Page 35 of Slashed Bonds

“If you stalk me, say that.” I laugh. “What is it? Jealous I’m going to fall for my masked sweetheart and leave you behind?”

Silence.

Beautiful, thunderous silence, and I could listen to it all night.

Scaredy cat.

“I feel like Malice would thrive with a threesome,” I say. “You in the mix. Hmm?”

“You’re too possessive to share.”

“I share you.”

“You do not share me.” I can hear the eye-roll travel down the line. “And you know Cash is straight as a city block. He cringed when we got wasted and kissed under the mistletoe.”

Okay. Facts.

Our captain has the sexual range of a filing cabinet and the emotional range of one too, and I’ve spent three years trying to expand both and made no measurable progress.

“Whatever. I’d share.”

“You realize I know about the wall of collectible photos of me in your room?”

“Now don’t get jealous that Malice has one more than you.”

“That better get evened out.”

“I’ll catch your good angle this time,” I promise, and lean back against the drawers on the far side of the closet, facing my creation.

“You better.”

The quiet that comes next is the comfortable kind. Killian and I have never once needed to fill it.

Then I say it.

“I told her to come to the gym. Gave her a card.”

He doesn’t respond.

“She didn’t look good today, though.”

A hot minute of nothing.

“Has she lost weight?”

And there it is. That’s why it’s him I tell things to.

“A bit,” I grumble.

More than a bit. Her ribs have gotten easier to count. Her hands were shaking when she picked up the cards, and she covered it by picking them up faster, which is a trick you don’t develop overnight.

Somebody should be feeding that woman.

Then again — does she have a pack to make sure it happens?

If she did, she wouldn’t be here. Not with me. Two years of reading her and I’d stake my career on it: she isn’t the cheating type. Whatever else that woman is, she’s loyal down to the bone, and somebody used that against her.

Which is the part that keeps me awake.