Beast Brothers 2

After Friday night, we both know she’s more than casual. That a night here and there, if she even wanted that kind of arrangement, isn’t nearly enough. And thanks to Megan and the Easton brothers, we know it can work.

Maybe all she wanted was to check something off her bucket list, but we want more. We want the real thing. And we’re going to show her how good it can be.

“All right.” Alex rises from the bench and is halfway to the door before I can move. He looks over his shoulder at me. “What are you waiting for?”

Shaking my head with a smile, I follow him. Once we make our minds up, we don’t mess around. We need to make sure Zoe’s on the same page before she starts getting ideas.

The security system we installed in her home is still active. So is the one at her work, for that matter. The threat might be neutralized — for now — but I feel better knowing that we can keep an eye on things. Whoever’s on duty in the control room switches off the camera if anything of a personal nature starts happening, but other than that they’re still going.

By the time Alex and I get showered and changed and eat breakfast, it’s late morning. We drive to our headquarters downtown and go straight to the control room. Jeff’s on duty. Checking the monitors is boring, so the guys switch off that job.

“No sign of anything suspicious?” I ask him as we move up beside him and scan Zoe’s monitors.

“No. Your girl was online, and then she was on the phone, and now it looks like she’s going out.” Sure enough, Zoe emerges from the back of her apartment just then, in a skirt and top that remind me of her outfit the night we met her, at the MMA match.

My eyes narrow. “We still have a tracker on her car?” It’s a standard security measure in cases like hers.

“Yup,” Jeff confirms.

Alex and I exchange a look that needs no words. “Pull it up,” I tell Jeff, and he brings up a map of the city, her location a pulsing icon. On the other monitor, Zoe goes out the door — without engaging the alarm system — and gets in her car.

I rub my temple and Alex mutters something under his breath. Our girl is really not security conscious. We’re going to have to talk to her about that, too.

A short while later, the map shows that she’s parked downtown, not far from where we are. “Switching to the tracker in her purse,” Jeff says, punching some buttons on the console. “And … she’s in the Ethiopian restaurant.”

“Thanks, Jeff.”

“Good luck,” he says as we head for the door, and I’m not sure if he’s giving us a hard time or not. Either way, it doesn’t matter. We’ll do what we need to where Zoe’s concerned.

35

Favorite Pastime

Lucas

Since the restaurant is only a couple of blocks away, we walk there. “I can’t believe this,” Alex says. “After Friday …” he breaks off.

“She could be meeting a girlfriend,” I say, though neither of us believes that. “Anyway, it’s partly our fault. We should have told her straight out, yesterday morning, that we wanted more.”

“Fuck giving her space,” Alex mutters. “No more of that.”

“We talk to her,” I warn him. “Let’s not push her into a corner. We know how that’ll go.”

“Right. Talk.” Alex sounds like I feel — like it’d be much better to skip the words and use our bodies to demonstrate how we feel. But didn’t we do that on Friday?

If she needs wo

rds, we’ll find them.

We hit the restaurant and push through the door. She’s easy to spot — halfway down on the right-hand side, in a little two-person booth. Her back is to us and some smarmy guy in a suit is grinning at her.

Red clouds my vision. Despite everything I’ve just said, all I want to do is put my fist through that guy’s face. “Down, boy,” Alex murmurs. “Let’s not get arrested.”

I take a deep breath and let it out. “You lead.” He can defuse the situation without hurting anyone. I think.

Without another word, Alex saunters down the aisle between the right-hand booths and the tables in the open central section. He stops right beside Zoe. “Darling,” he says when she looks up at him, startled, and then he pulls her to her feet and into his arms and kisses her in a way that cannot be mistaken for anything remotely platonic.

The look on the guy’s face puts me in a better mood immediately. “Hi,” I say, coming around to stand between him and Alex, who still has Zoe locked in a clinch. The guy’s mouth is open and he looks back and forth between me and my brother without saying a word. “You should probably go.”

Zoe’s date looks as though he’s going to say something, but then his face falls and he pushes out of the booth. Smart man. I take his seat while Alex breaks off the kiss, nudges Zoe back into her side of the booth, and squeezes in next to her.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she says, sounding halfway between stunned and angry.

“The better question would be, What the hell are you doing?” I counter. Her gaze drops to the table, and the sign of guilt makes me want to scold her. Don’t attack, I remind myself.

But I really need to know what she’s thinking. “Well?” I say, keeping my voice soft, non-accusatory.

She sighs. “You know how sometimes your imagination is your worst enemy?”

“Yeah?”

“I kept imagining the two of you out with other women. So I set up a date just to make myself feel better. I wasn’t — we weren’t—”

She hadn’t been planning to sleep with him, which makes me feel better. So does knowing that she’s jealous of our imaginary dates. “There are no other women.”