Alan would protect all three of you.” Slowly, she set her fork down, rolled her lips inward and pressed them between her teeth, head bowed.
“I’m sorry. If I’d known—”
“Don’t you apologize for anything. You were twelve years old. It was our job to protect you. The lot of us failed you, not the other way around.” She reached out and grabbed my hand, squeezing it tight. “Don’t you ever apologize when it’s all of us who owe you an apology.”
I didn’t particularly feel owed an apology, but she was so vehement that I chose not to contradict her. “I was just going to say I didn’t mean to dredge up memories best left behind.”
“But they aren’t, are they?” She turned and looked at Fluke and reached out to run a hand across the top of his head. He leaned into it, panting and grinning. “You didn’t have a familiar when I asked your father if I could meet with you last year. And Gideon, well . . . Meredith told me about you. Not exactly about you, but about the circumstances of her training.”
“I’ll do better this time,” he promised, something broken in the tense set of his shoulders and earnestness in his voice. “I won’t leave Sage alone until he can defend himself from these people. Not if I have a say in it.”
She gave him an indulgent, grandmotherly look, and he leaned forward, smiling at her and sighing deeply.
Sucker.
“Thank you, Gideon. You’ll never know how much I appreciate you being there to help Sage.”
My father didn’t come back out of the office that afternoon to yell at me, which was mildly surprising. Maybe he was still afraid of Iris’s threat. Or hell, maybe he’d decided to fuck off to someplace where he didn’t hate all the people. The moon, maybe.
The afternoon at the shop was quiet, and the walk home even quieter. And when we got there, I really didn’t like the look in Gideon’s eyes. He was staring at me intently, and I could see him thinking about his promise to Iris.
I was going to be the one who paid for that, I suspected.
“We’ve been doing a half-assed job of this so far,” he told me, confirming my every worry. “We need to make sure you’re ready for it when these assholes come for you. We’ll make them sorry they tried.”
I sighed and dropped onto the couch, staring up at him, trying to mimic Fluke’s pitiful sad eyes. It probably didn’t work as well in green as brown, but I could try, right? “Have you considered the possibility that they murdered you too? If a living version of you couldn’t be ready for them, how could I ever?”
He crossed his arms over his chest, making his broad shoulders look enormous. I was glad I was sitting down, because having to look up at him when I was standing was bound to give me a crick in my neck. At least this way I could lean back on the couch.
An imaginary breeze caught his duster, making it billow dramatically in the air behind him as he stared. The answering electric jolt through my whole body was probably not the response he’d wanted to his impressive muscles, but it made me sit right back forward again. He was already annoyed. Me getting a hard-on watching him wasn’t going to help.
Come on, though. He was six and a half feet tall, with gold blond hair and deep, soulful brown eyes. Who wouldn’t be attracted to him? Asexual people like Beez, that was who, and I was not one of them.
No, my gaze trailed down his enormous pecs, to his slim waist, and . . . well, Gideon didn’t seem the kind of guy to stuff a pair of socks down his pants to impress anybody, so I was duly impressed.
I started, realizing I’d been ogling his package, and looked back up at him. Oh gods, what if he was one of those old school “one man and one woman” people?
He looked thoroughly unimpressed.
Shit.
“I’m dead, Sage,” he pointed out.
I glanced away, turning slightly to one side and running a hand nervously through my always-messy black hair. “I know. Believe me, well aware. I can see the kitchen archway through you.”
At that, he groaned. Instead of walking away or berating me, he dropped into his usual position on the coffee table across from me and leaned his elbows on his thighs. “That’s not what I mean.”
I still didn’t look at him, so