Her flat had never seemed so far away. The roads were endless, the night darker than any other I’d ever lived through, the crackling in my good ear my only company. Would it have been easier with Rubi talking shite? Who the hell knew? But Saint’s silence deafened me until he clicked a rhythm over the radio that was random enough to distract me from a next-level panic attack. “What the fuck does that mean?”
He whistled, tuneless and strange. Then the clicking came again and my frustration boiled over.
“If that’s morse code, I’m gonna need a fuckin’ tutorial.”
He might’ve laughed, it was hard to tell, but it was drowned out by the roar of a bike that existed beyond the noise in my head.
A stripped V-Rod.
Nash.
Unless I was imagining that too, a notion I knew was impossible the moment he buzzed alongside me, his perfect profile a sight for the sorest eyes.
Hidden by helmet and leathers, I couldn’t see his face, an inch of his tattooed skin, or his sweet, baby-blue gaze. I felt him, though, that warmth—thatlove—and my heart rate slowed, my death grip on my handlebars loosening, the sting in my injured arm fading to an ache I didn’t mind so much.
Motherfucker. My lungs expanded without the throttling burn I’d carried on this hell ride so far. I relaxed into the wind, letting the road take me, and before I knew it, Orla’s building loomed in the distance.
Nash zoomed ahead to scout it out.
I felt his absence like a defibrillator shock, but with the ride all but over, I kept my shit together, slowing until he doubled back to give the order to press on all the way to the off-road car park.
Saint and Nash went inside. I waited by Orla’s car door until Saint came back down.
He tipped me a nod. That was it. But I wondered if he’d said more to me tonight than I’d realised. If he’d known that getting back on my bike was going to do a number on me. That brother was more than words.
I opened Orla’s car door and helped her out, guiding her towards the flat’s entrance while Saint shadowed us from behind.
He followed us upstairs. At Orla’s door, I turned to say goodnight, but he’d already gone.
“Is he even human?”
Orla breathed a throaty laugh. “If he isn’t, he’s my favourite alien.”
“Works for me.”
The door was on the latch. We pushed through and I shut it behind us, leaning against it as Orla kicked her boots off and dumped her leather jacket on the hallway floor.
The sound of running water reached me as I bent to retrieve it. A lacy bra landed at my feet and I looked up in time to see her naked back disappearing into the depths of her home. Her pale, inked skin and the delicate slope of her spine.
I left the jacket—and the bra—where it lay and stood tall again, every ache and pain in my body evaporating, taking my anxiety with it.
Boots that were technically Rubi’s left my feet and I ditched my jacket too. Then I followed my heart all the way to her bedroom, a place I’d dreamt of when I’d been face down in the dirt.
The room smelled like her—black cherry and roses. It smelled like him, guitars and marshmallows. My gaze landed on a woven bracelet on the bedside table, sea-green thread plaited into the black, exactly where I’d left itbefore, and I realised the flat smelled likeus. “You haven’t been here.”
Heavy breasts bare to me, Orla popped the button on her figure-hugging jeans. Arousal still raged in her molten eyes, but there was something else too. Sadness. Grief. “We didn’t want to without you. If our brothers found your body, I was going to burn this place to the ground.”
“I’m not?—”
“If the next words out of your mouth are any semblance of you not being worth the trouble, I’ll bite your dick off.”
The implication that my dick was going to be in her mouth hit me harder than any other part of that sentence. “I wasn’t going to say that.”
Orla stripped her jeans and her underwear, belligerent and beautiful.
Naked.
“What were you going to say then?”