiel hung back and let everyone else go to the table for Thanksgiving dinner.
His brother Raphael, or Rafe as his friends called him, had his chef’s staff put name cards on the plates. Cassiel wanted to see the looks on everyone’s faces when they found out who they would be seated next to. He was mostly watching for their reactions out of habit. Years of trying to see what other people were hiding had taught him behaviors that he couldn’t easily abandon, though everyone in his brother’s enormous penthouse in Boston’s newest luxury building was getting along surprisingly well. Even his mother seemed to be enjoying herself, and that in and of itself was a small miracle.
Today, he needn’t be as hawkish about every subsumed emotion as he usually was. He could relax and enjoy himself because everyone had apparently checked their agendas at the door. As much as it gagged him to think it, even Cassiel had to admit there was a lot of love in the room this Thanksgiving.
His big brother and Abbe were crazy about each other, and there was literally zero tension between them apart from the sexual kind. Which was good, because if Abbe were to become upset with Rafe and pull away from him, Cassiel knew his brother would unravel. He’d seen him for those three days when Rafe and Abbe hadn’t quite worked things out between them yet. Rafe had been a disaster, bitching at everyone, and when he wasn’t yelling his head off at Cassiel to find her, he was drained and blank. Cassiel couldn’t stand to see it.
But Cassiel had found Abbe and fixed the problem, which turned out to be something as simple as clarifying who did what, when, and who didn’t know about it, until her trust issues were dealt with. That relationship was well in hand now, and if Abbe survived their mother, Francesca, she’d make a great wife for Rafe. Cassiel was completely on board for that match. Rafe was thirty-three. It was about time he settled down.
Bianca had managed to pull off a good match for herself, too. Cassiel had hated Elias at first, second, and third, but then the former FBI agent had completely redeemed himself by saving his sister’s life.
Cassiel now felt like he owed the guy, which in a lot of ways set him at odds with himself. When he looked at them all he could hear was the recording Elias had been forced to make of him and Bianca having sex. Cassiel was not used to feeling indebted to guys who were plowing his little sister, but he was working through it.
That relationship was still brand new, and there were still some ramifications concerning Elias’ former FBI bosses wanting him to spy on the Loring family that had to be worked out, but Elias had in factkilledsomeone for Bianca. So that had taken Cassiel’s doubts about the guy’s loyalty off the table. And even though Cassiel thought Bianca was a bit young at twenty-three to be locking herself down, she was absolutely smitten with Elias. One look at her face when she smiled up at him and it was obvious.
At the thought of Bianca’s face, Cassiel looked over at hers appraisingly. It was still bruised and cut up from her abduction two days before, but the doctor had said it would heal without a visible scar. There were lasers for that now, anyway, even if the doctor was wrong, and those things could take care of just about any scar if you wanted it to. Some scars never wholly went away, though. Cassiel had a few of those, both on the outside and on the in.
The scars he had on his face were over ten years old now, and faded. He supposed he could get them lessened even more, but he didn’t want to. He’d be too pretty without them. Growing up he’d always felt incongruously good-looking, like his slightly sardonic personality was at odds with the way other people viewed him. He had been a blond-haired, green-eyed boy and he’d looked like, well, an angel. His hair had darkened a bit to light brown, luckily, though he never got the family black-hair, blue-eye combination of his brother and sister. The scars had lessened the angelic aspect of his face. They weren’t disfiguring, just a hint that maybe he wasn’t as sinless as he looked. And they reminded him of his dad.
Cassiel had gotten his scars when his father had died—more accurately when he’d been taken from his family. Saying he’d died made it sound natural, like it was supposed to have happened the way it did, and nothing about that boating trip was supposed to have happened.
In a way, showing his facial scars was how Cassiel kept the much more painful internal ones to himself. They marked the beginning of all the secrets, and they reminded him of why he needed to keep them.
He ended up sitting next to Anthony and Li Copeland, Elias’ parents. He hadn’t had much of a chance to talk to them yet, as his mother had been bogarting them all evening, but he was happy to. Anything to clue him in on Elias’ background.
“Did I hear right when you said that you lived in Kensington?” Cassiel asked.
“Yes, and you’re in Chelsea, are you not?” Anthony replied in his posh British accent.
“Chelsea and Boston,” Cassiel said, nodding.
“Both sides of the Pond, eh?” he said, smiling.
“You were much the same for a while. Was it Boston, London, and Singapore?” Cassiel said, knocking the conversation ball back in Anthony’s direction. One of his specialties was listening more than he spoke. It’s why he did what he did, and his brother Rafe handled the money. Rafe was good with numbers, and Cassiel was good at getting information.
Anthony nodded with a grimace. “For years I didn’t know what time zone I was in,” he admitted, with a regretful glance at Elias.
Cassiel saw guilt in him. Anthony probably wasn’t around his son as much as he would have liked when Elias was growing up. Typical working dad stuff, probably compounded by the racial differences. While Elias had a combination of white and Asian features that were clear to Cassiel, most white people saw Elias and just thought Asian. Anthony was blond, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed as well, making the physical differences between him and his son even more apparent to Western sensibilities. That was a potential powder keg. Cassiel made a mental note to keep watch for any unresolved daddy issues with Elias.
“But my work brought me to Li,” Anthony continued, bringing the conversation around to happier recollections as he regarded his wife fondly.
“In Singapore,” Cassiel finished for him. “Then you were here in Boston for years before moving back to London.”
“Quite so,” Anthony said, frowning somewhat. “About twelve years ago. When Elias went off to Brown.”
Cassiel reminded himself to back off. People found it off-putting when he showed how much he already knew about them on a first meeting. Time to ask a question and prove he didn’t knoweverythingabout the Copeland family. At least not yet.
