Arro snorted at my side. “You’ve got it bad.”
“Pot, kettle,” I reminded her before turning to Arran, and just in time.
He grinned as he bridged the distance between us and then I was swept in his arms and he kissed the life out of me right in the middle of the street.
I couldn’t help the little moan that escaped me, and I wound my arms around his neck to hold on. He held tighter and lifted me off the ground to increase the depth of the kiss.
“Ahem. AHEM.”
At Arro’s exaggerated throat clearing, Arran released me with a chuckle and lowered me to the ground. His hand settled on my hip, keeping me pulled to his side. “Oh, hello, wee sister. Just noticed you there,” he teased.
Arro rolled her eyes. “Enough of the PDA, Arr. You’re thirty-six, not sixteen.”
“Tell that to my libido,” he deadpanned.
I bit back my laughter as Arro made a comical gagging noise. “Okay, you’re provoking my morning sickness, so I’m going back to work.”
“First.” Arran released me to step toward his sister and place a hand on her belly. “How is my niece or nephew doing in there?”
Arro smiled fondly and patted his hand. “Wee bump is doing good. We both are.”
“When do we find out if it’s a boy or girl?”
“We don’t.”
Arran frowned. “You want to be surprised?”
“We do.”
“Robyn and Lachlan are going to find out. And soon, I believe.”
“Well, I don’t know what to say, Arran. Just because it’s highly possible your sister and brother had sex with their partners at the same time and got pregnant at the same time doesn’t mean we’re going to do everything at the same time when it comes to our babies.”
“This is a weird fucking family,” he murmured.
“The weirdest. We’re also the most awesome.” She patted his cheek teasingly. “Just don’t get Ery pregnant at the same time as Thane gets Regan pregnant, or we’ll start attracting those folks who travel the world looking for strange and paranormal stories to write about it. Now I’m off. Bye, lovebirds!” She shot us a grin before hurrying across the street to where she’d parked.
I barely managed to say goodbye—I was reeling from the mention of Arran getting me pregnant.
The thought wasn’t nearly as scary as it should be, which was, ironically, terrifying.
“You finished for the day?” Arran asked, drawing me out of those thoughts.
“Uh, no. I need to get back to work, actually.”
His gaze moved to where Arro was pulling out of her space, noting my car next to hers. It was a miracle we’d found parking today. Arro waved as she passed us.
“I’ll walk you over,” Arran said, taking my hand.
I chuckled. “It’s literally right there.”
He shrugged and pulled me across the street. When we got to my car, though, he positioned my back up against the driver’s door, his hands on my hips as he pressed the length of his body to mine. This kiss was slower, sweeter than the hungry kiss he probably shouldn’t have given me in front of his sister.
After a while, he broke away with soft brushes of his mouth against mine, but he didn’t move. “I need to tell you something.”
At the seriousness in his tone, I tensed. “What is it? Has something happened?”
Arran gave my hips a reassuring squeeze, but replied, “Aye. It’s probably nothing, but I don’t want to have secrets between us.”
“All right …”
“A few years back, I started getting these strange emails. They’d come every few months, always from different email addresses, all along similar lines. Just a sentence or two telling me they hadn’t forgotten me or what I did.”
My pulse raced. “What?”
“I have no clue what they mean, if they mean anything.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before now?”
“I honestly thought they were just a prank. So I deleted them. But I got one a few weeks ago, and with everything that’s been happening here over the past few years, I decided to have Lachlan’s team look at it.”
“And?”
“They couldn’t trace the email. Something about dummy IP addresses. So Lachlan gave it to his hacker.”
“Nylah?”
He frowned. “You know her?”
I nodded, glancing around to make sure no one was close enough to overhear. “She’s the one who uses a system to find any mention of me or my sister online and then takes the pages down.”
“Right.” His grip on me tightened. “Well, Nylah traced the email IP address to an internet café in Bordeaux, France. I don’t know anyone there, Ery. And I haven’t had an email since.”
I forced myself to be rational, to not panic out of instinctual fear. The truth was, the emails could just be a prank. Someone who sent creepy messages to random email addresses to get a rise out of people. Especially if Arran didn’t know anyone living in Bordeaux. “Who would want to prank you? Who would have something against you?”