Page 114 of Tempting Fate

Lark comes over, a mug in hand. I frown. I ordered when I came in, but I haven’t had a chance to order for Cate yet.

“Here,” he says, setting the drink down in front of her. “Tea. Just a hint of milk.”

“Just how I…” Cate blinks up at him. “Um. Thank you.”

He nods and whirls away again. Cate watches him go, then looks around the rest of the café. It’s not empty, but there are only five other people in here, so it’s hardly full, either.

“Oh. This is…” She trails off. “It’s all real, then?”

“You saw the livestream.”

“Emerson.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“You don’t look pleased about it.” She pauses, cup halfway to her lips. “You’re not in trouble, are you?”

“I was. I still am. Maybe. I think.”

“Tell me what happened. All of it.”

“Cate, I don’t know—”

“All of it. I didn’t drive all the way down here for three sentences, you know.”

I sigh. She’s serious and firm, but she’s worried, too—I can see that in the way her gaze keeps flicking over me, like she’s looking for an injury.

“Okay, shit. Let me start at the beginning.”

I do. I know we don’t have all the time in the world—though at least Kieran’s use of ‘afternoon’ was pretty nebulous—but I sit and tell her about moving in with Jamie and Nick, and meeting Patch, and the dates, and finding the wolf… All of it.

And then I mention Gideon.

Cate almost drops her cup. “What the fuck?!” she shouts. The couple over at a nearby table peer at us curiously.

“It’s fine. He’s—”

“No, it’s—” Cate glances around and lowers her voice, but the anger is still present. “No, it’s fucking not okay. What if you’d got in real trouble over this? He’s already messed everything up, as usual, and what, for some money you don’t even have? If I see him, I’m gonna—”

“I think he might go to prison,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve really thought about it, but if the executives at the company have any sense, even if only in saving their own hides, they’ll throw him under the bus.

“Good,” Cate says.

“I don’t…” I pull a face. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”

Cate stares at me. She pushes her cup aside and stretches her hands out.

“What?” I say.

“Come on.”

“I—”

“Em!”

I take her hands and sigh. She squeezes tight. “You’ll work out how you feel eventually. You always do. And I’ll be here when you do, and I have the funny feeling that these two new guys in your life—we are getting well into that, by the way, once we get through the heavy shit—will be there as well. However you feel won’t be wrong, Em. You can be sad. You can miss him.”

“I never really had a brother, though. Not like—Not like normal people do.”