Page 181 of Theirs to Tempt: The Marriage Claim

I look back at the empty exterior feed.

Because that would have been the wrong thing to do.

Lucian tackles situations head-on. He orders, arranges, controls the room until everyone else is reacting to him.

I prefer to read people. To wait.

I know when pressure needs to ease.

With Sophie, I told myself that made me safer.

Maybe it did.

It also made me more dangerous in a different way.

Because it gave me the arrogance to believe I knew what she needed.

“She might talk to you,” Lucian says quietly.

I glance at him. “You know she would.”

He hates that, and yet he’s willing to seize the opening if I offer it.

Lucian walks to the windows and stares. Probably unseeingly. “So we do nothing.”

Lucian considers inactivity a character defect, and I know the situation with Sophie is tearing him up. It’s destroying both of us. Neither of us are sleeping. We’re exercising compulsively, working too many hours, emptying a bottle of Bonds whiskey a night.

“Is that your goddamn plan? Do nothing?”

“It’s the right thing.”

He curls his hand into a fist, and he’s driven it into a punching bag so often over the last few days that his knuckles have split.

“What if she needs us?”

My chest tightens. “She knows where we are.”

“And if she never calls?”

There it is.

The question neither of us wants to face.

For years, we constructed every road so eventually it would lead Sophie to us.

Now there is no road.

Lucian looks away.

The silence echoes obscenely.

He and I always know what to do.

Or we make certain we do.

Resisting the impulse to look at the blank feed, I glance at Lucian. “You know what I keep thinking about?”

He waits.