“He’s also a Bennett.”
“Useful overlap.”
“You cannot just start a hockey-cop coalition before seven in the morning.”
“I can if it’s efficient.”
“Oh my gosh.” I press my palms over my face. “You are becoming a task force.”
“A very attractive one.”
“Do not make me laugh during tactical planning.”
“Then stop being funny.”
I peek at him through my fingers. “You really think he’d go after Aura or Charm?”
“I think he wants control,” Cade says, and all the humor bleeds cleanly out of his voice. “Men like him do not always hit the thing they want to punish. Sometimes they hit what the thing loves.”
Cold moves through me so fast my skin prickles.
Cade’s face softens by maybe half an inch when he sees it. “I’m not letting that happen,” he says.
Something inside me folds around those words. Not because I think he can control every bad thing in the universe. I know better than that. I know bad things happen in locked rooms, bright kitchens, familiar driveways, and houses full of people who love you. But Cade doesn’t say it like a magic promise. He says it like a man building a wall one brick at a time and daring the world to test the foundation.
“What time is your class?” he asks.
“Eleven.”
“You going?”
I narrow my eyes. “Are you asking as my emotionally unavailable situationship or my academic probation sponsor?”
His face barely moves, but the look he gives me is devastatingly dry. “Both, apparently.”
“I’m going,” I mutter. “Probably.”
“Pip.”
“I said probably with confidence.”
“You’re going.”
“Wow. Bossy.”
“You slept maybe two hours, cried enough to qualify as weather, and still have a class at eleven. I’m making sure you don’t wake up at noon and blame me.”
“I would never blame you.”
“You blamed me yesterday because your coffee was too emotionally aggressive.”
“It was.”
“It was black coffee.”
“Exactly. Aggressive.”
His mouth finally curves, and holy shit, this is the part that ruins me. Not the dirty talk. Not the body. Not the way he can make my brain unplug itself with one hand on my waist. It’s this. Cade sitting on my bed in the dark, arguing about coffee and class and practice like we are normal.
