87

7
FOSTER
Ethan ordered Callan out of the car the moment I parked outside Adrianne’s house. I didn’t have to be looking at Cal to know that he wanted to argue, but surprisingly, he got out of the car after pressing a kiss to the crown of Adrianne’s head.
I watched them walk up the walkway to the front door. He and Callan had seen that the window was replaced while Adrianne was on set today. “I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to just sitting around waiting for you guys to make sure my house is safe.”
I could see Adrianne in the rearview mirror. She was disheveled and prissy all at once. Her hands ran through her tangled dark locks, trying to arrange it into something more presentable.
“Do you want to see all the places where your security falls apart?”
It was a stupid question, but Adrianne stopped her fidgeting and looked at me. Her honey eyes found me in the rearview mirror. “You’ll show me?”
I nodded. “You need to know, right?” She beamed at me, and it was like the sun shining down on me. I climbed out of the car and went to open her door. When I held out my hand to help her out, a complicated look flashed over her face. “It’s just a hand down, Adrianne,” I reminded her.
She took a breath and took my hand. “Thank you,” she mumbled as I helped her down.
“It’s not a problem.” We stared down the driveway toward the perimeter fence. “Why don’t you like being helped?” I asked.
“Why don’t you talk more?” she shot back at me.
Touché. “I talk plenty when I’m comfortable.”
That seemed to cheer her. “Does that mean you’re comfortable with me?”
I shrugged. “Getting there” At the driveway’s edge, I point out the mutilated security panel. “They could easily access the guts of the thing,” I explained. “It should have had some kind of protective cover on it that would be more of a deterrent, but it didn’t.”
“Why didn’t it alert the police? It should have, right?”
I thought about simply assuring her that glitches happen, but I wasn’t the type to baby anyone. “These things rarely do exactly what they’re advertised to do. Your service comes from across the country, or even outside the country. Mistakes happen more than you’d probably like to think about.”
The color drained from her face, and she swallowed hard. “I was a sitting duck, wasn’t I?”
“Essentially.”
Adrianne swallowed again as if she were trying very hard not to be sick. “We’re here now,” I soothed. “We won’t let anything happen to you.” She nodded, but the terror was still stamped onto her face. Might as well get it all out now, I thought. “Let’s keep walking, okay?” As we walked, I showed her where her hedges were thin and the wrought iron was rusted.
By the end of our little tour, she was obviously shaken, but I had to give her credit for toughing it out until the end.
“There’s so much that has to be fixed,” she mumbled. “I can help with that.”
She looked at me. “You’d want to do yard work?”
“I like working with my hands,” I told her. “I’m the intel guy, but I like to build things.” I shrugged. “I like to be outside.”
Adrianne smiled, small and soft, and there was no wonder that Callan had made a move on her. She was beautiful all the time, but that soft smile was a killer.
“When I first saw you, I thought you were the surfer type.” She cocked her head, studying me. “Are you?”
I dipped my head. “In true Cali-boy fashion,” I admitted, and she grinned. “What about you?”
“I’ve been a few times, but I am absolutely atrocious.” She smoothed her hands down over the generous swell of her hips. “I’ve always been curvy, and while I love my body now, I didn’t always. Going to the beach
and wearing a swimsuit were . . . not my thing. I didn’t feel comfortable going to the beach until I was well into adulthood.”
I couldn’t imagine anyone not loving Adrianne’s body.
In the car, when she’d been making those helpless sounds and I’d had to keep my eyes on the road, it was absolute torture. “We’ll go to the beach,” I said. “I’ll help you with your technique.”
“I would love that.” She looked toward the house. “They’re taking a long time. Do you think they’re arguing?”
I glanced over my shoulder. There hadn’t been any distress signals. “Probably,” I said. “That’s pretty common for Ethan and Cal, though.”
Her smile faded. “I don’t want them fighting over me.”
“They’re not,” I assured her. “Not in the way you’re thinking, anyway.” I knew that she was worried about jealousy, but for us, that wasn’t as much of a problem. Not that she knew that.
“How can you be so sure?”
I didn’t want to talk about Laura . . . but I didn’t see how to explain this situation any better. “Come sit with me on the porch? I saw that you have rockers.”
Adrianne nodded, and as we crossed the yard, I took her hand and intertwined our fingers. Her palm was warm against my own.
How long had it been since I’d held hands with someone?
The few flings that I’d had, only ever because Cal or Ethan had pulled me in, had been just that. Flings. I wasn’t interested in anything else from those women.
But there was something in the fragile defiance enigma that was Adrianne Montoya that made my stomach burn with the kind of want I hadn’t thought I was capable of anymore.
We climbed the porch and sat in the two rockers that were tucked neatly away from the front door, but our hands remained interlocked. Seemed that Adrianne liked holding my hand just as much as I liked holding hers. I played my thumb over her knuckles, and that soft smile lifted the corners of her mouth again.
“You asked how I know that Ethan and Cal aren’t fighting over you,” I said. As if saying their names conjured them, we could hear the muffled dressing down that Ethan was giving Callan. It wasn’t clear what they were saying, but the tone was obvious.
She nodded. “Yes. How do you know that?”
“Ethan told you that you didn’t have to choose with us.” Adrianne’s eyes went round. “How did you know that?”
“Unlike Callan, who hooked up with you after being told to leave you alone, which is what they’re fighting over, Ethan texted us.”
Adrianne turned beet red. “He did?”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed about,” I said. “It’s the kind of communication that it takes to make this all work.”
She let go of my hand, turning so that she could look at me straight on. “What does that mean? Exactly?”
So Ethan didn’t actually explain anything, I thought. Typical.
“This wouldn’t be the first time we shared a woman,” I said. It wouldn’t even be the fourth time, I added in my head, but she didn’t quite need to know about every woman we took to bed for a weekend. The only one who ever mattered was Laura. “There was a woman, Laura Townsend, who we . . . fell in love with, I suppose.”
Adrianne tried to digest that. “Are the three of you-” “No,” I said. “We’re not romantic with each other.”
“So, why do this?” she asked. At the very least, she wasn’t disgusted by the idea, so that was a positive. Mostly, she just seemed confused. “You’re all devastatingly good-looking.” I couldn’t not smirk at that, and she swatted my arm. “You know you are,” she said with a dainty sniff. “You could have anyone you wanted, all to yourself.”
She wasn’t wrong. “We’ve all had girlfriends in the past,” I said, trying to explain in a way that would make sense. “They’ve always ended badly, for one reason or another.”
“So, that’s why you date as a pack?”
I chuckled, but pack wasn’t the most inaccurate term I’d ever heard. “Not exactly,” I said. “We met Laura while we were serving in the Middle East. She was a field nurse, and we liked hanging out with her. One night, everything just . . . changed. Friendly conversation became flirtatious, and everything sort of fell into place with her. Together, we were better partners for her than we could have ever hoped to be on our own. It just made sense.” And it had been hot sharing her, I thought. Just like it had been hot watching Callan play with Adrianne on the way home tonight.
Adrianne was quiet for a moment while she processed what I’d said. “What happened to her? Why aren’t you with her now?” she asked after a while.
I knew she would ask that particular question, but it was still hard to hear.
“Laura died in an airstrike.” I said the words quickly, hoping that it would be like ripping off a bandage, but as soon as the words were out, my stomach twisted itself into a knot that refused to go away. “Ethan was with her at the end, but Cal and I had been sent on a different assignment. We didn’t even know until a few days later.”
“Oh, God.” Adrianne looked horrified. “I am so sorry.”
I nodded at her words, but they rang hollow in my ears. “When we found it was a friendly fire incident, we all finished out our contracts and didn’t re-up. We all kind of . . . fell apart. It took six months for Ethan to come to us about starting Mercado Security.”
She reached across and took hold of my hand again. “No one should lose a love like that,” she said. “I hate that you went through it.”
While her words were sincere, the ones she didn’t say are what struck me. Adrianne didn’t try to center herself in what I’d said. She didn’t ask me how she was meant to live up to Laura or any such trivial question that I would have expected a woman in her position to ask. How could a possible new lady love live up to a ghost?
But she didn’t ask. She simply offered comfort.
My heart thudded against my ribs as if to remind me that it was still there. I leaned into her and kissed her. Her lips were as soft as I imagined they would be, and the hitch in her breath was a melody to my ears. When Adrianne parted her lips, however, I pulled back. Her eyebrows knitted in confusion.
“What-”
I kissed the place where her eyebrows were pulled together. “If I kiss you the way I want to,” I explained, “I won’t want to stop, and the first time I take you isn’t going to be to the sound of Ethan and Cal fighting.”
As if to emphasize my point, their voices pitched all the higher.
“Should we go in there?” Adrianne asked. “Before they start throwing punches and breaking my furniture?”
“Unfortunately,” I said, “that’s probably a good idea.” Cal and Ethan probably wouldn’t hit each other, but I also couldn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t. I held out my hand for her. She took it, and we went into the house.
“Should have fired your ass!”
I let go of Adrianne’s hand for a moment, motioning for her to stay put. I walked into the kitchen. “Are you two done yet?” I asked flatly. Ethan wheeled on me, all blazing eyes and flaring nostrils, and I held up a calming hand. “If you were going to fire Cal, you would have twenty minutes ago, so you can continue to scream at each other, or we could get some dinner.”
“I vote to get dinner.” We all turned to see Adrianne in the doorway between the living room and kitchen. “I didn’t really get a lunch break today.”
I looked at Ethan. “She didn’t eat?”
Our fearless leader had the decency to look ashamed. “We got a little distracted during her break,” he said.
Callan scoffed. “Fucking hypocrite.”
“Enough!” Adrianne’s voice rang out across the kitchen, and we all jerked. “I won’t have you fighting like this.” She stormed into the room and didn’t stop until she stood between all of us. “Ethan, if you’re mad that Callan and I slept together, you’re going to have to be as mad at me as you are at him, okay?” She whirled on Callan. “And you have no reason to be upset that he’s mad at you for disobeying an order. You were in the Navy. You know how it’s supposed to go.” She smiled at him. “Not that I’m exactly upset that you broke ranks.”
I sidled up beside her, wrapping an arm around her waist. “Well said,” I told her, and she leaned into me. Ethan and Callan stared at us, and I could practically hear their thoughts. Was she okay with all of this? “We need to talk,” I said.
WE SETTLED on Chinese takeout and ate it in Adrianne’s cozy living room. She was curled into my side, eating beef and broccoli straight out of the takeout box. On her far side, Callan was digging into his own dinner. His hand absently played up and down her calf as he ate. I offered her a bite of shrimp, and she took it off my fork with her teeth. She smiled around the bite. “Thank you.”
Anything for you to look at me like that, I thought. I glanced up and caught the slightly forlorn look on Ethan’s face. He had sat himself on the other side of the room in her recliner. He hadn’t said much since Adrianne’s
dressing down earlier. I leaned in and said directly into her ear, “Why don’t you go offer Ethan a bite?” She glanced at me, eyebrow raised, and I nodded.
Adrianne climbed off the couch and crossed the room. Ethan watched her with an equal mix of wariness and want on his face. She didn’t stop to ask permission but simply climbed into his lap. She scooped out a mixture of rice and steak and held it out to him. He took the offered bite, eyes never leaving her face. “It’s good, right?” she asked.
He nodded. “Delicious,” he agreed, but I knew that he wasn’t talking about the food. Ethan plucked the carton from her hand and deposited on the coffee table, careful not to displace her in the slightest. One of his massive hands slid up her back and cupped the back of her neck, pulling her down for a kiss.
Although Ethan, Callan, and I had been in this situation before, I waited to feel jealous. I waited to get upset that the woman I find so intriguing and so goddamn beautiful was in the arms of one of my best friends.
But it didn’t happen.
Instead, seeing Ethan take control of the kiss and dominate her mouth was just . . . hot. Especially when Adrianne so obviously enjoyed it. She melted into him.
After a moment, Adrianne pulled back, a smile curving her mouth. She readjusted herself on Ethan’s lap so that her back was pressed against his chest.
“You said we needed to talk,” Callan pointed out, glancing my way. “Let’s talk.”
“I told Adrianne about Laura.” The silence that followed was deafening. Ethan didn’t look like he was breathing, and I saw Adrianne pet his arm in a soothing way. “She needed to know.”
“Why?” Callan asked.
“Because I needed to understand,” Adrianne said gently. “I needed to know that this was possible.” She gestured at all of us. “Ethan told me that I didn’t have to choose, but I truly didn’t believe it.” She patted Ethan again. “I hate what happened to her, and what happened to you all. I can’t and won’t replace her, but . . .” She took a breath. Come on, baby, you’re doing so well, I thought. “But I find myself insanely attracted to you all, and I want to see where it goes. If you all do too.”
We all sat motionless for a moment, and then Callan was up and across the room. Without removing her from Ethan’s lap, he bent and slanted his mouth over hers. The kiss went on and on until he all but wrenched himself away.
Callan looked back at me. “Foster?”
I stood and crossed the room as well. Adrianne turned her face upward in offering to mine, and there wasn’t any way that I could reject such a request. I kissed her just as softly and chastely as I had on the porch. She was frowning when I pulled back.
“Soon,” I told her with a wink. “I think someone has an apology to make for being an ass. Right, Ethan?”
He flipped me off but turned her to him again and tugged her into a kiss that had soft sounds leaking from her throat. “Let’s go upstairs,” he suggested, and she nodded eagerly.
I nudged Callan. “Clean-up duty tonight,” I told him. Normally, Cal would bitch about having to do dishes, but tonight, he smiled. I felt lighter than I had in a long while. Life wasn’t always fair to any of us, but this felt like the beginning of something really good.