But after Han told them he would be staying in Hawaii, the same heavy frown crossed their faces.
“It is not safe,” Victor pointed out, signing since he couldn’t talk. “I’m worried about you, brother.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Phantom agreed. “And I’m not about that worrying shit, so it’s time for you to come home.”
They went back and forth with each other until finally agreeing to a new system. From now on, Han would text them every day to let them know he was okay. It made Han feel like a kid with parents who didn’t trust him to take care of himself, but in the end, he agreed just to end the conversation.
The call was a lot for the first thing in his afternoon version of the morning. And instead of going straight to the gym as he usually did, he made himself a tropical smoothie and went to stand at the glass to look out at the ocean as he’d been doing more and more since a certain surfer girl came to live with him.
However, he frowned and tilted his head when he heard a soft, hitched hiccuping. It was coming from the other side of the glass. And it definitely wasn’t a bird. Crying… someone was crying on the lanai.
He slid the glass door open and found the source of the sound immediately.
Jasmine lay half reclined in the lounge chair she’d pulled from the pool and placed just outside her room. And her shoulders were shaking. Was she…?
Alarm bells filled his head, and he walked over before he could think twice about it to demand, “Jasmine, why are you crying?”
She froze like a doe, who had suddenly heard a sound. Then without turning to face him, she said, “I’m fine.”
Her claim told Han that she’d come to no physical harm. Whatever she was crying about, it was an emotional matter.
That meant he could leave her to it without any guilt.
Yet…
He found himself unable to turn around and re-enter the condo.
She was hurting. On the inside.
Han rubbed his fingers into the pads of his hands, feeling more ill at ease as the seconds ticked by.
Coordinating international drug deals with several lethal and temperamental parties? No problem.
Figuring out how to help an emotional woman? A plane might as well have spat him into the middle of the ocean. He was so far out of his element.
Nonetheless, he walked toward her lounge chair and took a seat at the bottom of it near her bare feet. He tilted his head and scanned the face she’d refused to show him, and something stitched in his chest when he saw her red-rimmed eyes and her puffy face.
“Why are you crying?” he asked again, his voice tight with an emotion he refused to name.
“I’m fine,” she said again, even as fresh tears formed in her eyes. “I’m sorry for waking you or disturbing you or whatever I did. I’m fine. This is not me. Trust, this is just a phase or something. Like an allergic reaction. Just give me a few minutes.”
Han considered her words and nodded.
“Okay, I will give you your few minutes,” he said, rising to his feet.
She let out an audible breath of relief—only to eep when he reached down and scooped an arm under her legs to bodily pick her up.
“What are you doing?” she demanded when he sat back down in the lounge chair with her settled into his lap.
“You asked for five minutes. You will take them here with me. Like this,” Han answered.
Then using some long-forgotten instinct, he wrapped his arms around her and hugged her to his chest.
JAZZ
My mind reeled when Han gathered me in his arms. Was he…? Was the cold Fae King offering me comfort?
It was so crazy. And you know what was even crazier than that? In the next moment, I buried my face in his chest and sobbed. I sobbed for the perfect July ended too soon and so terribly. I sobbed because Mika had left again. I sobbed and sobbed like a crazy person who couldn’t stop.
“What happened,” he asked when I was finally down. His voice was quiet but hard as if he was planning to hurt whoever had made me cry like this.
And I’m not that girl. I’m not. When I’m upset, I don’t cry. I don’t talk about feelings with my sister—no, I figure out how to solve my problems, and I get to doing whatever it takes not to feel that way.
But there were some problems I couldn’t attack like I wanted. Like debts owed to Chinese mafia. And rare forms of muscular dystrophy. And a sister who showed up out of the blue at your summer camp and snatched your nephew away because she was terrified of what would happen if she didn’t leave Hawaii.
No, I wasn’t that girl, but I found myself telling him everything. About my sister’s awful in-laws, the Lacerdas…dirty cops who’d been harassing her for over a decade. How they’d escalated and basically threatened to kill her and hurt the people she loved if she didn’t leave Hawaii. How she’d refused to fight, even though both Albie and me begged her to stay.
