Free Unmade (The Lynburn Legacy Book 3) Page B

thin yellow rectangle, half spilled on the wooden floor and half across his white linen bedsheets.
    Kami wondered if she was a terrible girlfriend—if indeed she could be called a girlfriend, when it was basically a decision she’d come to entirely on her own—because she did not want to spend all her time gazing upon Jared as he slept.
    He’d been sleeping a lot. Kami did like looking at him: every so often she peered over her book and checked on him, lying on his side in the tumbled sheets. He had one arm flung over the pillows as if he was reaching out for something, and the sun shone on his brown arm, on the slope of his back and the fresh-washed gold of his hair, curling soft against the pillow. She filled her eyes with him like taking a drink of cool water, and returned to what she was doing refreshed.
    She couldn’t help Jared. She couldn’t quite banish Ash from her mind. She could not even see her mother: she had gone to Claire’s restaurant and found it closed, with nobody answering the door no matter how insistently Kami knocked. What she needed right now was a mystery she could solve.
    There was a mad butler hiding in the rafters of her book. It was very exciting. When she looked up from the pages the next time, she saw Jared was awake, his gray eyes shadow-dark and calm.
    â€œI’m glad you’re here,” he said, his voice a sleepy rumble. “And I’m glad Ash is gone. He was just in here trying to force-feed me oatmeal.”
    Ash had been in there that morning, and the sunlight coming through the window was the mellow light of late afternoon. Kami did not mention that. It had been a while since Jared’s eyes were clear and since he had talked to her rather than muttering, believing he was still trapped in the priest hole.
    â€œSuch an ungrateful brother,” Kami murmured back, and smiled at him. “Oatmeal’s good for you.”
    â€œI don’t like it,” Jared said crankily, and rubbed his eyes with the back of one hand. “What are you reading?”
    â€œIt’s called The Deadly Chandelier, ” Kami said promptly and with satisfaction. “It’s very good. What with everything that’s been going on, I’ve really fallen behind on my reading. Want me to read it to you?”
    â€œIt’s called The Deadly Chandelier ?” Jared repeated in a skeptical tone. “Sounds like if you do I will never recover. Read to me one of the fine works of Mr. Charles Dickens.”
    â€œShan’t,” said Kami. “Unless you want The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which Charles Dickens left unfinished when he died, thus accidentally creating the most epic mystery novel of all time. I’m warning you in advance, I will be making up a solution to the mystery of my own.”
    â€œSounds good,” Jared murmured, sounding half asleep. His lashes skimmed his cheekbones, but he opened them with an effort and reached out, this time with purpose though with no hope of actually getting to her, in her direction. “Will you,” Jared began, and quietly, as if trying not to ask too much, “come here?”
    â€œSure,” said Kami.
    She felt a little awkward about it, but she didn’t care: she scrambled out of the chair and sat on the bed, feeling it dip beneath her weight and the faint rasp of her flouncy cotton dress against the linen. Jared angled toward her slightly in the bed.
    â€œYou match the flowers,” said Jared.
    There was a small table at the end of Jared’s bed with an earthenware vase on it, filled with wild pansies. Kami had always thought of them as love-lies-bleeding, but when Martha Wright had been arranging them she had called them call-me-to-you.
    â€œThey’re from Martha,” Kami told him, feeling a little embarrassed lest he thought she’d brought him flowers. Though she supposed she could have: maybe it would have been all right. “Your constant