“I will.”

Jace ended the call, and I turned the faucet on to heat up the water.

Fifteen minutes later, my cast was soft enough to bend with my bare hand, so Jace dug up a pair of scissors from the desk in the main room. They were old, and neither sterile nor sharp, but it was either that, or gnaw the damn thing off with my own teeth.

Jace took off his shirt and tossed it onto the bedroom floor to keep it dry, then helped me turn to face the side of the tub. I propped my cast on the edge, fist to fist with my gored left arm. “I’ll try not to move your arm, but your bone hasn’t fully mended yet, so this might hurt,” he said.

“I don’t care.” It couldn’t hurt worse than the other one. And if it could, I didn’t want to know that in advance. “Just do it.”

His brows rose and one corner of his mouth quirked up. “Again, not my favorite words to hear from a naked woman.”

I laughed, grateful for Jace’s apparently effortless ability to break the tension. Not that he always employed that particular skill to my satisfaction…“Okay, here goes.” He started at the elbow end of my cast. The lower steel blade was cold as it slid against my skin beneath the warm, soggy padding and firm-but-pliable plaster. Jace squeezed the blades together, and muscles shifted in his bare arm as he forced the dull scissors through the cast. I held my breath, waiting for pain, but he was very careful and I didn’t feel a thing.

Several endless minutes later, the scissors split the last inch of plaster just below my knuckles. “Almost done.” Jace slid the blade in next to my thumb for the last snip, and a second later it was all over. I wiggled my thumb while he carefully pulled my cast open through the new split down the middle. “Okay, lift your arm.”

I did, again bracing myself for pain that never came, and he slid the cast gently off my hand, where the plaster was bisected but not truly splayed. “Wow. I look…wrinkly.” From the water, of course. My hands and feet were wrinkly, too. Other than that, my newly exposed arm didn’t look much different from the rest of me. I hadn’t worn the cast long enough to get a tan line—we didn’t do much sunbathing in February—and I couldn’t tell from looking that it had ever been broken. Or that it might still be.

“Does it hurt?” Jace asked.

I grinned. “Not my favorite words to hear from a guy while I’m naked.” I couldn’t help it. We’d indulged in innocent flirtation since I was fourteen years old, and just because the “innocent” part no longer strictly applied didn’t mean the habit was dead.

His blue eyes glittered as he set the wet cast on the floor. “I take it that means no?”

“Which you’re obviously used to hearing from naked women…”

“Oh, now you’re just playing dirty.”

My grin widened, and my gaze tracked him as he leaned back to set the scissors on the counter. “I’m trying…”

Jace’s fingers trailed a strand of hair down my back and into the warm water. “Watch out, or I might decide I need a bath, too.”

“It would take a lot more than that to clean you up.”

“Oh? What would you suggest?”

“A bar of soap for your mouth, and a sponge on a ten-foot pole for the rest of you.”

“Ten feet?” Jace eyed me with a mischievous glint. “You flatter me—but not by much.”

We were still laughing when the hotel door creaked open.

“Shit!” I whispered, and Jace stood so fast I thought he’d slip on the wet floor. My heart thumped so hard I swear the bathwater rippled with each beat. I hadn’t heard the car pull up. Or maybe I had. Several had come and gone since Marc had left, and I’d stopped paying attention.

“Faythe?” Marc called as the door closed, and plastic crinkled when he set down whatever he’d brought from the store.

Jace stood firm in the middle of the floor, facing the main room, but his pulse raced almost as fast as mine. I twisted in the tub, and water sloshed around me. Pain shot through my evidently still-broken wrist as I grabbed a towel from the rack overhead and pulled it into the tub to cover myself. Though, I could not have rationally explained why.

Marc had seen me naked. Jace had seen me naked. Half the south-central Pride had seen me naked. And we weren’t doing anything wrong. But I didn’t want Marc to see me naked with Jace, because we had done something wrong once, and the guilt from that carried over to transform this one awkward moment into a drama the likes of which daytime television had never seen.

Because we didn’t look like we’d done nothing wrong.

Marc’s footsteps thumped slowly toward the bathroom, and I could practically smell his suspicion. Neither of us had answered him—I, for one, had no idea what to say—and he’d heard both my curse and the slosh of water. And probably our twin racing pulses.

He stepped into the doorway with my torn, discarded shirt in one fist, Jace’s in the other, and rage took over his expression faster than I could form words to explain. He didn’t notice that Jace still wore his pants. He didn’t see the ruined cast on the floor, or the scissors on the counter.

Marc took one look at us—me naked and soaked in the tub, leaning around Jace to be seen, both of us probably looking guilty as hell—and the specks of gold in his brown eyes glittered with fury and bitter betrayal.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Twenty-Three