About five men swarm the car, pressing their lenses to the tinted windows. Others pace back and forth on the sidewalk and call their colleagues hurriedly.
“Get here now!”
“We think it’s a Hale kid, hopefully Xander.”
Two men crowd the rear door, and I storm ahead. My threatening stride and appearance is like a gunshot. They stumble backwards, and I grip the handle to the Escalade. I mime opening the car door to rid the over-zealous idiots.
One man rushes up and knocks into my hard back. I shoot him a brief, scathing glare.
Brief, because they don’t need to think I care about them. Some paparazzi want a fight for footage or insurance payout (I hurt them, they sue), and then most hecklers want a fight for fame or because they’re morons. And my job is to avoid confrontations.
Not start them.
When I really open the door, I fit my body in the free space. Not letting the cameramen see Luna yet.
I’m not surprised by what I find. A gangly seventeen-year-old girl is sprawled on the leather seat like a starfish. And she’s dressed in a full-body Spider-Man costume. Mask and all.
It’s an easy ploy so people avoid snagging a money-shot.
She looks at me upside-down.
I won’t smile during pandemonium, but Luna always manages to make life interesting. Out of all the Hale kids, I’d say I’m closest to her. For my twenty-fifth birthday, she wrote me anAvengersfanfic where Bucky Barnes and Captain America weren’t merelyjustfriends. It was entertaining as shit.
“Luna, you ready to go?” I ask.
The driver rotates. It’s her three-hundred-pound bodyguard who’s been blowing my eardrum out for the past ten minutes. I’m not close to anyone on Epsilon since the SFE lead calls me a “liability” when really,hecould audition for the role of hall monitor.
Thankfully her bodyguardisn’tthe lead of Epsilon. I dodged that headache.
“She won’t talk,” he snaps at me.
“She doesn’t need to talk to climb out of a car.” I extend my hand. She grabs hold, sitting up and sliding across the seat.
Paparazzi scream, “WHO IS IT?! WHO’S IN THE CAR?! IS THAT YOU, XANDER?!”
As soon as she drops onto the cement and lets go of my hand, I slam the door shut. I push ahead to clear a path, and I make sure she stays right behind me.
I keep an eye in front and constantly glance back at Luna. She’s not one of the kids who fear the paparazzi. She seems fine, but with her Spider-Man costume hiding her face, it’s hard to tell why she’s here and what happened.
When no more paparazzi lie ahead, I fall behind Luna and protect her from the back. We reach the brick stoop, and the door already flies open.
Maximoff pulls his little sister safely inside.
Squatting down,I rummage through Maximoff’s bathroom cupboard beneath the sink. I hit my elbow on the nearby toilet a few times. There’s no space in here, not even for a tub. Just a small shower stall.
I push aside Jane’s baskets of nail polish, and Maximoff bends down next to me and searches through the cupboard too. He has this intrinsic need tohelp, and he’s been in big-brother, over-protective mode for the past twenty minutes.
His love for his siblings toughens him, not softens.
And a guy being so protective over the people he loves, I find extremely fucking sexy.
I grab the first-aid kit in the very back. “The mouthwash needs to be alcohol-free,” I tell him, and when he finds a bottle, we both stand up. I pop open the kit to see what else I need.
Maximoff watches me. “How up-to-date is your medical knowledge?”
“I know more than you,” I say since he tried to diagnose Luna downstairs until I butted in, “and I’m the one who gradated medical school at Yale.”
“But your undergrad only took two years?—”
