Lina made me feel like a man, not like the broken shell of one.
Lucian’s jaw tightened beneath his neatly trimmed beard.
“Two smoked salmon eggs Benedicts.” The server appeared with our breakfast.
“Thanks,” I said flatly when it became clear Lucian wasn’t going to.
“Can I get you anything else right now? More coffee? Napkins to mop up any future bloodshed? No? Okay then.”
“She’s lying to you,” Lucian insisted. “She’s here because of you.”
“You both need to shut your damn mouths now,” Knox ordered. “Lina is one of the fucking good ones.”
“You don’t trust her with your brother either,” Lucian pointed out.
“Because he’s gonna get his stupid heart broken, that’s why,” my brother said in exasperation. “Not because she’s taking advantage or whatever bullshit you made up in that suspicious-ass mind of yours. She isn’t gonna settle down and be a cop’s wife and chase after a bunch of kids. So if you go fallin’ head over heels for her and she kicks you in the gut on the way out the door, I’m the one who’s gonna have to deal with your bitching and moaning about it.”
I was oddly touched, but still mostly pissed off.
I faced them both. My brother and my best friend thought I was too weak to survive this.
“Go near her again and I will make you regret it,” I said, my knuckles going white on the handle of my mug.
“I’m sayin’ the same thing to you,” Knox said to me.
“Not your call to make,” I reminded him.
“I don’t trust her,” Lucian said stubbornly.
“Yeah? And I didn’t trust that dental hygienist you dated for a month three years ago.”
“You were right not to. She stole my watch and my bathrobe,” my friend admitted.
“Lina isn’t after me for my watch and I don’t have a bathrobe.”
“No. But she’s after something. A liar can smell a lie.”
“Stop looking into her.”
“If you get your head on straight, I’ll stop keeping tabs,” Lucian said.
When Lucian Rollins kept tabs, that meant he knew what was in your garbage before it went out to the curb. It meant he knew what you were going to have for dinner before you did. The man had a gift for information gathering, and I shouldn’t have been surprised that he’d wield it against me. Especially if he thought it was for my own good.
“I don’t need to be hearing this.”
“Yes, you do,” he insisted. “I’m hearing more rumors that Duncan Hugo didn’t run off with his tail between his legs.”
“So what?” I shot back.
“You’re a loose end. A direct threat to him. You can’t hide in the blanks in your memory forever. I need you to be operating at one hundred percent. Because if he does get to you again, if he does manage to take you out…that leaves me with only Knox as a friend.”
“Hilarious.”
“Fuck you,” Knox muttered.
“You’re too good to let this end you. You need to claw your way out of this darkness if necessary and beat him. And you’re not going to accomplish that by distracting yourself with a woman you can’t trust.”
“There’s a simple solution to this. Both of you stay the hell away from Lina,” Knox said.
“Fuck you both.”
NINETEEN
KHAKI IS NOT HER COLOR
Lina
“The usual, lovely Lina?” Justice called from behind Café Rev’s counter when I walked in.
“Yes, please. Mind if my furry friend joins me?” I asked, holding up Piper in her pumpkin sweater. The dog sniffed the coffee-scented air and trembled at the excitement of the early morning rush.
Justice grinned. “Not a problem. I’ll make something extra special for Miss Piper.”
Of course the beloved barista already knew the dog’s name. And of course he knew my usual. I’d been going to the same café around the block from my town house for the past two years, and they still got my order and name wrong.
“Everything okay?” he asked me over the buzz of the busy café as I paid for my coffee.
I blinked. That definitely never happened in my coffee shop.
“Yeah. Sure. Totally fine,” I said.
It was a big, fat lie.
But I wasn’t about to explain to Justice that I was freaked out because there was something so irresistible about Nash Morgan that I was acting completely out of character around him. Snuggling. Confiding. Emotionally supportive. And I certainly wasn’t about to voice my concern that Lucian was about to ruin it all even though I wasn’t sure I wanted “it all” in the first place.
They had been friends for years, and if Lucian said I was bad news, Nash would listen.
I should be happy. Lucian’s interference would extricate me from a situation I didn’t know how to handle and let me focus on what I came here to do. I should be ecstatic. Instead, I felt like that time I’d insisted on going on that roller coaster after four shots of tequila in college.
“You sure? Because your face doesn’t say totally fine,” Justice pressed.
“My face and I are fine,” I promised. “I’m just…trying to work a few things out in my head.”
He grabbed a mug and twirled it around his finger by the handle. “Sometimes the best thing you can do is distract yourself and let the answer come to you.”
I threw a twenty in the tip jar. “Thanks, Justice.”
He winked. “Grab a seat. I’ll yell for you when it’s ready.”
I grabbed the first vacant table I saw and plopped down in the chair.
Justice was right. Nash wasn’t some operation to plan out and execute. He was a grown-ass man and he could make his own decisions. But he should probably make them with all the information. If I told him the truth and he still wanted to believe that I was bad news, then it was his loss. Not mine.
Then why did it feel like mine? The tiny voice niggled in my head. I wasn’t actually falling for the guy. Was I? Prior to this weekend, I’d drunk at a bar with him and patched him up after a shootout. We barely knew each other. This was just a crush. Nothing more.
“You look like you’re a million miles away,” Naomi said, appearing with several beverages.
“How much coffee do you drink in the morning?” I asked as she took the seat next to me.
“Two of these are yours,” she said. She slid a latte and a paper cup of whipped cream with Piper’s name written on it my way. “You didn’t hear Justice calling.”
Piper forgot to be terrified and stuck her snout into the whipped cream.
“How did you know Knox was the one?” I blurted out the question without even consciously thinking it.
But if Naomi was surprised by the question, she didn’t let on. “It was a feeling. Some kind of magic. A rightness, I guess. It definitely didn’t make any logical sense. On paper we couldn’t be more ill-suited to each other. But there was something so right about how it felt to be with him.”
Shit. That sounded…familiar.
I busied myself with a hit of caffeine.
“But you can’t just fall for someone over the course of a few days, can you?”