“He’ll trace my phone to you.”

“Fucking let him,” Heather said. “I’d like to leave an imprint of my shoe on his ribs, too. And then his dick. Maybe his skull.”

Holy shit. I whipped around and braced my hands on the counter. “A shoe print?” I seethed.

This fucking asshole. Yeah, I knew she was holding her side. The slashes on her face were obvious due to the stitches. “He fucking kicked you?”

“Settle down, tiger,” Heather said, but her voice wasn’t teasing. “You’ll scare the girl.”

“I’m fine,” Emmersyn said. And looked at the phone then me. “I’m fine. Or I will be. I just… need to figure some things out. Lincoln has a long reach.”

“True. And thanks, brother, for all your help. We appreciate it.”

“No problem.”

Technically I hadn’t really had a choice, considering how it’d been handled. Hell, by the time Heather called me the first time, she already had Emmersyn on a plane headed my way.

What kind of asshole would say no then?

Although, based on what I was hearing, Lincoln might.

I plated up Emmersyn’s avocado toast, slid my pepper and saltshaker in front of her.

Done with that, and then mine, I grabbed my eggs and held both of my plates up. “I’m going to eat outside. Give you a minute,” I said quietly to her.

She nodded and turned back to the phone. “Thank you, Heather, for everything. I know I asked a lot of you yesterday—”

“Shut up, brat. You didn’t ask anything more than what you’d do for me.”

I shut the sliding door, drowned out their voices, and another rush of anger pummeled me.

The very idea of a man treating Heather like what’d been done to Emmersyn was enough to make me want to murder anyone who so much as looked at her.

Four

Emmersyn

After the night I met Heather and she threatened to rip off the balls of a man she didn’t know who was also three times her size, we’d quickly learned we just moved in across the hall from each other in the dorms. The first day I went to her room, she told me all about her awesome, professional hockey-playing brother. She never hid the fact of who her brother was, how successful he was, or how proud she was of him. Heather loved her family so deeply and in such a healthy way it always made me admire her and a little jealous of all the goodness she’d had in her life.

Her brother, on the other hand, dear sweet baby Jesus in a manger… he became fodder for all the girls in our dorm. So damn hot.

Is he single?

Do you have another brother?

I’d ride him.

How big is his other stick?

How flexible is he?

Can he work his hips like that off the ice?

We didn’t even care he was married, but then it was all in good fun for us.

Heather heard it and laughed her ass off. To her, Kane was her awesome big brother.