If you were a biker chick with a permanent target on your back, but Willow didn’t need to hear that.Ineeded her to leave her door open in case she had to hit the backseat again in a hurry.
Locke opened Willow’s door.
She slid out at the same moment Nash appeared at mine.
I unfolded myself from the car and licked his cheek. “Hey, lover.”
Nash snorted. “Is lickingloversan O’Brian thing? I saw River do it to Rubes the other day.”
“You ever see Cam lick Alexei?”
“That’s the weirdest sentence you’ve ever said.”
“Valid, though. For your O’Brian theory.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Nash planted a smacker on me, his arm sliding around my waist with the perfect blend of protective affection—the mood he and Locke were so good at, separately and together. “The diddy hatchbacks have moved down to the end since you were last here. You ready for some Corsa porn?”
“Are you?” With Embry lurking somewhere behind us, we trailed Locke and Willow into the auction site. “I’ve never seen you drive one you didn’t steal.”
“Hey, I’m a reformed character. I haven’t pinched a car in...” Nash frowned as he tallied up whatever measure of time he’d picked. Then he gave up. “Whatever. I’m a good boy these days.”
The words left his mouth as Locke glanced over his shoulder. They locked—ha-ha—eyes for a hot second and my belly fluttered, that skip in my heart returning for a heated encore. “I need to tell you something,” I murmured as Locke turned back.
Nash scanned our surroundings with vigilant eyes, cataloguing every face as Locke did the same. “If it’s about snogging Locke, I already know. He told me this morning.”
I started to smile, a dirty chuckle building in my throat. Then I remembered the tension between Nash and Locke back at the compound and my humour stalled. “How did you react?”
“Me?” Nash steered me around a group of men clustered by a breakfast wagon. “It’s my ultimate fantasy. One of them, anyway. How do you think I reacted?”
If I knew Nash, and I did, his standard clap-back to any suggestion of me and Locke was an eight-inch boner that wouldn’t quit. But I’d learned a lot watching Cam navigate his complex love life, and this... thing between the three of us, it was delicate, and most of it had nothing to do with sex. “Did you talk about it?”
“A little.”
“And?”
“And...” Nash paused to fire a glare at a dude who looked my way a little too long. “He seemed worried I’d feel left out. So I had a crack at convincing him otherwise, and I think it panned out, cos he manhandled me after that.”
My skin felt too tight for my body. Too hot. “Definemanhandling.”
“I was naked.”
“How did that go for you?” Nash was as attracted to Locke as I was, but being sexual with men didn’t always come easy to him. Even men as satanically hot as Locke Halliwell.
“It took me a sec,” he admitted, “to stop feeling like I was fourteen and my dad was going to burst in with the Bible. And then we got interrupted, so that’s pretty much it, but if you’reworried about how I’m going to react to anything between you and Locke, stop. We’ve talked about this a million times. If we’re lucky enough for it to happen to us, I’m cool with whatever, and I’d always tell you if that changed.”
My sweet boy. I’d loved him for so many years, but in moments like this, my battered heart grew new wings. “It’s not going to change, is it?”
“Not for me.” Nash’s tone turned cautious. “But we gotta be careful with him, Orls. He’s the daddiest daddy out there, but he’s been hurt as much as we have, and we can’t fix that with dick jokes and rum.”
“I don’t make dickjokes. I mean every single thing I say about dicks.”
“Fair enough. But what dowedo when we have shit between us to deal with?”
“Recently? Drink rum and fuck. Before that, it was rum, pizza, and pining.”
I spoke without malice. Nash had held out on me for literal years, but I didn’t blame him for a second of it. Our lives were complicated, pot-holed with grief, violence, and heartache. I was lucky he was alive to complain about, and I never forgot that.
We reached the hatchback auctions. I looped my arm through Willow’s, losing track of Nash as he veered off to grab a program. “What’s your dream car?”
