Page 133 of Cross Checked
“It was accurate,” Emitt said.
Luke’s jaw clicked. “You talk a lot of shit for a kid who thinks college hockey means something.”
There it was, the old-guy angle.
Cute.
I glanced at him, calm enough that his nostrils flared. “And you talk a lot for a guy whose best season happened before the iPad was invented.”
The street erupted.
Daniel choked on his beer. Ryker turned away laughing under his breath, trying and failing to act like a responsible adult. Even Aura’s mouth twitched from beside Pip, though her eyes stayed sharp on Luke like she was waiting for him to finally show everybody what lived under the charm.
Luke took one step toward me. “Careful.”
I smiled., fucking finally. He has stamina I give him that, but I knew he would unravel at some point. Now it was about getting the mask to drop.
“Or what?”
The noise around us thinned. Not stopped because the Bennetts never fully stopped making noise unless someone required stitches, but the air changed enough that every adult male in the driveway noticed. Knox cop switch flipped on. Ryker’s posture straightened. Daniel lowered his beer. Pip’s head came up fast.
Fear first followed by panic. Then that devastating, automatic need to protect everyone else from an obvious truth they refused to see.
It was time someone showed them.
She stepped off the curb. “Okay, I think street hockey has reached peak testosterone poisoning—”
My eyes cut to her. “Stay there, Pip.”
Her mouth opened but I cut her a look, not harsh. Not cruel. Just direct enough to make her understand I was not asking because I thought she was fragile. I was telling her because Luke had shifted toward her the second she moved, and I didn’t fucking like that.
Her chin lifted, stubborn as ever. “Do not boss me in front of my family.”
“I’ll boss you wherever you need it.”
Kellen coughed. “Oh, they are absolutely dating.”
“We are not,” she snapped.
I didn’t look away from Luke. “Pip has labels she’s emotionally attached to.”
The entire driveway went up again.
Pip made a strangled sound. “Cade.”
Luke’s eyes moved between us, and the mask slipped another inch. “That what she’s calling it now?”
There was something in his voice I didn’t like. Not jealousy. Jealousy, I understood. Jealousy was normal, ugly, manageable. This was sharper. Older. Like he thought her mouth belonged to him in some way and the rest of us were trespassing on property.
I stepped closer to him before I even decided to and fucking Pip moved too.
I saw it from the corner of my eye and snapped my hand out, catching her waist before she could put herself between us. Not hard. Not even close. Just enough to stop her from thinking she had any right to take this fuckers shit. To protect him out of fear. To think for one second I would ever let her step into my fight, because that’s what this was. My fight now.
Her eyes flew to mine and I looked right at her. “No.” The word landed clean and her breath caught. “Do not step between me and him. He is a grown man and no man needs a woman protecting him.”
Her face changed.
I felt it immediately, the way her pulse jumped beneath my fingers, the way her eyes flicked once toward Luke and back. Not because I scared her. Because I had named the thing she’d been about to do and dragged it into the light before she could hide behind habit.
