I smirked. “Why, isn’t that a coincidence? Happens I love you, too.”
***
The town dug itself out of the snow the blizzard had dropped.
I fed us on fast food, take-out Chinese, bottled water, and chocolate. Above us, office workers returned to work, Jacy and Declan both healed at a fantastic speed, and we both slept comfortably within the confines of Jacy’s massive forearms.
Two mornings after our arrival, I checked her left wing. Jacy extended it without wincing, then slowly raised it to lower it. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“It’s still weak,” I warned her. “No flying for a week or more. We’d better go home before the dog eats the cats.”
“Daaad!”
Max, while hungry, hadn’t actually eaten Wendy and Pete in our absence. All three devoured their food with gusto upon our return home. Max wagged his tail, pushing his face under Jacy’s arm as she sat at the table, grinning up into her eyes. Declan stroked the cats’ backs as they chowed their breakfast, apologizing for having abandoned them, albeit briefly.
“We’re free.”
Jacy’s smile melted my heart.
I knelt beside her chair and took her hands in mine to kiss. “We are, my lady, my love. We’re free at last.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jacy
Jenkins smiled gently, his fingertips tapping the table. “Honey. Where’s your brother?”
“Gone.”
He pursed his lips, yet the mild smile never vanished. “Gone? As in how? Gone home? Gone for good? There’s a country song about the word ‘gone’. Have you heard it? No?”
I smiled stiffly. “Sorry.”
Avery poured more coffee from the pot, Declan’s voice shifting between ordering Wendy and Peter to telling them stories drifting from the TV room. As was his wont, Jenkins invited himself over a week after Carter’s unlamented demise.
“He most likely gave up,” Avery added, sitting beside me.
“Is that so?”
Jenkins’s sharp gaze never left my face. Nor did I try to avoid it, despite suspecting he pulled the information I kept from him from my mind.He knows. How he knows, I can’t imagine. His cop instincts, maybe.
“Tell me what I want to hear, Jacy.”
“Is that all?” I widened my eyes, lifting my brows, in feigned innocence. “All right. Carter wanted my oath I’d nevertell the cops about what he did. I gave him my word. He went away.”
“That’s not what I wanted to hear.”
“Then what?” I demanded. “A confession that I killed him?”
Jenkins’s enigmatic smile grew. “Did you?”
Shit! He can smell a lie ten miles off.“Why would you think that?”
“Ah, the old answer the question with a question.” Jenkins chuckled. “You’re dancing, honey. But I know the beat very well. Come on, tell Uncle Truman what happened to big brother.”
“You have no proof I did anything.”
Dammit! That’s the wrong thing to say.I’m sure he noticed my inner wince, for he laughed.
