Soren felt the sadness descend on him like a weight. He knew how much she must be hurting. Knew how lonely she must feel to send that text. He’d been there. Maybe not exactly the same, but in a similar enough place, the place where you have a good thing and think it can’t possibly be right, so you burn it down. He never wanted her to feel like that, and it didn’t matter that he knew she had to, at some point. It was just something she had to go through, but it made him crazy with grief to think of it.
If he pushed, she’d run away screaming, and for good reason.
All he wanted to do was help her, and he fucking couldn’t.
“You never have to hide.”
And then he called Adra.
Brian threw a couch pillow as he got up and blocked the screen, and Soren caught it, threw it, and nailed Brian in the head with it without breaking stride. These guys were family, but God help them if they got in the way right now. Only Desi, still
weirded
out by being in a new house, followed him out.
“Soren, what time is it?” Adra said.
“Don’t know,” he said, stepping out into the brisk night air with his dog. “You talk to her?
About all this?
Ford set her up with you, right? So did you talk to her?”
He could hear Adra sigh. “Yeah, I talked to her, but you know I can’t tell you anything, Soren.”
“Adra, you don’t have to tell me shit except whether or not she’s ok. Is she ok?”
He was pacing, looking for some way to get the energy out. Desi whined at his heels. He felt like a gladiator without an enemy. He would climb mountains to fix whatever it was, and instead he was pacing around Declan’s porch like a moron.
“Adra! Just tell me she’s all right!”
Adra sighed again. “Yes. Ok. She’s not in any immediate danger or crisis.”
“That’s a very lawyerly answer.” He laughed humorlessly.
“I think it’s contagious.”
“You know what I want to know.”
“I can’t give it to you, Soren,” Adra said. “There are so many different ways to be ok, or not, or…look, she’s obviously figuring stuff out. Let her do that.”
“That was the plan.” He paused. “Thank you. I just needed to know that she was all right, and that there was someone watching out for her. This isn’t
gonna
be fun for me, but I can handle it. Just…watch out for her. As a favor to me.”
“I’d do it anyway. It doesn’t have to be a favor to you.”
“Yes, it does.”
He could practically hear Adra roll her eyes at Dom ridiculousness. It made him think of her and Ford.
“Hey,” Soren asked. “What about you? You ok?”
Silence. {1">ked. font>
“After the thing with Ford, Adra.
You all right?
I haven’t been down to the club lately.”
Another
sigh
. When she finally spoke, Adra was quiet. “I have no idea how to even talk to him,” she said. “So we’re not. Talking. I don’t even—”
“He went crazy when another man invaded your space, Adra. Don’t overthink it. We’re not that complicated.”
“We?”
“You know what I mean. Men.”
“It’s just so not like him,” she said. She sounded sad, and somehow hurt.
Soren pinched his nose and shook his head. For two people who had had the love of their lives handed to them on a silver platter, Ford and Adra were unbelievably stupid.
“Christ,
Adra
, will you two just work it out already?” he said.
Adra finally laughed, and it was a good sound, an all-is-still-mostly-right-with-the-world sound. “Says the man calling me to find out about his sub,” she said.
“She’s not my sub anymore,” Soren said.
Even if he planned to fix that soon.
“Oh, Soren, I’m sorry,” Adra said.
“Just keep an eye on her for me, will you?”
“Yes, sir,” Adra said.
Soren paused. “And I won’t tell Ford you called me ‘sir.’”
Adra hung up, laughing and cursing at the same time. It felt good to make his friend laugh under the circumstances. For a bunch of people who made a point of being self aware enough to keep their various kinks safe, they all seemed to suck at relationships.
Soren maybe more than others.
He didn’t pretend to be good at it. He didn’t keep in touch with his family, he didn’t let anyone but Dec and the band and now Cate depend on him, and he knew there wasn’t anyone out there who needed him except Cate. He thought he had it pretty well under control.
And that was when his sister called.
~ * ~ * ~
Cate had a longstanding habit of throwing herself into her work whenever her personal life became too painful, something that at least partially accounted for her professional success—something she’d decided long ago to see as a silver lining—but this time when she threw herself into work, it meant th {, i’t ainking about Soren.
It was killing her.
She even sort of hoped that all the new research her team was doing would somehow uncover something that could make her fall even a little bit out of love with him. She wasn’t proud of that desperate, frustrated thought, but it had happened, and she could live with it.
But even though they were scrambling to catch up with this drug den of sexual perversion story precisely because Soren had failed to tell her about Julia Goode, the long-ago ex-girlfriend who had died of a drug overdose shortly after leaving him, she still couldn’t find a way to paint him in a bad light. Oh, she knew how she’d do it if she were suing him; that was easy. But that was because as a lawyer she was only really concerned with the perception of truth.
As a woman?
She cared about the actual truth. And all she could see, the more they uncovered about Soren’s affair with Julia Goode more than ten years ago, was the possible source of Soren’s conviction that he wasn’t capable of love.
Cate shook her head, going through the file one last time. It wasn’t helpful for her to make assumptions. That was just a clever way of getting her hopes up.
And her traitorous brain kept freaking doing it.
Because she was in love with him.
More than that, this was the first time she’d felt love that felt…real. With Jason it had been about
her own
screwed-up issues; with Soren? She’d love him even if she never saw him again. She wanted him to be happy. She wanted him to feel what he’d allowed her to feel.
It was a good thing, a warm thing, something that made her better. It felt like it was about who she wanted to be, not about something she was running from.
She couldn’t explain it, and she certainly couldn’t justify it, and if she were being honest, it even kind of embarrassed her a little bit, because who fell in love like this after the age of, like, sixteen? To the point where they read the same sentence in a report over and over again without ever understanding the words?
And here was the torturous part: the fact that it was so dramatic, so certain, made her question it all the more. Because what if she really was broken and just couldn’t see it? What if she had been right, in the beginning of all this, to tell herself never to trust her feelings for a man, never to trust her judgment ever again?
She had gotten approximately no work done. This was ridiculous. This was adolescent.
Cate felt like she might cry.
So of course that was when Jason showed up.
“Ms. Kennedy, I have your husband for you,” Verna squeaked on the intercom.
Cate practically shot out of her seat. She was st {t. n>
anding there, hands on her desk, wild-eyed and stock-still like a deer in the headlights when Jason strode into her office.
She noticed he closed the door behind him.
Cate felt her eyes darting about, felt her blood pumping, her heart racing. It was the shock of it. She watched Jason, watched him carefully, looking for any of the telltale signs that would warn her of an impending incident. He looked…he looked smug. He looked proud, the way he did right before he was going to knock her down.
She hadn’t had to operate like this, from this vigilant
place,
in so long that part of her was seeing it clearly for the first time. It was
insane
. It was insane that anyone could make her feel like this, let alone someone who supposedly cared about her.
But insane was good. Insane meant it felt wrong. It felt other. It felt like the past.
“Jason, what do you want?” she said.
He smiled at her. He smiled at her warmly, in that way that might have seemed caring once. Now she knew it to mean something else. And in this context it just seemed triumphant.
“I just wanted to see how you were doing,” he said. “The case isn’t going so well, huh?”
Cate wanted to laugh. He was so incredibly, absurdly transparent. It was like he’d seen Cate get beat up in the press for a professional failure and immediately his dick had grown about three inches. He just needed to come in and lord it over her.
“I am not talking to you about the case,” Cate said. “Please get out of my office.”
“Cate, don’t be petulant,” Jason said. “So you’re losing your first big-league case. Mark Cheedham has a lot of experience.”
Cate just stared at him.
First big-league case?
Mark Cheedham was a bottom feeder. She’d gone up against multinational corporations and won.
And still, it stung. She could feel her old insecurities waking up, beginning to nip at her heels.
She had been distracted by Soren
, it was true. She never should have been blindsided by this Julia Goode dying of a heroin overdose thing.
“You know you’re going to have to settle,” Jason said, picking up the ship in a bottle she had on her desk. It had been a gift from a law professor when she’d graduated. She only just now realized how much it resembled Soren’s tattoo.
Wait—Jason was asking about settlements?
This was even more ridiculous than she’d thought. She watched Jason peer into the bottle as though he didn’t care about her answer, like it was unimportant or incidental. The man was a
terrible
poker player. He always, always let his ego get in the way. And now with this little display of affected nonchalance, he’d made it clear to Cate why he was really here—on behalf of Mark Cheedham, fe { Ch the way.eling her out for settlement opportunities.
Which told her a few things. One, Jason was still looking for a job, principally with Cheedham, and he hadn’t told the truth about the state of his marriage; and two, Mark Cheedham’s actual case was as weak as she suspected it to be. If he had the slam-dunk he’d projected to the press, he’d be begging to go to court for a chance at a giant jury award.
It was a satisfying few seconds of deduction. The only reason she didn’t laugh out loud was because this was Jason at his most dangerous.
Right when he was feeling big, and feeling powerful. Right when he was feeling alpha. Anything that disrupted that, anything that threatened to bring him down, could set him off.