The Strength of the Pack (Suncoast Society #30)(16)

Tilly texted her back almost immediately, and she waited for the next stoplight to look.

:)

Leo and Jesse were watching TV in the living room when she walked in. They could have just as easily been watching TV in bed.

They both looked at her, eyebrows arched.

She walked over and they parted so she could sit between them. “Well?” Leo asked.

“It went well. At least, I think it did.” She recapped the evening.

“Do you like him?” Jesse asked.

“I’d like to see him again,” she said. “And we’re going to meet at the club on Friday and talk. Maybe get a treatment.”

“We weren’t going to go on Friday,” Leo said. “Date night with Laurel.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I asked if he’d meet me there.”

“Ahh,” both men said.

“I figured it’d be easier that way,” she said. “And you know you’re going to go do sushi anyway, so I won’t have to lie and say I don’t feel like going out with you guys. I don’t see how you can eat the damn stuff. It’s bait.”

“Not when it’s on a bed of rice and drenched in wasabi-infused soy sauce, it’s not,” Jesse said with a grin. “Then it’s fine dining.”

“Blech.”

“I’m glad you had fun, sweetheart,” Leo said. He kissed the top of her head before standing. “Now we can head to bed.”

“Ha. I knew it. You were waiting up for me.”

Instead of the playful smile she expected, he scowled as he turned back to her. “Of course we were. Had my phone ready, too. You don’t think I would have gone to bed until I knew you were home safe, do you?”

And here she’d assumed he just wanted to hear how it went. “Thank you,” she quietly said.

Jesse, who hadn’t stood yet, touched her shoulder to make her look at him. “What part of ‘under protection’ do you not get? If it wasn’t a school night for Laurel, we would have arranged a babysitter and gone out on the double-date with you.”

“You don’t think that would have scared him off?”

“If it had,” Leo said, “then he wouldn’t be good enough for you to start with.”

“You guys don’t need to arrange your lives around my dating schedule.” Not that she technically had a dating schedule.

“Eva, listen to us,” Jesse said. “We’re a pack. Not just a pack, but a package deal. This isn’t lip service to us. This is a serious commitment on our parts. To Laurel and to you. The strength of the pack is our bond with each other. We want you to be happy and safe. And that means this is the kind of stuff you can expect until someone meets or exceeds our standards and we feel we can back off a little.”

Jesse kissed her forehead before standing to join Leo. “The pack always comes first. This isn’t a burden. It’s just what we do, because we know you’d do whatever you had to do for us. You already do, every day, by sharing a home with us. We love you, and that won’t ever change.”

“Thanks.” Her phone buzzed in her hand.

Tilly.

AREN’T YOU HOME YET????????

Leo smiled. “Let me guess, Tilly wants a report.”

“Yeah. I’d better give it to her.”

“Good-night,” Leo said. “See you in the morning.”

When she heard their bedroom door close behind them, she walked out onto the lanai and sat in one of the chairs there and called Tilly.

Her friend answered immediately. “’Bout damn time.”

“Sorry. I was talking to Leo and Jesse.”

“Sooo?”

Eva gave her the quick recap. When she finished, Tilly sounded satisfied. “I won’t be at the club Friday. I’m going to be in LA still. But I’ll call Marcia and—”

“No,” she gently said. “It’s okay. I want to try this one solo.”

Tilly went quiet. “You sure?”

“It’s at the club. I feel safe at the club, and I’ll know enough people there that if I don’t feel safe, I can grab someone. Please, you don’t need to chaperone it. Or arrange for a chaperone.”

Tilly didn’t respond at first. “Any time you want one—ask.”

“I will. I promise. I just had this talk with the guys. Sort of. I won’t jump into something. I’ll take things slow.”

“Okay. Good.”

By the time Eva got off the phone with her it was nearly eleven. As she stood and headed back into the house, she couldn’t help but think about how different—in a good way—hugging Nate had felt.





Chapter Seven


Nate took his run Thursday morning, just before dawn. It was another comfortably cool, albeit muggy morning. A warm patch this time of year, even by Florida winter standards.

Hard to believe it was nearly the end of the first week of December already.

Although every year he said that.

Damn, I feel old.

Last night, he fell asleep thinking about Eva. Not wild sexual fantasies of her, but idle suppositions regarding the depths and contents of her emotional pool. An apparently calm surface, but still waters running deep and all that bullshit.