“No kidding,” Nate said. He gave the kid a grateful nod and crossed the floor. The door opened before he got there, and Flynn waved him in. Despite everything else going on, Nate felt that hot tug of attraction as he took in Flynn’s scruff, stubble, and shoulders. It was a hot, tight bubble low in his stomach, and it made him feel even shittier when he saw his mother.
Ally was sitting on a tattered office chair with one crutch balanced across her lap. The leg of her trousers was blotched with blood.
“Jesus, Mum,” Nate said. He went to her and bent down to skim a kiss over her cheek. “I told you this would happen. You’re doing too much. Why not use your chair?”
“Because I don’t want to,” Ally snapped. “And I didn’t do too much. I went into town on the bus. You were doing that when you were eight. If an eight-year-old can do it, so can I.”
“When I was eight, I wasn’t recovering from cancer, and I had both legs.”
“No sense, though.”
Flynn cleared his throat. “I’ll just go out,” he said. “Get back to work.”
He brushed against Nate on the way past, briefly gripped Nate’s forearm, and leaned in to murmur in his ear. “It does look worse than it is.”
Then he left and closed the door behind him.
Silence dragged out for a second as they both waited for Flynn to walk away. Nate took a deep breath and tried to hang on to his composure. There was no point in turning it into an argument. Ally was right. She was an adult. If she wanted to go shopping—
“I hope you’re happy,” Ally said. “You made the poor man uncomfortable in his own office.”
Nate bit his tongue. He didn’t know when Flynn had gone from “that Delaney boy” to “poor man” in his mum’s lexicon, and right then it didn’t matter.
“He’ll survive,” he said. “You should have called me. I could have been here sooner.”
She flapped her hand dismissively. “You have work to do, Nate,” she said. “Besides, I didn’t need you. If everyone hadn’t made such a fuss, I’d have just called a taxi and gone home. I can take care of myself, you know. I’m not an invalid.”
Theanymorehung in the air between them. Theyetmight just have been in Nate’s head.
“What if you’d really hurt yourself?” he asked. “What if youhavereally hurt yourself? Flynn’s not a doctor.”
“It’s a graze.”
“What if it’s not? What if—”
“Oh, stop it,” Ally said sharply. “I know you’re worried. Do you think I’m not? That doesn’t mean that every sneeze, every spot, is me getting sick again. I fell. I’ve got a cut on my leg, and my ass is killing me. That’s all. God knows, it feels like enough.”
Her voice cracked, and there went the anger. It popped like a bubble and left him with the stale taste of guilt and fear. What sort of terrible son argued with his mother—his still-recovering mother, after she’d had a nasty fall?
Nathan Moffatt, apparently.
“Sorry,” he said. It sounded like he’d reached back through time and yanked that apology out of the mouth of his eight-year-old self. Small, grudging, and shamefaced, all at once. There was a wedding to relocate, a venue to find, and a couple to sell on the change, but that would have to wait. “Come on. Let’s get you home.”
“Don’t you have anything better to do than fuss over me?” Ally asked. “I told you it was nothing. It was the shock more than anything else that threw me. I’ll get a taxi. Kenny can help me out when it gets here.”
“That’s daft. I’m here now. Just let me drive you home.”
“You don’t need to, Nate.”
“I want to.”
“Sweetheart, I love you—”
“I know. I love you t—”
“But I’m sore, I’m tired, and I’m not crawling into your ridiculous car so you can rattle my bones all the way back to the house.”
Nate had already taken a breath to disagree, but that was a hard point to counter. His car wasn’t a smooth ride on old roads full of ruts and occasional stretches of cobbles.
