“A bit. Why? That unusual?”
“Highly.” Orla kissed my cheek, then drew back to take my hand. “Come sit with me?”
On the couch. “You have coffee I can pinch?”
“You know where the machine is.”
“I meant instant, queenie.”
“Then you’re shit out of luck.” Orla let me go and moved to the couch, hips swaying. “Maybe the rum will have to do.”
No fuckin’ way. I took my chances in the kitchen and found myself facing the fancy coffee contraption she never used for herself. I didn’t drink much coffee either, but if I was going to spend a significant amount of time on that couch, I needed a rocket up my arse.
Not that I couldn’t think of better ways of keeping myself awake.
Ho-hum.
I finagled a mug of coffee from the space-age machine and carried it back to the living room.
Orla had put a record on the turntable—PJ Harvey—and curled up on the couch, her dainty feet tucked. I felt like a lumbering oaf beside her, but Orla was far from delicate. She was strong.Resilient. And like every King and Queen around here, she had the heart of a fuckin’ lion.
I sat close—close enough that the heat of her body made my head swim. “You don’t have to tell me about his parents. He said enough for me to understand.”
Orla sipped her rum. “That’s sweet, but I know Nash, and there’s no way what he told you came anywhere close to the fucking damage those selfish, pious pricks did to him.”
“They hurt him?”
“Not physically. But they rejected him for existing, and he’s spent the last however long subconsciously rejecting himself.”
I tried to bend my mind around that. The Rebel Kings were free-love fuckin’ central. It was hard to imagine a dude getting as fucked up about their sexuality as Nash seemed to be. “All right. Maybe I don’t understand.”
“Do you want to?”
The question seemed loaded. I leaned back, letting the couch swallow me up. “Why are you asking me that?”
Orla drained her glass and set it aside. “Because I think I know the answer, but I need to be sure before I tell you things I’d never tell anyone else, not even Rubi.”
“Sure that you can trust me? Or that I give a shit about him?”
“Neither. It’s more than that.”
“Are you asking me what my intentions are with your man?”
A faint smile curved Orla’s red lips. “A little. I mean, you love him, right? I feel like you do... when I see you with him, even without knowing you want to bang his brains out.”
I’d never put words to how I felt about Nash McGovern. For so long he’d been this mythical creature. The hot VP from across the way. The target—themark. The man they’d ordered me to kill, but I’d refused without—aside from the obviousI’m not a fuckin’ murderer reasons—ever truly knowing why.
It had taken Priest three days to catch up with me after that night. He’d shackled me and broken my ribs with a crowbar. Maybe he’d have killed me if Rocco hadn’t intervened, but at the time, I hadn’t much cared.
I cared about myself now. About him.
Abouther.
“You’re right.” I abandoned my coffee and faced Orla. “I do love him, and it has nothing to do with wanting to fuck him and everything to do with the man who rode into fuckin’ Crow town by himself to offer idiots like me a better life. But I do want to fuck him, queenie. I can’t deny that, and I won’t. But... shit, I can’t be the person who puts that look on his face. I’d never touch him again before I hurt him like that.”
The slow dip of Orla’s chin meant everything. “What was your mother like?”
I pictured my mum, red-haired and tiny, her body old before its time, her smile as radiant as Orla’s. Her laugh as dirty. “She was a diamond, but we lost her when I was twenty-one.”
