He looked away again. “Before I knew better, I studied in the library while my uncle worked, plotting my next chess move.”
He grimaced as if he hadn’t meant to tell me any of that, but it had spilled out anyway.
My phone rang instead of buzzing. The ringtone I’d set for Mac, “Warrior” by Kid Rock, was strident and loud in the quiet house.
“I’ll let you get that,” Nash said, and he left, shutting the door behind him. It was an even more somber version of Nash than I’d ever seen before. As if this house had suddenly turned him into someone else.
“Hey,” I said, steeling myself for Mac’s ire.
“Thank God,” he said. His tone, full of relief instead of anger, had me stalling my sassy reply. “Where are you?”
“I told―”
“Don’t even. Georgie just got done texting Brady. You aren’t with him. He’s on his way to someplace in Vermont.”
Damn. I hadn’t expected them to figure it out so quickly. Georgie, of course, would have checked in with her longtime friend after hearing that the shows had been canceled. My brain had been overloaded with emotions since yesterday; otherwise, I would have already told Brady to just let it slide if they thought I was with them.
“You’re stalling. Trying to find a way to tell me the truth. What the hell is going on, Dani?”
There was the anger. “I just didn’t want everyone to worry.”
“It’s too late for that.”
I sat down on the window seat, looking out at the view of the conservatory, the pool, and the lemon-scented trees we’d driven past. It was stunning. A painting or a picture in the making. One you’d hang on a wall in your very best room, and yet, it was something Nash had hidden away. A family he hadn’t shared.
“Dani.” Mac’s prodding brought me back to him, and I just let the truth slip out of me.
“I was poisoned.”
I’d wanted to figure out a way to spin the words before I’d shared them with anyone, but I couldn’t.
“What?” Mac’s voice dropped. “Are you okay?”
“I am now. Fiona got into the restaurant we ate at yesterday and added ipecac syrup to my drink. So, I was pretty sick for most of the afternoon and into the evening.”
“Where the hell was Nash?” Mac’s voice was all growl.
“Don’t blame him. He was there with five other members of the detail. She must have disguised herself or something, because the place was pretty small, and none of us saw her.”
“That’s exactly what Nash is paid to do for a living.”
“Stop. He already feels bad.”
“He should.”
“Mac, really. You’re being ridiculous. It was a spur-of-the-moment stop that none of us expected her to be at. They were all standing guard like we were some British nobility or the president or something.”
“Where is Nash now? Where are you?”
This was the moment I dreaded. Even though he was younger than me, Mac had always done the big-brother-watching-over-his-sister thing, and I knew exactly where his mind would go when I told him the truth.
“I’m with Nash at his home in Georgia.”
Silence.
“Nash has a home in Georgia?”
I couldn’t help a sputtered laugh. “Right? Get this. It’s his childhood home. And it’s a frickin’ huge estate. An antique, Georgian mansion with hundreds of acres of fields and a manufacturing plant that makes essential oils and that sort of thing.”
“Nash? Nash Wellsley?”
I laughed again, and it helped to lighten the tightness that had begun to gather again in my chest. “He said I shouldn’t have expected him to spawn from the devil, but that’s almost what I thought, because who can possibly imagine him as a child?”
Mac chuckled a little. Then, silence settled down again.
“So, you’re not alone?” he asked.
“Back off, little brother. But yes, there are other people here—an uncle and a woman who Grandma would seriously invite to tea at the clubhouse.”
He breathed out a long sigh into the phone. “It’s just… There’s been this weird vibe between the two of you lately, and I don’t want to see you hurt. Not again. Not after…”
His voice trailed away. Not after Russell. I had been more hurt by Russell than I’d expected. The casual dalliance we’d had, which had progressed to the point of my keeping a couple of sets of clothes at his apartment, had been more serious than I’d intended. The fact that he’d met his ex-girlfriend instead of me on the night Fenway assaulted me had cut a little hole into my heart, which I’d never thought I’d given to him. No one had seen the holes except Mac and Georgie.
“Nash isn’t going to hurt me like that, Mac,” I told him, but what I didn’t say was that I wasn’t going to let him. Sure, our bodies were attracted to each other. The sex had been off the charts. The kisses had been the same way, but both our hearts were caged with barbed wire and iron. There was no way either of us was getting through. At least, that was what I told myself.
Nash
DEMONS
“Don't get too close,
It's dark inside.
It's where my demons hide.”
Performed by Imagine Dragons
Written by Mosser / Grant / McKee / Reynold / Sermon
I retreated from Dani to the room that had always been mine. A room I’d grown up in but had not maintained a single aspect of my childhood. Instead, it had been redone in deep blues, burgundies, and whites that Maribelle had insisted wasn’t because I’d joined the Navy, and yet still bled America like a theme song.
It was masculine and sturdy, and in many ways, it reflected my personality, but it still wasn’t a room I’d call home. It took me all of a minute to unpack my bag. I was reluctant to throw my dirty clothes in the hamper because then Maribelle would have whoever was helping her in the house these days wash them. I was uncomfortable with strangers handling my clothes after doing them on my own for
