Not this morning.
She felt…vivid. Alive. Horny.
Amazingly horny.
Who knew it would take a seven-foot blond god to light up her libido?
About to roll over and see just how much better she could feel this morning, she stopped when she heard the unmistakable ring of her cell phone. She knew it had to be hers because she didn’t think Andy had the theme from Farscape as one of his ringtones.
Having a brother who knew his way around a computer editing program did occasionally come in handy.
Except that was Joss’ specific ringtone.
“Do you have to get that?” Andy pressed closer, making it clear he would be more than happy to take her mind off whatever Joss wanted. She stifled a groan. What could Joss possible want this early—
Wait, it wasn’t this early in Scotland. It was actually probably midafternoon. Maybe something had happened? What if the money had fallen through and he was stranded somewhere in Great Britain? What if—
“Jenna, are you okay?”
Damn it, she really wished she could say yes to that and mean it.
“Yes, I’m fine. I just need to answer that.”
With a sigh, she slid away from Andy, from the heat of his body and the temptation of all that naked flesh.
Which of course meant he could see her in all her naked glory. She didn’t have many hang-ups about her physical appearance. She kept in shape and if she had a few more pounds than she wanted, at least she carried them in her breasts and ass. Both of which Andy didn’t seem to have a problem with.
Still, she reached for Andy’s shirt on the floor and pulled it over her head even as she reached her pants and grabbed the phone from the pocket. “Hey, Joss, what’s up? Is everything okay?”
“Jenna, where are you?”
She frowned. Her brother sounded worried. Joss never worried. Not when he was lost in some state park in Maine in the middle of winter and definitely never about her. He knew she was steady as a rock.
Except, the proof of the decaying bedrock of her stable life was still in the bed they’d nearly destroyed last night.
“Um, I’m at that little B&B in Tioga we talked about. Remember, we discussed this trip before you left.”
She didn’t want to say too much because she didn’t want Andy to overhear anything. Especially not anything that might make her sound as if she was chasing crackpot cryptids, like her brother.
“You actually went? Damn, Jenna, for the first time I was hoping you’d ignored me. Doesn’t matter. You gotta get out of there. And fast.”
A shiver ran up her back at Joss’ anxious tone. “What are you talking about? You’re not making any sense. First you tell me I have to do…something for you and now—”
“Now I’m telling you to go home. Right now. I don’t have time to go into everything, but you need to get out of that town. Now.”
“Joss, slow down—”
“I can’t. We’re getting ready to board the plane and we’re going to get cut off. And they’re confiscating our cells.”
“I thought you’d already left for Loch Ness?”
“Change in plans. Look, Jenna, if you trust me at all, please just go home. There’s nothing there. I was totally wrong. Just go.”
Now he was really starting to freak her out. “Are you okay, Joss? Did you hit your head or something? Do you have a fever, nausea? Did something bite you? Did you eat something you shouldn’t have?”
She wouldn’t put it past Joss to have tried some mushroom because the locals told him it would help him see the monsters better. Or to have been bitten by some wild animal as he trekked through remote forest.
“Jenna, this isn’t about me. I’m fine. You just need to leave—”
The connection clicked off in her ear and she lowered the phone to stare at the blank screen.
What the hell?
“Jenna? Are you okay?”
Andy’s voice sounded strained but she put that down to her own baffled confusion.
Hell, five minutes ago, she’d been thinking about doubling the amount of great sex she’d had in her life. Now…
“Jenna?”
“Yes?”
She turned to find Andy staring at her with an expression she couldn’t decipher. Almost as if he looked sick to his stomach.
“I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “My brother…” She sighed. “He’s worried about me for some reason.”
“And your brother is…?”
She frowned before she could stop herself. Why did that sound like an odd question? Almost as if he wanted her to spill secrets.
Maybe she was reading too much into Andy’s tone, but…
He almost sounded like he knew who her brother was. Which was crazy, right? She hadn’t told Andy her last name, which seemed kind of silly now, considering he knew exactly how she liked him to stroke her clit to make her come.
So she deliberately misunderstood his question.
With a weak smile, she said, “Not usually a worry wart. He’s a…” Crackpot who believes in Bigfoot and the Jersey Devil. “He’s on a business trip to Scotland. I don’t have any idea what would set him off like this.”
Andy had no idea what would have set off Jenna’s brother.
Then again, he’d had no idea Jenna was Joss “That fucking SPAz” Durham’s sister before he’d slept with her.
Holy shit. What the hell were the odds?
Too fucking high.
So she can’t be.
Yeah, she is.
No way.
Yes—
Christ, he felt like Gollum. And that was not only creepy but depressing.
Joss Durham was the king jester of the idiot brigade otherwise known as the Society of Paranormal Abnormalities, a group dedicated to proving the existence of what they called cryptids.
SPAz was what the Fringe society called the self-proclaimed “researchers”—and yes, he used that word loosely—who believed in Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and El Chupacabra and a whole lot of other things that other people knew were fictional.
Only they weren’t.
And the SPAz… They weren’t dangerous so much as a major pain in the ass. Most Normals wrote them off as crackpots, which was just what the Fringe dwellers wanted.
But some of them, like Joss, were a little smarter than the average bear. And when they got an idea in their head, they were like starving terriers with a bone.
Most Fringe dwellers gave the SPAz a wide berth, but some took the time to screw with their heads for fun. Hell, he’d messed with Joss personally a few times. The guy had an uncanny knack for showing up at the right place at the wrong time.
Like when a seven-foot, shape-shifting Yeti was visiting his American Bigfoot cousin and they decided to take a run through the woods to work off some steam.
That episode had been more than two years ago, and the couple of fuzzy pictures Joss had gotten had only made it as far as a few cryptid blogs.
Still, the guy was tenacious and surprisingly smart for a SPAz.
“So, your brother…what does he do for a living?”
Her expression turned even more pained. It was obvious she didn’t want to talk about Joss. Hell, she was downright embarrassed.
She didn’t believe, not like her brother.
And now he didn’t know whether to be relieved or bummed. What would she do if he flipped the switch and pulled on his Yeti form right now?
With another woman, he might have gotten a laugh out of it. At the very least, a chuckle.
So why did he feel like a teenager who’d just been told Justin Beiber had married Lil Wayne and they planned to adopt a couple of kids and move to Europe?
Jenna dropped her gaze to her hands, twisting in knots in front of her. “He just got a new job, as a matter of fact. Filming documentaries.”