Chapter Thirty One-The Restaurant

Warm hands grazed my skin as Jacob grabbed my zipper. “Let me help you with that, Darlin.” After kissing my mark, he yanked on one of my curls. “You look good enough to eat, Tess.”

I leaned over and scrunched my hair between my fingers. “When we get home, baby.”

Footsteps stopped at the bathroom door, and when I looked up, Logan was checking his watch. “Are you two ready or what?”

I lifted myself to my toes and kissed the tip of his nose. “Don’t you look dapper?”

He was wearing dark grey trousers and a black button-down shirt that hugged his muscles well. He usually wears jeans and t-shirts, so I just love it anytime I get to see him in something different.

His eyes fell between our bodies, and his hand came to his heart. “You look amazing.”

I wore a knee-length, simple black dress with a long strand of black pearls that Haldir bought me for my sixteenth birthday.

Jacob wore black pants with a white shirt and a button-down grey vest. I picked the fuzz off his collar as he opened the door of the SUV. “I swear, you boys just get better and better looking every day.”

It was a half-hour drive to the restaurant, and the quiet was just too much. I never really cared about pack business, but anything would do right now. “So, how was work today?”

Without missing a beat, Logan sighed and checked his rear-view mirror. “Fine.”

I tossed around the air in my mouth and leaned forward. “What do the two of you do anyway? I never have asked.”

He glanced out the window and shrugged. “Pack stuff.”

After checking his phone for the fifth time since we got in the vehicle, Jacob’s chin brushed his shoulder as he spoke over it. “I’m an accountant, and Logan has an MBA.”

Honestly, I didn’t have a clue what either of those things was. “Oh, so the dynamic business duo.”

He dropped his phone n the console. “Something like that. Do witches go to school?”

I shook my head. “Hun-un.” I bounced my head from side to side. “Well, yes. But Teddy and I never went to any.” I laughed out loud when the thought of it came back to me. “Except for this one time, Haldir sent me to charm school so I could learn to be a lady.”

Even Logan laughed just a little as he looked at me in the mirror. “You went to charm school? With that filthy dirty mouth?”

I narrowed my eyes back at him. “I didn’t say I was there long.”

As promised, my gentlemen kept their paws off me through our meal. We had a private room in the back of the restaurant, so as we were finishing our meal, Logan got up and shut the door. When he returned to the table, he pulled his chair closer to mine, then turned it around and straddled it. 

When Jacob put both his elbows on the table and clasped his hands together, my heart started to pound, and suddenly I felt breathless. “What’s going on, fellas?”

A little blue box slid across the table in front of me, and all the tiny hairs stood up all over my body when Logan’s finger tapped on it. “See, the thing is, we know you’re not ready yet to say yes. So, you don’t have to think of it that way if you don’t want to.”

Jacob’s fingers tugged at mine. “We just want you to say that you’re ours and that you’re not going to just take off when things get too hard.”

Logan’s thumb rubbed over the knuckles on my other hand. “You don’t have to say yes today. Just don’t say no.”

I fanned my face as I tried to catch my breath. “I just…I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

“It’s alright, Tess.” Jacob squeezed my hand. “We kind of sprung everything on you all at once. We know that.”

Logan’s thumb pushed the top open, and his hands shook as he pinched the ring between his fingers and held it up between us. “Tess, when you’re ready. So just take this and let us know when that is.”

Witches love their shiny things, and I wanted to snatch it from his hands, but I knew what that meant to these two.

It was an impossible situation. I wanted them, but I knew putting that ring on my finger was the nail in the coffin, and I’d never see my brick Italianate on Jones Street ever again. But if I said no, Logan would use any trick in the book to manipulate me, and I was wary of all the games. “Okay. I’ll think about it.”

Thanks to my big-mouth twin, there was little they didn’t know about me, and the total carat slid down my finger perfectly. “It’s just beautiful.”

My fingers slid down Logan’s cheek, and I saw the disappointment in his eyes that I didn’t say yes. “Thank you.” His lips met my hand before he cleared his throat and went back to his beer.

As Jacob held the door open, Logan helped me down the stairs, and the wind caught my face just right. A twitch came to my nose, and the urge to rip it off my face made my fingers ache. Doesn’t seem like much, but to a worldly witch like me, it’s a bad fucking sign.

I slapped at Logan’s chest. “We need to get out of here.”

He gripped the sweater I wore in his hands as he tugged me close and examined my face. “What’s going on?”

My heart was a jumbled race of beats and pauses as my adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream, and he could smell it on me. “Sweetheart, look at me.” My pupils were a sea of black, and he understood everything.

When my parents were killed, the first place Haldir took us was a safe house in Massachusetts that turned out to not be so fucking safe.

One morning, my nose began to itch at the breakfast table, so I rubbed it with a tissue. The look on Haldir’s face turned to panic as he told us to grab our things. He misted us to a building across the street, and as we watched from the roof, we saw at least 20 people enter the house.

When they left, the house exploded in flames, and every person inside was killed. He took us to Norway that night. Not many people would venture all the way to the damn arctic circle to settle a score with a couple of children.

Jacob rushed to the driver’s seat as Logan tugged me against his chest and escorted me to the SUV.

There was a car pulling into the spot beside us, so we waited for them to finish, but my eyes darted everywhere as I looked for danger. My Alpha did his best to comfort me. “You don’t mind sharing the back with me, do you? I’m kind of in the mood for cuddling.” 

My focus was gone, and everything around me fell away as I heard whispers coming from deep inside me. Even his booming voice was just a warbled mess. “What?”

His nostrils flared as he scanned the landscape with me and kissed my forehead. “Nothing, Sweetheart. Let’s go home.”

Before I could even get my ass in the seat, the glass in the car that just parked beside us exploded then we heard the shot reverberating through the woods around us.