“Not a shitting chance,” Rubi backed me up.
Grumbling, Nash took the flask and necked a few shots’ worth. Rubi drank the rest, then promptly fell asleep in the back of the car.
I glanced at him as I drove. “That can’t be comfortable.”
“You fell asleep on a child’s bunk bed last week.”
“I ate too much, and Lo puts all that lavender shit on Billy’s pillow to shut him up.”
Nash tipped his head back and laughed, shifting his leg around, flexing it, just cos he could. “Should we drop him off before we go to the house?”
I checked on Rubi again. “Nah. He misses you.”
“He’s asleep.”
“Probably cos he was up all night worrying that cast would come off and take your leg with it.”
Nash chewed the inside of his cheek, fingers twitching for the cigarettes he still hadn’t smoked. Then he did what he always did when he needed a break from the heavy.
He put a record on—figuratively, anyway, and I drove on to the Palace album I knew inside and out by now.
Closer to home, I parked the car outside a big old house equidistant between Mateo and Embry, and Cam’s beachfront cottage. It was a wreck, but the structure was sound. The foundations. Rubi woke up and wandered in as Nash was signing the paperwork, and it didn’t take him long to work out what was up.
“You’re buying this place?”
Nash chucked me the pen. “Weare.”
Rubi’s face split in the widest grin I’d ever seen. “For real? The Locktipus is putting down roots?”
“You’re fuckin’ ridiculous.” I tossed Nash’s words from a few days ago at his best friend, but I couldn’t contain my own expanding smile. “But yeah, if that’s what you want to call it. That profit share bonus the accountant dropped on me last week isn’t gonna be in the bank long.”
“You fucking legend.” Rubi thumped me on the back and slugged Nash, unbalancing him on purpose. “This place is massive. Room for all the sproglets here. And you can put a kennel outside for Cam.”
He ambled off to nose around. We finished the forms to exchange contracts on the sale. Then we stared at each other, grinning, until my phone broke the moment.
Galen:these street names are feckin’ crazy and the people are weird.
I showed Nash the message.
He laughed. “He’ll have to get used to that if he wants to hang out in Porth Luck. That place is an asylum.”
“Gale can handle it.” I sent a meme and ditched my phone. “I don’t think he’ll be around much anyway. He’s bought that shitheap of a house as an investment, not a passion project.”
Nash didn’t agree. “He was into it, I could tell. He’s got the bug.”
“He has ajob,” I countered. Making sure my heroically inclined brother didn’t get himself killed. I loved being around Galen, but I liked him best when he was watching Logan’s back. “Don’t expect too much of him.”
Nash gave an easy shrug, already busy assessing our surroundings, building walls with his fuckin’ eyeballs. And busy was the word of the day. Nash still couldn’t ride or drive the HGVs, but he had plenty to do. The garage, the construction sites the Kings owned and ran. This place, on top of a crazy-ambitious plan to regenerate the old Dog Crow territory. His sick leave was officially over, and I was here for all of it.
Except the Crow shit.
It didn’t matter how many times he explained his reasons for giving something back to a community that had tried to kill every Rebel King I loved at some point, I just didn’t fuckin’ care.
And it didn’t hurt me to know Nash was a better man than me.
We bought a house and did a thousand other things. Then we went home to our woman, tracking her down to the chapel where she was helping Cam prep for the first pizza night of the year.
She already knew about the house.