Flirting With Disaster (Camelot 3)

“Thanks. Grab a seat,” Ben ordered. “You three need coffee. Hey, Mel?” He called toward the kitchen. “Can you bring four cups of coffee? We have more visitors than we planned for.”

She popped her head out, and her eyes widened when she saw the three of them lined up on the couch. “Sure. Give me a sec.”

Judah sat on the couch and listened to the pleasant domestic sounds of Melissa in the kitchen. A refrigerator door opening and closing. A spoon in a ceramic mug.

He listened, suspended in this calm place where he’d arrived, and he stared unabashedly at Ben.

In his whole life, no one had ever looked better.

Chapter Thirty-eight

It was awkward. So awkward.

Melissa came out with the first two cups of coffee, Judah stared at Ben, Ben cleared his throat, Sean turned to stone, and Katie looked around at the prints on the walls and the piano in the corner and wondered if it would be rude to put on her sunglasses.

The sun, absent just minutes ago, had found its way from wherever it had been hiding, and now it was assaulting her through the windows behind Ben’s head. Whose house was this bright in the winter?

Nobody said anything, and Katie had no way of knowing why. Maybe Melissa had a gun in her sock. Maybe Ben was pissed off that she and Sean were here. Maybe no one knew where to begin.

When Melissa handed her a mug and sat down in a wingback chair beside the TV, completing the circle of people staring at other people and wondering what to say, Katie broke the silence. “I’m not his girlfriend.”

“You’re not?” Melissa asked.

She shook her head. “He’s queer as a three-dollar bill.”

Oh, God. What had possessed her to say that? Now Ben would think she was a homophobe. “No offense,” she told him.

Judah blanched.

Shit. That was worse. It was entirely possible that she wasn’t supposed to know Ben was gay. She would definitely shut up now.

Ben frowned, and she endured several more seconds of excruciating silence before he said, “None taken.” He crossed one ankle over his knee, preternaturally calm. “So what do you do, Katie?”

“I’m an office manager for my brother’s security company. I thought I was on my way to becoming a security agent, but now I’m thinking probably not. I’m not really the Bond Girl type, it turns out.”

Ben nodded, as if this were a normal sort of thing to say. “And how did you and Judah meet?”

“I work for him. Sean and I have been trying to figure out who’s sending him threatening messages.” She paused, considering whether this was the best approach to nabbing a bad guy. Sean shot her an exasperated look.

Definitely not.

But she’d more or less given up on subtlety. She was never going to be slick or disciplined or sophisticated. It wasn’t her. She was messy and mouthy, a bit aimless and disorganized. But loyal, too. Kind. Capable of love, with a tendency toward self-sacrifice that was possibly not altogether healthy.

She was fine. Except for the hangover.

“Any chance it was you?” she asked Ben.

He sipped his coffee, the corners of his mouth turned down. “Is this an interrogation?”

“This is breakfast,” Katie said. “Or it will be, I assume. I’m hoping you’ll feed us some of the

bacon I’m smelling, because I have to tell you, Judah got me wasted on rum and Coke last night and told me the whole story of what happened with you guys, and then I woke up hungover and he made me walk over here in the minus-twenty-degree cold. I think bacon might be the only thing that can save me.”

Ben looked at Judah. “You told her?”

With his face naked of all the habitual confidence and egotism, Judah hardly looked like a celebrity at all. “I—I did. Yeah. She’s my … friend.”

Ben took another sip of his coffee, his face a wasteland where expressions went to die. Katie would have been willing to swear there was nobody alive who could conceal his thoughts better than Sean, but this guy made Sean look like an amateur.