Nash leaned down and kissed me. “We both are. Don’t worry about that.”
His baby blues held nothing but truth. On autopilot, I looked for my phone.
He pressed it into my hand. “Willow’s been messaging you. Probably about Funday Sunday.”
“Eh?”
Nash used my thumb to unlock my phone and opened the message thread for me. My kid had sent me sixteen messages about baking bread at Rubi’s house tomorrow, but I was too spun out to type an intelligible response.
“Need some help?”
“I need a new fuckin’ brain.” I relinquished my phone.
Nash typed out a message that could’ve come from my own head, from the sentiment to the terrible grammar.
Dad:okay, have fun. don’t go anywhere else until i find u there. love u xx
Willow:Don’t ride your bike. I don’t want you to fall off again xxx
I winced. “Tell her to go to fuckin’ bed.”
Nash typed some more. Then passed the phone back.
Dad:make sure you tip a whole bag of flour on rubi’s head xx
Willow:Nashie? Is that you? xxx
Warmth filled my chest. “I love that you’re friends.”
Nash lay down again, stretching his long naked body out beside me. “We love her.”
“I know, but it’s more than that—all of you, you’re so fuckin’good, I just wish...”
“What?” Nash took my hand. “What do you wish?”
A heavy sigh rattled me. “I wish Rocco had lived to become one of you. He’d have fit right in.”
Nash squeezed my fingers, letting that nugget of wistful misery settle, understanding, like he always did, cos the Kings had lost people too. “You hungry?”
“Hmm?”
“Hungry,” he repeated, shifting to tuck our hands under the sheets, as if he honestly believed I could ever be cold when he and Orla were this close to me. “You didn’t eat much earlier.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Beneath the covers, Nash shifted to graze my hip with his thumb. “That’s like asking Orls to stop being hot.”
His touch tickled and I was too distracted by sensation to contain the shiver that rattled through me.
Nash soothed me with his palm, skating it over my abdomen before it settled there, inches above my dick, chill as fuck while a slow fire reignited in my blood, fighting a war with my spent body and frazzled mind. “Can I ask you something?”
My eyes had drooped so low I couldn’t see him.
I forced them open, a dazed nod all I had right now. “What did Logan do to put a target on your back?”
Orla’s hair smelt of black cherries and sex. That scent ofrightI’d always felt with her and Nash, long before I’d ever laid hands on them, or even admitted to myself that I wanted to. I took a subtle, deep breath, cutting off the instinctive urge to deflect. “It wasn’t my back. It was his.”
Nash waited, steady and calm, no emotion in his gaze but empathy.