“It’s connected to your sister’s case?”
“Maybe, but there are complications. The daughter’s into some shit. The dad too. That’s probably why she was taken?—”
“Sounds like last spring,” Nic said, putting it together.
Now Cam just had to make the ask. “Which is why I’m calling you. I need you to work your legal magic.”
“That the only magic you need from me?”
Not by a long shot. He needed that magic voice live and in person, the magic taste that went along with it, and the very magic that somehow had made Nic the person who grounded him best. But with his family on edge already, Nic’s professional magic was all he could ask for.
“You’re the best federal prosecutor I know.” Cam took Nic’s silence for understanding, of all the things he’d said and not said. “I need the best on this case, Dominic.” Cam said what he could, urging Nic for this favor.
It was enough, thank God. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”
Nic slurped another spoonful of Mary’s homemade cioppino, cursing himself for staying away for so long. He’d had his reasons for avoiding his childhood home—namely his father—but that had come at the price of missing Mary’s cooking. The native San Franciscan was not easily outmatched in the kitchen. He’d stayed in touch, visiting with her at least once a year, but these sorts of home-cooked meals were sorely missed.
As was the woman herself, the last of his father’s household staff.
She sat across from him, making sure he ate every bite. Motherly as always. He’d only planned to swing by on his way to the airport to make sure Mary had all his contact numbers in case the worst of any variety should happen and to issue a behave warning to his father. The last thing he needed was for his father to incite an incident with Vaughn while he was clear across the country. But his father wasn’t home yet, and Mary had insisted on feeding him while he waited.
“Tell me about him.”
Nic almost sent a clam flying across the kitchen. “Him?” he said, bobbling the shell and dunking it back in the seafood stew.
“Whoever you’re flying off to Boston for.”
“It’s a case.” He pretended to focus all his attention on wrenching the morsel loose from its shell. Not on the excitement that was trilling through him at the certainty of seeing Cam again tomorrow.
He’d been disappointed to deliver bad news to Cam earlier, but that disappointment had vanished with the opportunity to help more tangibly and in person. He’d jumped at the chance, even if there was still something niggling in the back of his mind. Cam hadn’t let him be there for him personally, but he’d let him be there professionally. Cam had been the one pushing for more and then he hadn’t. Was he giving Nic the space he’d asked for? Or was there another reason he hadn’t initially wanted Nic in Boston?
He hoped it wasn’t guilt or embarrassment that had made Cam push him away. He had plenty of that of his own, and he’d bared those scars, memorialized in ink, to Cam. He hadn’t told him the full story, but Cam knew he wasn’t perfect. Nic didn’t expect him to be either. In fact, he craved those imperfections along with every other part of the man he?—
He gulped down another spoonful of stew, forgetting to blow on it and scalding the roof of his mouth.
Mary snickered. “See, that’s what you get. Now, tell me about him.”
He looked into her knowing green eyes, which had always had the power to make him spill it, even as an adult it seemed. “He’s an FBI agent.”
“Ooh. Handsome?”
He nodded. “And funny. Smart, very by the rules, but he’ll bend them if it’s for someone he cares about. We have . . . friends in common.” Family had been on the tip of his tongue, but he still struggled with the concept.
“You like him,” Mary said with a smile, and Nic had to set down his spoon. He hadn’t admitted this to anyone, not fully at least. Hell, he was only just admitting it to himself.
“I haven’t felt like this about someone since . . .”
He couldn’t finish, name and words stuck in his throat. He cast his gaze outside to the cypress trees in the backyard, the sight of which only made the words harder to come by. Made the branches on his back seem like they were extending and wrapping around his throat, strangling him.
They receded a little when Mary laid a hand on his forearm. “You can’t let what happened almost thirty years ago hold you back from love again.”
Love.
That emotion, that connection, that trouble that Nic didn’t want to attribute to what had been brewing between him and Cam.
“Look what love got me and the people I cared about last time.”
He’d loved, as true and deep as his eighteen-year-old heart could go. He’d loved a boy he shouldn’t. A boy who would have become his stepbrother, his mother engaged to Curtis. Garrett had become his best friend and shared this house with him for three years. The best three years of his life. In part because Garrett’s mom, Victoria, with Mary’s help, and with Nic’s father frequently away on business, had made this awful cavernous estate house seem like a home.
