“It took a lot of power. You pulled from Killian and me, and it was,” Roarke hesitates, rubbing the back of his neck, “intoxicating. If Pax hadn’t intervened, we – we were getting dangerously close.”
“Pax intervened?” I ask.
Seth loosens his grip around me, a little at first like he’s testing my ability not to fall over. But now that Killian isn’t trying to torture me, standing isn’t a problem. He seems to realize that and scoops my roll back off the floor. He brushes his hand over it – then offers it back to me.
I try to wave it off, but all three of them fix me with glares that make it obvious this conversation is only going to continue once I’m eating. So I take it and bite. I don’t care that it’s been on the ground, or that it may or may not be bitter, because to be honest, I am hungry-as-bralls.
“Pax might work, though?” Seth suggests. “Now that she knows how to heal – he might be able to push more power into her without taking so much out?”
“No.”
Roarke nods. “I’m with Killian. Pax is just as likely to, ah, lose himself, and once she had control of my power, she latched on to Killian pretty instinctively.”
“I did? Have you three forgotten I’m here?” I demand. “How about I just don’t get hurt again?”
Killian grunt-chuckles, then crouches to grab the weapons. Suddenly, my pants ankle is yanked up, and he’s slapping the leather against my shin.
“This stays on,” he growls, tightening it in a well-practiced heartbeat before standing up. “And put this in your pocket,” he adds, shoving the knife back into my hands.
“Roarke,” Pax shouts down the stairs.
“What’s his problem?” Roarke asks, looking up at the ceiling.
“Bubble’s still shrinking,” I admit, holding my hand up as if answering him requires some kind of permission.
All eyes are on me again. The rhythm of Pax coming down the stairs is impatient, like there’s more thumps than there needs to be before he joins us. The small stack of Eydis’ clothes – the ones I seem destined to claim – are in his arms, and he dumps them on the floor.
I groan. They were clean.
“Fix these,” he tells the guys.
The image of my clothes laid across the bed and Pax, or more accurately Thane, rolling and rubbing all over them pops into my mind. I mean, maybe the guy needed to use the toilet as Seth said, or maybe he just wanted to act like a giant puppy. At least it was my clothes and not the massive piles of Brahman shit the manor mutt, Chomp, would stink of.
“Show me,” Pax says.
This is both getting old and at the same time more and more horrifying. I pace across the room with Seth counting each step out loud.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.”
“Why?” Roarke pulls his bun in frustration, but no one else jumps in with answers, so he keeps talking. “It’s got no pattern. Day or night. Unrelated to environmental factors. It’s like every time she sleeps, she wakes up with less steps.”
“I volunteer to keep her awake,” Seth says.
Roarke opens his mouth, then closes it again.
“Or it’s a slow piece of Logan’s potion reacting to her after being messed up by Seth,” Pax says, waving me across to him. He presses a soft kiss to my forehead before adding, “Roarke, Killian, upstairs.”
Roarke doesn’t say anything, taking the steps two at a time with Killian right behind him.
“Stay with Seth,” Pax whispers in my ear.
I don’t argue. A part of me doesn’t want to be stuck in the bubble conversation again anyway.
Seth leans in exactly where Pax was and says, “Stay with me.”
I shove him away. “I am. Don’t make me regret it.”
“You’ll never regret it,” he says, bouncing on the balls of his feet. First on the spot as he talks, then around the room, grabbing strewn items of clothing. “That’s one of my missions in life.”
“What are the others?” I ask, helping him make a pile out of all the clothes in the room.
“Keep those guys alive, always have a bottle of liquor close by, rate every object taller than me based on climbability. Never wear the same braies for two weeks straight. Treat Logan like my walking, talking toy. Use the left end of a loaf of bread first just because left things get left out, and accept that Killian’s never going to get over that one time I burnt his hair off. And more. It’s a long list.”
And a weird one. I pull a face at his back, a cross between being annoyed because I’m sure he did all of those things just to poke fun at me, and ridiculous, with my tongue sticking out and my eyes crossed. None of which he sees.
And since he isn’t looking at me, I take my first opportunity to look at my arm. It still hurts, the kind where I instinctively keep it close and motionless, and without confirmation, I’d think it’s still broken. But it hurts less than yesterday, less than when I woke up, even.
I follow him, because I have no choice, as he grabs the things off the steps and tosses them beside the door.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m doing the laundry.”
“Do you know how to do laundry?” I ask him, serious and dumbstruck at the same time.
“Yes, Vexy, I can wash clothes and lots of other things too,” he says, running a hand through his silky hair.
He has gold strands that glint in the light. All of my guys have nice hair. I’m definitely jealous.
“And what are they doing upstairs?”
“My guess is it’s boring and it involves numbers, facts, or more books.”
As I suspected, more bubble conversation.
I gather up an armful of clothes and get two steps through the door with him close behind before stopping.
“You’d better go first,” I say – because honestly I’m not entirely sure how many steps I’ve got
