Carissa had no answer right away.
That was answer enough.
The first dinner with Jackson happened that Friday at a steakhouse in River North that Damen always dismissed as “too corporate” whenever Carissa wanted to celebrate something. Jackson picked her up at seven in a charcoal overcoat and dark suit, not overdone, not underdone, exactly appropriate in the way affluent men often were when they had learned long ago that competence is its own kind of style.
Carissa wore a black dress she had bought two years earlier and never found the right room for because Damen had once said it made her look “intense.”
That night, she was in the mood to be intense.
When she came downstairs, Damen was in the foyer with one hand on the banister. He looked at her, then at the lights outside, then back at her face.
“No.”
Carissa paused. “No what?”
“You are not going out with him.”
She almost admired the reflex.
“With whom?”
“My brother.”
She stepped past him toward the front door. “Watch me.”
Damen caught her arm.
Not hard enough to leave a mark. Hard enough to remind both of them that marks were not the threshold for wrong.
Carissa stopped moving and looked down at his hand.
Then she screamed.
Not in fear.
In volume.