I left him in Saint’s capable hands and followed the tug in my gut I’d forced myself to ignore when I’d screamed into the compound and set eyes on the fucked-up Toyota, Mateo’s furious voice echoing in my head.
“They ran them off the road. With fucking guns. Someone has to die for this.”
Fuck that. Someonecould’vedied.
Locke.
Embry.
Orla.
Fuck. Ten minutes earlier and it could’ve beenWillow.
You’d have been there.
You’d have died before anyone touched her.
But I wasn’t a fucking superhero. None of us were. And us being dead wouldn’t save her next time.
I passed the RAV4, my phone buzzing up a storm as the news rolled in that we’d been hit again.
Cam:Bring church to the cottage. I don’t want Orla on the road again.
Orla:Is he okay?
Saint:Meet me at midnight.
I fired off replies to Cam and Saint, accepting my orders, even from Saint, despite the fact that I outranked him. Saint never wasted my time. If he wanted to see me, it mattered.
Orla’s message, though... I didn’t have an answer. Not until I saw Locke with my own eyes.
I found him in the bunkhouse, standing over the sink, cleaning up a split eyebrow, T-shirt draped over his shoulders. His back was to me, but the faded jeans he wore sat higher than the low-slung sweats he’d worn in my bed, concealing the thick, ropey scars that had shattered my soul this morning, and he let me see him.
Let me come up close behind him and press my forehead between his shoulder blades, and god, his skin smelled so good it was hard to think about anything else. Even the harsh reality that a mere shift in variables could’ve ripped him away from me—fromus—forever.
I could’ve lost Embry too, and later, I’d find time to dwell on that along with every other horrifying possibility, but Locke, man. I couldn’t explain it. Didn’t have it in me to try, but the longer I stood behind him, just breathing him in, the more entrenched in him my heart—my fuckingexistence—became.
“Nash.”
His voice was a low rumble that I felt more than heard.
Then his touch hit me—his warm hand sliding back over my hip, and it was all I could do not to sway on my feet, woozy with a wicked combination of fear and arousal from the way he was hunched over the counter.
I’d never thought about it. Fucking him. In my wildest wet dreams, when they got that far, it had always been the other way around. But I knew he was into it—that he was vers. I’d heard him and Rubi talking about it one night in the bar when they thought I’d passed out on the couch next to them.
To be fair, I had, but the conversation I’d woken up to had kept me awake for days.
“I don’t give it up that much, but when I do, I let fate decide how it ends.”
“Hey.” Locke turned round, the movement jerking my head up. “What’s wrong?”
Nothing waswrong.
But nothing felt entirely right either.
Locke wrapped an arm around me, doing that thing with his hand where he tangled his fingers in the mess of hair at the nape of my neck.
The other came to rest on my chest, palm over my heart, and he frowned. “Breathe, brother.”
