Page 43 of Desired

Neither of them moved for another ten minutes.

The kitchen already had people in it.

Lauren heard it half a second too late, a cupboard door, the tap running, and she came around the corner in one of Mason's flannels with Mason behind her in jeans and nothing else, and stopped dead, and Mason walked into the back of her, and the whole morning arrived at once.

Addi was standing at the coffee maker.

Addi was standing at the coffee maker in a man's white dress shirt and, by every visible indication, nothing else, her heels from last night sitting on the kitchen table like evidence tagged for trial, her hair the shape of a night nobody supervised. And on the couch beyond her, under the Mexican blanket that lived on the armrest, lay a long familiar shape with one bare arm over its eyes, and the shape was conspicuously missing its shirt, because the shirt was on Addi.

Nobody moved. The coffee maker gurgled into the silence like it was narrating.

"Okay," Addi said, at last, in the voice of a woman calling a meeting. "Before anyone says anything they can't unsay."

"Nobody's saying anything," Mason said.

"That's a start. Everyone hold that thought." She rescued the pot and filled a mug she'd found somewhere, entirely unrepentant. "I want it on the record that I was at Elena's last night."

"You're wearing his shirt," Lauren said.

"I sleep in menswear. It's a known fact about me. Ask anyone in Boston."

"We're not in Boston."

"And won't that be handy," Addi said, and drank her coffee.

The shape on the couch spoke without moving its arm. "Is that Mason?"

"It's Mason," Mason said. "It's my house, Jace."

"Why are you here?" Jace said, from under his arm, with the careful diction of a man whose head was mostly regret. "You've spent every night for a month at her place. This house sits empty. I did nothing wrong except trust the pattern."

"It's still my house."

"And I have never once been in it, and neither has she, and this is a dream you're having, and my truck’s not outside."

"Your truck's outside," Mason said.

"Then somebody stole it and drove it here. That's the story I'm going with. There's a criminal element in this county, always has been."

"You've got a whole house of your own to not be in."

"I've got a whole hallway. In Mom's house." Jace put the arm back over his eyes. "You want to explain heels on the stairs to Stephanie Royston at two in the morning, you go ahead. I'll send flowers." He moved the arm at last, one eye opening onto the room, taking in the four of them, Lauren in Mason's flannel, Mason shirtless, Addi in his own shirt, the total shape of the situation, and closed it again. "Oh, hell," he said, sincerely, to the ceiling. "It's a family breakfast."

Lauren lost it first. She'd been holding it since the coffee maker gurgled, and it went out of her in one disgraceful bark of laughter and after that there was no order in the room at all. Addi went down onto a kitchen chair wheezing. Mason leaned on the doorframe with his arms crossed and let a slow grin do what the rest of them were doing loudly, and Jace lay on the couch under one groomsman's boutonniere and took it all like a man in the stocks, one hand raised in a weak wave to the room.

"Are we done," he said. "Take your time. I'll be here."

"You slept together," Lauren said, delighted.

"Allegedly.” Addi said, wiping her eyes. “Allegedly slept. There's no proof of anything."

"You're wearing the proof," Mason said.

"This is my shirt. I travel with it."

"It's got his buttonhole flower on it."

Addi looked down at the boutonniere, wilted rosebud and a sprig of Lauren's own eucalyptus, pinned over her heart like a medal, and had the grace, for one full second, to look caught. Then she plucked it off, dropped it neatly in Jace's coffee-less hand as she passed the couch, and said, "Never happened," and went looking for a skillet like a woman who lived there.