Eve’s Wedding Knight

you away from You-Know-Who so we could make our plans.”

“P-p-plans?” Eve sputtered, recovering fast. “Our plans?” She rounded on Jake, who was watching her from under lowered brows, a look of appeal in his eyes. Which she ignored. She felt cold; her scalp prickled now with fury. “You told them?”

“Yes, he did,” Mirabella answered for him, “and I’m sure glad he did. I knew something was wrong about that guy-I knew it.” She glared at them all in happy triumph; there was nothing Bella enjoyed more than being right.

“I wanted them kept out of it. You knew how I felt.” Eve’s voice was pitched low and for Jake alone. She was trembling with shock, stunned by what she saw then only as a terrible betrayal. “You knew. You had no right. Not without-”

“Yes, he did.” This time it was Summer who broke in, and her voice was so uncharacteristically sharp that Eve turned to stare at her. “We had a right to know. How could you even think about keeping this from us? We’re your sisters. And what about me? This was my fight a long time before it became yours.”

Eve had to look away from her sister’s tear-filled eyes before she could speak. “All right, maybe I should have told you what was going on. But-” and she threw Jake a glaring glance “-I do not want you guys involved in this. I will deal with it. We-Jake and I-will deal with it. You stay out of it.”

“Oh, no,” said both of her sisters together. And Mirabella continued, “Don’t even think about going it alone. The Sisters Waskowitz, remember? Nobody can beat us if we stick together.”

“Don’t forget,” Summer added softly, “I tried it. It doesn’t work. Trust me.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Eve whispered, already knowing it was futile. “You both have families… children to protect.”

Summer nodded. “That’s exactly why you can’t shut us out. That’s why we’re doing this-to protect our families. Sonny’s a danger to all of us, Evie, not just you. If there’s one thing we can do to help put him away, of course we’re going to do it.”

“Yeah…okay.” Ignoring Jake, Eve reached for the box of tissues on the bedside stand. But his presence was a drumbeat inside her chest, a silent scream in her ears, a bomb burst inside her head. She blew her nose, cleared her throat. “Fine-I understand that. But there isn’t anything you can do. So-”

“But,” said Mirabella gleefully, “that’s where you’re wrong. We already have a plan.”

“Plan?” Eve stared over her wad of tissues with a feeling of foreboding. “What plan?”

“Well…it involves Christmas-”

“-which we’re going to have at my house,” Summer continued, firing the words with machine-gun speed, hoping to get it all in in one burst before Eve could object. “We’ll all be mere-except Mom and Pop-we’ll send them off on a cruise, or something. Troy and Charly will be there, too. Troy’s an ex-SEAL, which should come in handy in case something goes wrong.”

“Which it won’t,” Jake growled.

Summer glanced at him and smiled tranquilly. “Of course not. Anyway, apparently, Sonny thinks Hal hid something there that can incriminate him, right? So-we’ll let him look for it. Jake’s going to have the whole house wired for surveillance.”

“No,” Eve choked out. “No.” She bolted for the bathroom.

Summer and Mirabella looked at each other. After a moment, Summer said, “That went well.”

Jake muttered, “Excuse me,” and went to knock on the bathroom door. There was no answer. He glanced at the two sisters, who both gave him a nod. He opened the door a crack, then pushed it the rest of the way and went in, shutting it behind him.

She hadn’t turned the light on, so he did. Then for a few moments he stood where he was, not knowing what to do or what to say to her. His heart felt as if it would pound a hole in his chest. He didn’t know when he’d felt so unsure. So exposed.

She stood with her back to him, hands braced on the sink. For some reason she’d taken the collar off; the pieces sat askew in the basin in front of her. Her head was bowed and her shoulders hunched, and her nape looked unprotected and vulnerable as a child’s. Seeing it like that, he thought about what she’d had to endure these last few weeks, what she must be feeling now, and anger burned in his belly like acid.

“Eve,” he began in a cracking voice, reaching toward her.

About as vulnerable as a cougar kitten, she rounded on him, eyes spitting dark fire. “How could you do this? How could you go to them without even telling me? You knew how much I wanted to keep them out of this. Couldn’t you at least have told me?”

“You didn’t give me a chance,” he said stonily. “You haven’t been going to your therapy sessions lately.”

Her mouth twisted, and she looked away. “I went to the first one after…the holiday. You weren’t there.”

“I was in a meeting with Coffee-getting authorization for all this.” But he’d talked with her sister by that time, and that knowledge was heavy in his belly. He took a breath, but it didn’t ease it much-or the pounding of his heart, either.

“Eve-” he said, and her name was thick and scratchy m his throat. But she interrupted him before he could say what he wanted to say, gazing at him and slowly shaking her head.

“I don’t understand, Jake. I mean, I know how important it is to you to bring Sonny down-I know you’ve been working on it for years, I know you feel that it’s at least partly to blame for the breakup of your marriage. But just a week ago you wanted me out of it completely. You were going to ‘bring me in.’” She raised two sets of fingers, setting that off in quotes. “You wanted me to break up with Sonny and call the whole thing off. I’m the one that wanted to keep on with it. And then you turn right around and get my whole family involved? I don’t understand, Jake. What’s going on? What’s changed?”

“What’s changed…” He released a breath that was like a pressure valve letting go. She’d asked him that before, and he hadn’t had the courage to answer her. “What’s changed? For starters, we-” And he stopped, suddenly terrified, like a man walking on thin ice, hearing it crack under his feet.

“For starters…?” All at once she was breathlessly alert, as if she’d heard that cra- ack, too. “You mean…because we…”

The tension inside him was unbelievable. “Because of what happened in the truck… yes.” There was so much emotion in him, his jaws had locked tight, so the rest was a thickened mumble. “We’ve never…addressed that.”

“Addressed what?” In the glaring bathroom light, her eyes seemed to shine and shimmer like sapphires. “We made love. That’s it. What’s there to talk about? You think just because we made love, that automatically changes everything? That it gives you the right-” And suddenly her jewel-like eyes had turned to liquid; tears sparkled like tiny pearls on her cheeks.

That was it. He felt it like a gunshot inside his head-the ice cracking under him, the tension snapping, his self- control giving way. With a groan of anguish he reached for her, felt her flesh beneath his fingers, felt her mouth, her lips warm and wet and salty from her tears. Sinking…drowning…he moved his mouth over hers, felt the moisture slick on his lips, and the salt-taste sweet on his tongue. He felt her mouth open under his, and heard-no, felt-her sigh.

He made a sound, then, deep in his throat, an animal sound of hunger and need that stunned him, shocked him to the depths of his soul. Helpless to stop himself, no longer even wanting to, he drove his tongue deep into her mouth. And when he felt her give way, yet whimper and open to him, hungry for more, he brought his hand up to the back of her head to steady it. With her head cradled in his hand, he drew back just long enough to nip at her lips and glaze them with his own moisture, until she gave a tiny, gasping cry and lifted to him, blind and trembling.

Her response and her helplessness touched him unbelievably, and when he plunged his tongue between her lips again, it was no longer a plundering, but a giving. He took nothing from her, exerted no dominance, extracted no surrender, but instead poured into her all the hunger and need he’d stored away deep inside himself during the years of his self-denial, and the loneliness and vulnerability he hadn’t even known was there inside him, too. He let it flow from the depths of his soul in trembling, shuddering waves of emotion that should have appalled him, but instead came as unbelievably sweet relief.

At last, drained and fragile, he tore his mouth from hers and with his arms around her, held her as though she