“Yeah.” At this point, Jayne could have told Caleb that two plus two equaled seventeen and Caleb would have been on board.
“So what you’re going to want to do is adjust where you’re gripping the knife. Kind of like this…” Jayne directed Caleb’s hand to a different position and squeezed, not only securing Caleb’s hand to the knife, but pushing the air from his lungs as well. Caleb did his best to play it off like nothing had happened, but he was almost certain he heard Jayne chuckle. “Then, you’ll use the weight of the knife to cut. You won’t need to put much pressure on it at all. It may seem counterintuitive at first, but before long, it’ll feel natural.”
“How do you know all this?”
“A brief, severely misguided rotation in surgery.” Jayne shook his head. “It wasnotfor me. In retrospect, I have no idea what I was thinking.”
Individually, the words made sense, but collectively, Caleb couldn’t parse their meaning. Fantasies of Jayne, Everett, and the trouble they could get up to behind a closed bedroom door took up too much of his processing power. “Rotation?”
Shep snorted and rolled his eyes. “He’s a doctor, dingus. He’s talking about when he was in school.”
The reply threw Caleb off. He balked. “You’re adoctor?”
Jayne shrugged. He let go of Caleb’s hand. “What? Were you expecting a florist, or a baker, or… fuck, what else would fit the stereotype? Hairdresser? Makeup artist? To be fair, I’d be akillermakeup artist. Do you know that one time Evie Warwick asked me to do her makeup? Maybe I should retire from medicine and let my love of glitter and contouring pay the bills.”
While Caleb didn’t disbelieve that Jayne could be a doctor, he wasn’t sure if he was bullshitting him or not. Jayne’s snark and sass flowed so naturally, at times it was hard to tell. “Evie Warwick? The actress?”
“That’s the one.”
“I don’t get it,” Caleb admitted hesitantly. “You’re a doctor and also a makeup artist to the stars on the side?”
“And a father,” Jayne declared proudly. “And the legal guardian of my teenage brother.”
Shep rolled his eyes again. “Like I’m all that hard to take care of.”
“Yeah? You want to say that to my grocery bill?”
“Yeah!” Shep quipped, puffing up like an angry, decidedly emo bird. “I do.”
While they argued over how hard it was to take care of a teenager, Caleb took a moment to himself to process what he’d learned. Jayne, the glitter-chested party boy he’d rescued from a man with murder—or something equally diabolical—on his mind, was a doctor.
A celebrity doctor?
Living in Aurora allegedly, until several hours ago, in a run-of-the-mill apartment with his young son and his brother.
It didn’t make sense.
“Whoareyou?” Caleb asked, cutting off their argument.
Shep tore his attention away from Jayne, and the anger on his face faded into nothing. He simpered. “Not such a stupid question now, is it?”
22
Everett
Four hours into the official start of Everett’s shift, Everett sank onto one of the club’s second-floor bar stools and crossed his arms on the counter. The Shepherd was always busy on Saturday, and tonight was no exception. Most nights, four hours on the job wouldn’t have been enough to wear Everett out, but tonight his mind was elsewhere and time dragged as a consequence.
Right now, back at home, Caleb and Jayne were waiting for him. If Everett had called in sick, what kind of trouble could they have gotten into together?
“You look tired,” Clarissa, the bar manager and Everett’s sort-of aunt, remarked. She slid a bottle of water across the bar in his direction. It bumped Everett’s arm, the plastic shockingly cold to the touch. “Did you sleep okay last night?”
“I could’ve done with a couple hours more,” Everett admitted. He cracked the seal on the water bottle, then twisted the cap off and took a drink. Cold water plunged through him—he felt it all the way to his stomach. “I had to go this morning to pick up Gage and Aaron’s kids from Alex’s place, so I was up earlier than I would have liked.”
“Mm.” Clarissa cocked her head to the side, a blond lock of hair spilling over her shoulder. “I guess that explains it. You just look…differenttonight. Tired, yet wired at the same time.”
“That’d be why,” Everett admitted. While he loved Clarissa dearly, he wasn’t ready to divulge what had happened over the course of the last twenty-four hours with her. “It’s no big deal.”
“You know…” Clarissa grinned and leaned forward conspiratorially. “Once upon a time many, many years ago, I said something similar to my brother when he first set his sights on your uncle. But that wouldn’t be related in the slightest to how you look right now, would it?”
