His silence gave me time to formulate something I’d been wanting to ask him for a while.
“I haven’t told Willow yet, but I was thinking about taking her and Nicky up to Logan’s place next week. Just for the night.”
Nash shifted to look at me, his chin on my ribs. “I’ll put Mats on Orla.”
“I was gonna ask her to come with us. You too.”
“To your brother’s place? To, like, meet him and shit?”
“Without the shit part, hopefully. But yeah. Logan’s a big part of who I am. It feels fuckin’ weird that he’s never met you.”
Nash nodded slowly. “Orla would love that.”
“What about you?”
That tension flickered in Nash’s gaze again. Faint, but so clear to me that I shot out a hand to touch his face. “What is it?”
He took a breath. Tolie, I saw it in his honest fuckin’ eyes.
Fuck that. “Hey.” I slid my palm along his jaw. “Whatever it is, you don’t have to tell me. Just don’t bullshit me, okay? Don’t do that to yourself.”
Indecision raged in Nash’s gaze. Conflict. Fear that broke my heart.
He rolled out of bed.
Disappeared from the room.
Soul in my throat, I heaved myself upright to follow him, but he came back before I’d planted two feet on the floor.
“Don’t get up.”
“Don’t fuckin’ leg it then.” I eyed the device in his hand and the sweats he now wore. “How did you get dressed so fast?”
“I’m not dressed.”
“You look it.”
Nash pressed some buttons on the gadget in his hand. It beeped as he waved it around and I realised what he was doing.
Checking the room for bugs.
I got up and invaded his personal space. “It’s safe here. Alexei came over last night. No one’s breached this place and wired it up since then.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know there’s been brothers outside all night and the cameras are on. Unless Mossad came after us, I think we’re fuckin’ good.”
Nash tossed the device on the dresser. Didn’t know what it was called or how it worked. Didn’t care. The technical shit was for bigger brains than mine. I dealt in matters of the heart.
I took Nash’s wrist and led him back to the bed, pushing him to sit while I scrounged up some clothes of my own.
He watched with a look on his face that made me want to rewind the last five minutes until just before this conversation began. Anything to save him from the brutal sigh that rattled his lungs. “I don’t know if I’m going to be here next week.”
I claimed the space beside him. “Haulage run?”
“I wish.”
He didn’t. Chugging up and down the motorways bored the sweet arse off Nash. I knew, cos he’d told me too many times to count. “Where then?”