Nic shot him a baleful side-eye.“You named a cat Bird?”
“I know you got hit by a car today, Price, but come on, put it together.”
Nic glanced back at the cat.White and orange tabby, green eyes, thin green Boston Celtics branded collar around his neck.
Ohin surprise, thenohin disgust.
Nic couldn’t have stopped his eyes from rolling if his life depended on it.“Should have fucking known.Better than Larry, I guess.Or worse, Brady.”
Cam hid a wider smile around the mouth of his beer bottle, and Nic couldn’t stop himself from staring either.Or from the heat that warmed his cheeks when Cam made a satisfied hum in the back of his throat.
Tearing his gaze away, he forced himself to pause his desire’s objective and address the other objective first.“You ready for this tomorrow?”he asked.
Cam looked like he wanted to swallow a whole bunch of conflicting emotions with his next gulp of beer.“Best way to rescue Abby.”
“Thank you,” Nic said, infusing his voice with all the gratitude he felt, “for keeping that as your priority, even if you still don’t trust her completely.”If not for Cam, he’d feel like he was shouting at the wind.
“Bowers isn’t my boss.”
“Lucky you.”He took a long swallow from his own bottle and unfastened another button at the collar of his dress shirt.He should have snagged a T-shirt at Gravity, but his mind had been elsewhere.Here already, questions swirling, and Cam, whose eyes had drifted to the hollow of his throat, wasn’t giving him what he wanted, at least in the answers department.“Also, you dodged my question,” he said, calling Cam’s bluff.“Tell me why Jamie doesn’t want you going under on this one.”
Cam’s eyes shot up.“Boy, you don’t beat around the bush, do you?”
“Not with most things.”He held Cam’s gaze, double meaning clear.
They’d been beating around the bush of whatever this was between them for months.Nic intended to directly address that too after he got any more case surprises out of the way.There’d been enough of those already.He wanted everything out in the open before Cam put his life in danger.
“I wasn’t always Special Agent Cameron Byrne.”
“I didn’t expect you launched from your mother’s womb as such.”
Cam almost spit out his beer on a startled laugh.Nice to catch him off guard and break the tension that had crept in.
Smiling, Nic climbed onto one of the padded barstools.“Tell me why you can fake it as a B&E guy.”
“Caught that, did you?”
“I should hope so, as the success of this sting depends on it.”
Cam took another long swallow of beer, then set the bottle down.“My older brother Bobby worked at a garage.”
He’d put the last word in air quotes, and Nic caught on to his meaning.“So, a chop shop, then?”
Arms braced behind him on the end of the bar, Cam leaned back and stared into space, his reflection in the shiny double oven doors vacant, his mind far away from the here and now.“I worshipped him.”
“You followed him to the garage?”
“Into it all.I could boost a car by the time I was thirteen.From there, it was a short jump to breaking into and boosting other things.”
“What changed?”
The vacant expression vanished, and Cam’s face twisted into grief and regret.He shook it off a second later, but Nic had seen it.Felt a familiar stab of pain in his chest.
“Some family shit went down,” Cam said.“The same night Bobby and I were out on a job.If we’d been where we were supposed to be instead...”His words drifted off, Cam struggling for composure as the emotion returned.“I might not be a practicing Catholic, but I’m Catholic enough to have a mountain’s worth of guilt stored up.Bobby too.”
Reaching out, Nic slid a hand over his.“You got out?”he asked softly.
Cam tangled their fingers like he’d done in the condo last night.“Bobby and I made a deal.Never again.”
