Read Online Northern Exposure: Compass Brothers, Book 1 by Mari Carr and Jayne Rylon - Free Book Online Page A

her relaxed.
    Well, as much as she could be.
    She’d anticipated that the jolt of desire Silas had always inspired in her would rear between them when they connected once more. And it had. But the intensity of the reaction had surprised her. It flared a hundred times brighter than the naïve infatuation she’d experienced as a young girl.
    The injuries dotting his body, draining his alertness, had stopped her from mounting him where he lay. The wounds evident in his tortured gaze had broken her heart. She shivered as she remembered the undisguised agony she’d spotted in his dazed stare.
    “Want me to find your sweater?” Colby whispered near her ear.
    “No thanks.” She capitalized on his nearness, stealing a kiss, needing the fortification to gel her insides, which threatened to dissolve into a pile of mush.
    “He’s going to be okay.” Her husband sipped from her lips again.
    “Are we ?” She shivered again. “Did you feel it? The connection…”
    “Did I?” Colby breathed hard though she doubted their kisses inspired his elevated respiration. “I still do.”
    Lucy couldn’t help herself. She glanced at the crotch of her husband’s ripped work jeans, sighing when she spotted the bulge there.
    “Behave.” He rearranged himself. The gesture didn’t obscure the evidence. “I’m trying not to be obvious here, but it won’t quit.”
    “Want me to take care of you?” Lucy squirmed in the chair. It’d been three hours since Silas had crashed into their lives again and already she thought she might die if someone didn’t touch her soon. “I’ll meet you in the bathroom downstairs in five minutes. I bet Vicky’s good for another half hour of lecturing.”
    “At least.” Colby winced.
    They’d all faced the mama bear’s wrath once or twice, but even the time Sawyer had gotten caught stealing from the general store for the hell of it his junior year of high school had generated less stern disappointment than this.
    “When you have problems, you don’t run from family. You trust the people who love you. I did not raise you to shirk your responsibilities. Your place was here. Always here. Not like your brothers, who dreamed of something else. What made you think the answer was lying to us? To yourself? To Colby and Lucy?”
    “I feel kind of bad abandoning him. Especially for a BJ. Even one of yours, baby.” Her husband hunched his shoulders and jammed his hands in his pockets when Vicky aimed her laser vision at him. He froze—like a deer in the headlights—until she turned back to her eldest son, disaster averted.
    “…disrespectful…”
    Lucy peeked up at Colby and grinned. Someday she hoped to have half as much command over her men and their children.
    Men ?
    Oh damn, when had she gotten so greedy? Could it really be possible to keep them both? She had to try at least.
    “…wasteful…”
    Something about the energy surrounding the three of them when they’d touched in the ranch’s plane, which they’d rigged to haul their damaged friend home from Cheyenne, had electrified her. Given her hope.
    “…unhealthy…”
    Lucy grimaced at the rising pitch of Vicky’s diatribe. She thought she could hear dogs howling in the yard. When she shifted to leave the room, regardless of the danger from Silas’s mom, the tirade stopped short.
    “And I love you more than I can say. I missed you, Silas.” Vicky smothered her son in hug tight enough to break another rib or two. “Please, don’t ever do that to us, or yourself, again. This accident is a blessing in disguise. It’s brought you home, where you belong.”
    “Is this still my place?” Silas broke his silence.
    “Absolutely.” Vicky answered before either Colby or Lucy could interject.
    “How do you know?” Their injured friend fiddled with the edge of the blanket covering him.
    “Because I’m your mother.” She kissed his forehead then glanced toward the corner where Lucy and Colby waited. “You can still set things to