He looked her calmly, squarely in the eye. “How would you feel?”
She sneered at him. “About what?”
“If this was our baby having a baby, and he or she didn’t tell you?”
Those damn rolling eyes. He was going to have to take her over his knee pretty soon. “You’re really grasping at some hypothetical straws. And Iwilltell them. Just not right now.”
“When?”
“When I’m good and fucking ready!” She pushed her plate away, growled athim, stood up from the table and left. Seconds later, a bedroom door slammed.
Brock really hoped it wastheirbedroom door.
She definitely needed time to cool off. Something, a bee, a hornet, a wasp, something was in her bonnet. It would do nobody any good for Brock to follow her down the hallway and demand she continue their conversation from earlier. He chalked the majority of it up to hormones and the rest up to her feeding off his bad mood. He really needed to work on that.
So instead, he finished his own dinner, wrapped hers up for later, did the dishes and then waited.
It was nine o’clock and he was watching the news in the living room when he finally heard the bedroom door creak open.
Good. She’d locked herself intheirroom. At least there was that.
Quiet as a mouse, she padded her fuzzy slippered feet down the hallway. He glanced up to find a pillow-creased, tear-stained face with wild red hair frizzed out as if she’d stuck a fork in an outlet. She looked sad and beautiful and so damn tired.
He turned off the television and popped the footrest back into his recliner, inviting her to move into his lap.
With no hesitation, she perched her strong, petite frame on his thighs. Fuck, she smelled good.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Care to tell me what that was about?”
She lifted her gaze from where she’d been studying her intertwined fingers. “Shit at work.”
His back stiffened.
Slade.
She ignored him. “And then I come home and you’re all grumpy. I plastered on a happy face even though I wasn’t happy, and then you get all Mussolini on me about telling my parents.” She wrinkled her nose and glared at him. “Not cool.”
“What happened at work? Was it Slade? What did he do?”
She rolled her eyes again. Now he really was going to have to take her over his knee. A sigh escaped her. “Nothing… to me. But I ran into Wendy and Marlise, and we’re all going to go for coffee tomorrow. I asked them about their one-night stands with Myles, thinking I could get some information for our case, and they got all weird, said they didn’t want to talk about it at work. I know something’s up. Something happened when they slept with him.”
Damn it. He’d told her to leave the digging to him and his brothers. He unclenched his jaw and rubbed her back. Now was not the time to get all tyrannical on her.
“You think it was rape?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I mean, we both saw him put that pill in Ingrid’s drink at the Christmas party, which means he’s obviously notabovedrugging a woman to get laid.”
The man shouldn’t beaboveanything. He should be fucking six feet under.
“You’re going to meet them in a well-lit, heavily occupied public place, right?”
There was that fucking eye roll again. “Yes.”
“Good.” He ran his hand up and down her back, squeezing the nape of her neck until he felt the tension begin to dissolve. “Now, about your parents … ”
