Meg finally managed to finish sputtering. She smacked his back. “Put me down, asshole. You can’t just manhandle me whenever you feel like it. I didn’t sign up for this. I didn’t sign up for any of this.”
He couldn’t argue that, but she seemed to be forgetting one crucial fact. Galen readjusted his grip on her, sliding her moresecurely onto his shoulder. “Funny, but I could have sworn Theo offered to get you set up somewhere while we dealt with this problem. You chose to come with us, just like you chose to ignore my order to keep yourself out of this. So tell me again how you didn’t sign up for any of it.”
She just cursed more viciously.
Galen met Theo’s gaze, his friend weighing her response. Theo finally grinned, the first real grin Galen had seen on him in months. “I’d say this infraction deserves a punishment, wouldn’t you, Galen?”
“If you try to spank me,I will fucking gut you.”
Galen tilted his head in question, but Theo was focused entirely on Meg. He motioned for Galen to set her on the counter, which he was only too happy to do. They might be tempted to play this game out, but the truth was that Meghadn’tsigned up for the mess she was on the receiving end of. She was a civilian. No matter how he’d warned her, she couldn’t be expected to know the stakes.
Before.
She knew them now.
Theo moved to stand opposite her, just out of reach. “Spanking, princess? Don’t be so pedestrian.”
She looked at him for a second like she might actually try to follow through on her threat, and Galen tensed in response. But just like that, the rage melted away, replaced some irritation. She pointed at Galen. “Don’t pick me up again.”
“Don’t eavesdrop on conversations you’re not invited into.”
She glared, turning that accusatory finger on Theo. “And you—no punishing. What the hell is wrong with you?”
Theo gave a slow smile that had Galen’s pulse picking up. He knew what that expression meant. Meg was playing right into his hands, and he had her exactly where he wanted her. “There’s areward at the end, so I think you’ll find the punishment is more than worthwhile.”
She blinked. The moment spun out between the three of them, ripe with possibility. Galen should have said something, done something, to put an end to it, but when it came right down to it, he was a selfish bastard. He’d always been one. In the months since the exile, he’d only seen Theo put down his weight of responsibility twice—both times when he was inside Meg. She did something for Theo that Galen was incapable of. Theo looked at Galen, and he saw endless reminders of home. Of what they’d lost. Of the price he’d paid for being caught flat-footed.
Meg was outside it all.
Or at least she had been.
Theo let the silence spin on and on, and then he stepped forward and patted Meg’s knee. “Later, princess. No need to make a decision now. Let’s eat.”
Meg’s body was a traitor.Or maybe Theo was a sorcerer. Or perhaps it was that Galen infected her with lust with just his touch. More likely, it was a combination of all three.
Her eavesdropping hadn’t netted her any worthwhile information. Theo’s cousin seemed untrustworthy, and there was something about a clinic being burned down and records lost, but without context clues, it might as well have been in Latin for all she understood it. And then Galen tossing her over his shoulder and Theo talking of punishment…
Meg prized herself as a smart woman. She wouldn’t have made it to where she was in life without brains and drive and being too stubborn to back down even when the going got hard. The goingstartedhard. It was just life, and she didn’t knowwhen to quit—or at least that was what her mother accused when she got a good drunk going.Girl, you don’t know when to quit. One of these days, life is going to kick you right good in the teeth and then you’ll be sitting where I am now, drinking away your pain.
No.
Never.
Meg stared at her glass of wine. Falling into bed—backinto bed—with Theo and Galen was a mistake. It had to be. Their strings had already entangled her and tipped everything she knew as truth on its head. They might feel a little bad that she was paying the consequences of their mutual pleasure, but she didn’t get the feeling that either of them would do anything different.
Would you?
That wasn’t fair.
But then, life wasn’t fair. She knew that all too intimately.
She was here. They were here. The danger lurked in the shadows around them and showed no signs of dissipating anytime soon. She’d refused their offer to set her up somewhere until this all blew over, refused to sit on her hands while important things in her life were decided without her presence.
What more could she possibly lose by throwing sex back into the mix?
More than you can possibly imagine.
“Meg?”
