“How do you know he’s drippy?”
“Alexei showed me a picture.”
Orla’s gaze narrowed again.
“Oh, fuck no.” Nash intervened. “Let’s put a record on and eat something.”
Magic fuckin’ words. Orla poked my ribs and drifted away to her older brother’s record stack, which meant I was in for a few hours of hardcore metal, but I could live with that more than her anger, for no other reason than her flushed face and flashing eyes made me want to jump her.
I took a shower—a cold one that made my bones ache harder, but I didn’t care. I needed it, even if the throb in my back was enough to have me hunching over the sink like I was eighty years old, gone so long Nash came to find me.
He’d brought the magic hemp cream that smelled like Saint. He rubbed it into my tight muscles and it felt almost as good as when he’d fucked me this morning.
Reckon my face was the same.
“Come to bed,” he whispered when he was done. “Please?”
He didn’t have to plead. I was dead on my feet and I needed to be horizontal with my people to survive it.
I followed him out of the bathroom and claimed my place beside Orla. She was already asleep. With Nash warming my soothed spine, I curved around her, my hand on her belly—her tight belly, alive with the false contractions that often hit at night, causing her to shift and grumble in her sleep, growing in intensity as her pregnancy progressed.
Nearly there.
Just a few weeks. Then I’d have two more kids to lose my shit over, and as scary as that was, I couldn’t fuckin’ wait.
18
EMBRY
ONE WEEK EARLIER...
Liliana’s new horse was a Welsh pony. He had a wispy face and thick muscles and a chestnut mane that matched Saint’s messy hair.
She’d called him Casper. Wasn’t sure why. His paperwork named him as Spot. But who the fuck was I to argue? I just had to survive watching her ride a horse a foot taller and twice as fast as Chappie.
Sharing the load with my cousin helped. For all his grump, Joe was an excellent teacher. He never took his eyes off Liliana as she flew around the jump course he’d built for her, and it gave me a minute to relax and stretch a hard day of building site graft out of my body.
It was a cold evening, frost on the ground, the wind biting my face. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my cement-ruined hoodie and leaned against the fence, observing the sights and sounds of a farm woven into my DNA. Even though I hadn’t set foot on this land until I was a prison-scarred adult, I felt the hand of the people who’d come before me, and I’d learned to like it.
Still wasn’t much for horses, though. Or the scent of hay and manure saturating my senses. I slid a mint into my mouth and fished out my phone to tell Mateo I missed everything about him, but especially how he smelled—in the morning, in the evening. In the middle of the night when I woke up just to press my face to his skin.
We weren’t good at poetic text messages. I wound up asking what he’d had for dinner. He didn’t reply, but I’d grown used to that over the past few weeks. Mateo didn’t like using his phone, and the expanding quiet between us felt like those dark weeks we’d spent apart when I’d helped hide Lilliana at Alexei’s Bristol penthouse.
When you left him.
Stress rattled my gut. I pushed it away, like I’d had to the whole time Mateo had been gone. Keeping busy helped. Being a dad—a part of my life that still felt surreal sometimes. Working overtime on building Joe’s new stable block. Early mornings, late nights, and the long days in between.
I’m so fucking tired.
Good tired, though. Not the death fatigue I was finally free of—the kind of lethargy that would’ve left me uncaring that an unknown vehicle approached Joe’s farm.
These days, the engine noise whipped my head around. A car crawled up the gated driveway only family and staff had the code for—a nondescript SUV that jogged something in my brain. Had I seen it before? Not that I could remember, but that didn’t mean much when it came to the past few years. I’d lost so much time that I’d never get back, and maybe this car belonged to the blurry days of pain and exhaustion when only Mateo and Liliana had existed for me.
I tracked the car to where it stopped near the chalets some of Joe’s staff lived in.
Angelo, maybe?From this distance, I couldn’t tell, and it bothered me enough to push away from the fence and move closer, reaching in my pocket as the driver door opened and a man hopped out from behind the wheel.
Literally fucking hopped, to the rear door to fetch a set of crutches.