Nigel glanced back at the dining table. As Bertie and Byron looked over, he saw they were both sitting like worried birds, their bodies stretching up long, their arms down at their sides, their eyes wide. Tarquin had lain down on the ground and put his long-muzzled face under the tablecloth so he couldn’t see anything.

The meal was beyond ruined. And not just because the show o’er here was a dramatic disaster to watch: indeed, Nigel wasn’t going to be able to stomach a thing. This match with Devina was heading in bad directions on so many levels . . . and he was paralyzed by the rules.

“Let me up,” Edward grunted.

Colin might have been a stone or two lighter in the frame than the other angel, but he had tensile strength beyond measure. “You’re going to be nice, mate. No more fists or you’ll get another bullocking.”

“Fine.”

The one word was not a capitulation of any sort, but Colin jumped free anyway—likely because he knew he could just subdue the male again if that was necessary.

Edward brushed off the blades of green that stuck to his leather coat like tinsel. “Just because Jim can live through it, doesn’t mean it’s fair.”

With that, he disappeared into thin air.

Upon a vicious curse, Nigel regarded the disappearing imprint of Edward’s heavy body, the grass springing up, righting itself.

“They have a point,” Colin said gruffly. “And that bitch is not playing fair.”

“Jim volunteered himself to her.”

“In a situation she engineered. It’s not right and you know it.”

“Do you want us to run the risk of forfeiture?” He glanced over. “Do you want to lose because of that?”

Colin clapped the grass off his palms. “Bloody hell. Fucking bloody hell.”

Nigel looked back down at the fading body mark on his lawn. “My sentiments precisely.”

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 31

The wine cellar was not a place Grier went very often. First of all, the twenty-dollar bottles of chard she poured in her glasses at night were hardly worth the trip up and down the stairs. Second, with its bank-vault door, low ceiling, and shelving that ran all around the walls, she’d always felt like it was a prison.

And what do you know . . . as her father shut the three of them into the tight confines, Isaac’s heft dwarfed the place down to the size of a Kleenex box, and she felt like she couldn’t breathe.

There was a polished table in the center of the space and she took one of its four chairs. As Isaac sat across from her, it was hard not to remember meeting him at the jail: It had been just like this, the two of them facing off with each other.