I hoped leaving the necklace with him would give him reason enough, but now I wasn’t so sure.
“Is everything cool?”
I glanced up at Nash pulling up alongside me in his pizza delivery van. I approached the open passenger window and rested my arms on it. “Hi, Nash. How are you doing?”
“I should ask you,” he said, a somber look on his face. “I drove by your shop earlier and noticed all the action. I tried to steer down the alley to see what was going on, but they had it blocked off. Word spreads fast around here. The lady at the shoe store made it sound like the whole place burned down.”
“No, just some damage in the back. Don’t you have air-conditioning in here?” I asked, waving my hand in front of the vent.
“I just dropped off a huge delivery to a pack of three hundred, so I’m airing out the van. It’s not good to run the air conditioner with the windows down.” He took off his red baseball hat and wiped his fingers through his curly hair, his blond locks sweaty from the heat. Then he put his hat on backward. “Are you going somewhere?”
“No. I just stopped off at the bank, and now I’m heading back.” As much as I wanted to go home, my mother didn’t have a spare set of keys to lock up, and I had no idea if Melody had returned or gone back to the apartment. “I have to finish up some work at the store,” I said, resting my chin on my arm.
“You look beat. Hop in. It’s just around the corner.”
“What about your orders?”
He laughed. “I’ve only got two more stops, and you’re on the way to one.”
Thank the fates for men like Nash. The last thing I needed was a mugger snatching my purse and making off with our money. I climbed inside the hot van. “It smells good in here. I bet it makes you hungry all the time.”
The motor rumbled as he merged back into traffic. “I don’t eat the stuff myself. I stick to a high-protein diet.” He flexed his arm. “Plus when you smell pizza every day, you get sick of it. I go home stinking of sausages. Sometimes they have me chopping vegetables, and I can never get the smell of onions off my hands. Not exactly a turn-on for the ladies.”
He slowed at the light and turned the cold air on full blast. Nash had all the qualities a Packmaster looked for, and I was grateful for his kindness. While I stared at the dark circles under my eyes in the visor mirror, he reached for something in the back.
“Here,” he said, offering me a slice of pizza. “You look like you’ve been busting your ass all day. When’s the last time you ate anything?”
“I don’t remember.”
“This one’s on the house.”
I took the slice. “Isn’t this someone’s dinner?”
He shook his head. “The last time I delivered to this customer, he didn’t tip me. I live off tips, so he can kiss my ass if he has a problem with it.”
I took a big bite, gobbling up the stringy cheese. Seemed I was hungrier than I first thought. “I hope this doesn’t get you in trouble.”
“My boss makes too much money from large orders to give a rat’s ass about one customer’s complaint. Anyhow, friends don’t let friends starve to death.”
When I finished eating it all the way up to the crust, I tossed the remaining bread out the window and into a trash bin on the curb.
“Nice shot,” he said. “So what happened at the store? I hate to rely on rumors.”
I wiped my mouth. “The arsonist is dead. Not much to gossip about anymore.”
“Dead?” His eyebrows arched as we turned the corner. “That’s some swift justice.”
“There was a brawl out back that escalated.”
“Why would anyone want to burn down your store?”
“I think he was targeting me for extortion. He’s been doing all kinds of things to undermine my business.” I rubbed my eyes and reclined my head against the seat. “Now we just have a big mess to clean up.”
“Sleepy?” Nash rolled up his window, making the van a little cooler. “It usually doesn’t take long for it to kick in.”
“What? The cold air?”
“The sedative.”
