Jes tried to ignore what sure felt like jealousy—even though she knew it couldn’t possibly be—forcing herself to breathe and replay every conversation she’d had with him. He’d never implied he had a wife waiting back in DC for him. If he was married, why wasn’t the woman on the Skype call with the kids?
Maybe he was a single dad?
Jes—and the little green-eyed monster lurking in the back of her consciousness—decided that was a much better scenario. Although she couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be raising two teen girls on your own while working for STAT.
Curiosity getting the better of her, Jes picked up her coffee and casually turned around, trying to be covert about sneaking another look as she sipped the hot beverage. Apparently, she wasn’t as stealthy as she thought because the twins looked over Jake’s shoulder and directly at her.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us, Jake?” one of the girls asked.
Jake spun around on the stool so quickly he almost lost his balance. Crap, he hadn’t even realized Jes was there. So much for those vaulted werewolf senses.
* * *
Jake was so stunned to see Jes standing there, it was all he could do to keep his jaw from dropping. Yeah, he’d heard her talking to Caleb on the stairs earlier, but then he’d gotten caught up in talking to Zoe and Chloe and assumed she’d gone back upstairs. Sneaking up on him shouldn’t even have been possible, not with his sense of smell and keen hearing. But for some reason, his nose had been worthless ever since what happened at Darby’s place. It had gotten so filled with her scent that she was the only thing he could smell in the whole house right now. His damn ears weren’t much better. The steady beat of her heart, which normally would have been nothing more than a background noise, now drowned out nearly everything, including the sound of her footsteps.
Hand shoved in the pocket of the long cardigan she wore—which she looked good as hell in—Jes’s gaze went back and forth between him and his laptop. He hadn’t seen her since they’d gotten back from Darby’s, when she’d headed straight upstairs to help with Misty. Now that he got a good look at her, he couldn’t miss how exhausted she must have been. It made him wonder why she was down here in the kitchen, getting coffee, and not up in bed trying to steal a few hours of sleep.
It was only when she arched a questioning brow at him that he realized he’d been staring at Jes like an idiot…and the twins were still waiting for introductions. What was it about his teammate that got him off balance so easily?
“Jestina Ridley, Zoe and Chloe Haynes,” he finally forced himself to say, pointing out each twin in turn as he said their names, knowing firsthand how difficult it was to tell the girls apart until you got to know them.
“And this is Sam,” Zoe said, holding up the silky black puppy with white on his chest and floppy ears that was sitting on her lap.
“And Dean.” Chloe held up Sam’s identical twin with a grin. Seriously, it was as hard to tell them apart as it was the girls. “We were supposed to adopt one puppy from the shelter, but they’re twins. There was no way we could separate them.”
Jake shook his head with a chuckle. He’d always been a dog person, so he didn’t mind. And the girls were clearly in love with them. “We couldn’t have that.”
“They are too adorable for words,” Jes said, giving the twins and their dogs a smile as she perched on the stool beside him.
Jake couldn’t help grinning as Jes, Zoe, and Chloe oohed and aahed over the puppies and talked about all the stuff the little furballs had gotten into already.
After a while, the twins steered the conversation away from Sam and Dean to Jes and how long she’d been in STAT—and whether she wasspeciallike Misty or anordinaryfield agent like Forrest.
When Jes blinked at them over the rim of her mug, Jake could tell she’d been caught off guard by the question. She seemed to have no idea how to deal with the fact that Zoe and Chloe knew stuff the rest of their organization would have treated as classified. Thank God he’d gotten them out of the habit of saying the wordwerewolfover an unsecured Skype connection. Jes would probably have lost her mind over the release of classified information.
“As you have probably already figured out, Zoe and Chloe have a bad habit of speaking first and thinking later,” he said drily, throwing a pointed look at the twins he was sure they’d ignore. “Please feel free to ignore their rude questions. I usually do.”
Jes laughed, the sound soft and musical. “It’s okay. I remember what it was like to be young and say the first thing that popped into my head. I don’t mind admitting I’m more like Forrest than Misty.”
On the other side of the Skype connection, Zoe and Chloe tried to hide their disappointment as they munched on handfuls of Peanut M&M’s.
Beside him, Jes opened her mouth to say something to him, then closed it again. After a moment, she took a deep breath and charged on. “I hope this doesn’t come out the wrong way, but I never pictured you as a dad. Then again, maybe that’s because I don’t want to admit I’m old enough to have kids myself.”
Jake chuckled. He’d gotten used to people wondering about his relationship with the girls since he and the twins had become a pack. “I’m not Zoe and Chloe’s biological father, but I am their legal guardian and they’re a very important part of my life. Which is why I’m still awake at four o’clock in the morning Skyping with them before they go to bed.”
He expected the usual litany of questions that always followed an admission like this: How did you come to be the legal guardian to two teen girls? What happened to their parents? Don’t they have any other family? Wouldn’t it be better if they were raised by a woman? Why aren’t they out on their own already? Since he’d started taking care of the twins, he’d heard it all and had his responses ready.
So, he was a little thrown when Jes didn’t ask a single question. Instead, she looked at him like he was the greatest thing since free Wi-Fi, then turned to the girls and asked them whether they’d finished high school yet and what they were going to major in when they went to college.
Just like that, Jes and the twins were talking about stuff like they’d known each other for years. Jes didn’t ask about how Jake and the girls had met or ended up as a family. Instead, their conversation revolved around college classes, driving, shopping, and what London was like.
“Please tell me you have pictures of Big Ben and the London Eye,” Zoe said. “What about Buckingham Palace? And those double-decker buses—you’ve ridden in one of those, right?”
“And those black taxis,” Chloe added. “Did you ride in one of those?”
“What about those red phone booths?” Zoe interrupted, her blue eyes wide. “Do they still have those? And do they work?”
Jake shook his head with a laugh. Even after living with the twins, it still amazed him how fast they talked. When Jes looked at him with an overwhelmed expression, Jake decided it was time to step in and come to her rescue.
