Hayes went still, the muscles in his jaw tightening like a loaded spring.
Brody blinked, the confidence on his face flickering—like he’d just realized he’d said that with a little too much truth in it. He cleared his throat and coughed into his fist, trying to patch the moment.
“I mean,” he hurried on, waving a hand like he could physically bat the words away, “you know what I’m saying. The whole family’s intense. Big personalities. They sort of ... take over a room.”
His save didn’t quite land.
Not with Hayes watching him like that.
Not with Austin still staring.
Not with my chest tight and my pulse suddenly too loud in my ears.
Because Brody wasn’t wrong, and that was the problem.
Clara Darling had taken over my house in less than a week, and I couldn’t tell which part of me hated it more—the part that wanted my space back or the part that was already bracing for what it would feel like when she eventually left.
Hayes’s stare cut first to Brody—sharp and warning, the kind of look that he used to shut down anyone who dared glance at his beloved sisters. Then his attention swung to me, and somehow it was worse.
Because with Brody, it was older brother annoyance, but with me, it was history.
All the shit we didn’t say out loud. The phone call on that dark road. The way his guilt sat between us like an extra chair at every table. The way he’d hovered since the accident like he could rewrite the ending if he just tried hard enough.
And now Clara was in the mix.
Hayes leaned back in his chair, casual on the surface, but his eyes stayed locked on me like he was bracing for impact. He kept his voice light, like he was asking about the weather.
“Something I should know about you living with Clara?”
My spine went rigid.
I felt the question like a hand closing around my throat. It wasn’t even what he said—it was everything underneath it. The protectiveness stitched into him where his sisters were concerned. The suspicion that came with any man in their orbit. The automatic need to make sure they were safe, even when they were grown women who could handle themselves.
He didn’t want to think about Clara in my house.
He sure as hell didn’t want to think about Clara in my house withme.
My mind flashed, unhelpfully, to steam and glass and tiny sleep shorts.
My stomach dropped.
I swallowed hard and snapped the answer out too fast, too sharp, like if I cut it clean enough it would stop the conversation from bleeding. “No,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
Hayes didn’t move. He didn’t blink. He just stared at me, the way he used to when we were out together and he could tell I’d made up my mind to do something stupid.
“It’s temporary,” I added, because apparently I couldn’t leave well enough alone. The words came out with an edge, as if saying them harder would make them truer. “She needed a place. I needed ... someone who isn’t a nurse.”
I could feel the pin in place inside my chest, the needle of my pulse in my throat. The more I insisted it was nothing, the more the lie took up space. Too loud. Too obvious.
Because if it was really nothing, I wouldn’t have been so damn defensive.
If it was really nothing, I wouldn’t have pictured her beneath me as I sank into her and stretched her open.
If it was really nothing, my body wouldn’t have betrayed me the second I was alone on my couch.
Hayes held my stare for another beat, then looked away like he’d filed the moment in a drawer he planned to open later.
Austin cleared his throat awkwardly and flipped through his binder like it could save us. “Okay,” he said, too cheerful. “Back to the campaign. You’ve made it to the edge of the woods?—”
But the air had already shifted.
The game pieces were still on the table. The dice still sat waiting to be rolled.
And yet it felt like we’d wandered into a different kind of dungeon altogether.