“Um…” Harleigh Rose hesitated. “No offense, girl, but Lion and I live in a tiny apartment while the renos are being done at the ranch. I think for the sake of all our relationships, it’d be better you didn’t stay with us. I’m not so good at stayin’ quiet.”
“Ew,” Hudson said, wrinkling his nose because he’d grown up with H.R. around, and he considered her like a sister too. “TMI, dude.”
“You can’t stay with Zeus and Lou either,” Ares stated with more authority than any kid should ever have. “They twins’ve got colic and they don’t sleep so good.”
Which might have been true, but there was something in the way he slanted Nova a measuring look that said he was rooting for him to win the stand-off.
“You’re stayin’ with me,” Nova cut in intractably. “No one else I trust enough to take care of you.”
The words landed like a silken blow, and I hated him for them. Because damn him for loving me like that, so much, but platonically. Always platonically.
How could a girl ever be expected to move on from a man who would do anything to keep her safe?
He planted flowers all over my body, inside the cage of my ribs, in the fertile soil of my heart, yet he never noticed how they bloomed just for him.
I looked away, gritting my teeth against the sudden burn of tears in my eyes, trying to call up the anger I’d felt to burn away the oncoming flood.
“I’m not going with you,” I told him with a finality he could understand. “There’s no way I’m living with you.”
“There’s no way you’re not,” he countered simply.
I shoved at his chest, two hands to the white tee, but he wouldn’t move.
Instead, he leveraged my weight against me and shifted to the side so I fell forward into the arm he had ready to catch me. Before I could even squawk out a protest, Nova was lowering me to the ground steadily with one bulging arm then kneeling over me, twisting my hands behind my back, pinning a knee in my ass.
“What the hell?” I yelled at him.
“Huds,” he said calmly, ignoring my struggles. “Go get me some of Dad’s rope.”
“Don’t you fucking dare!” I screeched, thrashing against the floor like a grounded fish. “Get him off me!”
But no one rescued me.
Instead, I heard muffled laughter and Molly’s heavy sigh, the same one she’d expelled when we were rowdy children acting out.
Hudson returned quickly, handed off the rope, and Nova made quick work of tying up my hands in tight fisherman’s knots I had no hope of escaping from.
“I’m going to fucking kill you for this,” I promised.
He chuckled huskily in my ear, patted my ass, then hauled me into his arms as easily as a sack of grain before flipping me up and over his shoulder where he slapped my ass again.
“Fuck, can’t think why I haven’t done this before,” he mused to our family as they snickered and watched me being manhandled. “She’s a helluva lot more amenable like this.”
“Just don’t drop her,” Molly called out wearily.
“She weighs like five pounds,” Milo said confidently. “He won’t drop her.”
“Want a call when you get her home and settled in,” Diogo warned. “And an update on what the hell you two are wrapped up in right now.”
“You’ll have some serious hell to pay later,” Harleigh Rose noted accurately.
“You better fucking believe it,” I shouted. “All of you are officially on my shit list.”
“As long as you’re alive to have one and Nova can help keep you that way, I don’t care,” Molly replied with surprising fervor. “Take care of our girl, honey.”
Nova’s body jerked with his nod, then he started to walk us out the door. “’Til the day I fuckin’ die,” he promised, and even hanging upside down in a fireman’s carry on his shoulder, I felt those words hit home in my heart like yet another strike of Cupid’s bow.
* * *
* * *
I’d always loved Nova’s apartment, and I hated that the sight of all that exposed brick and black leather and chrome furniture looked even better amid my plants, cool and homey at the same time. It was a massive, open plan space with a loft set back over the living area that contained a small game room complete with dart board, pool table, and a short hall that gave way to two bedrooms. I’d helped him move in years ago, and I both loved and hated that he still had the huge photo of Dane, himself, and me in a place of honour on the wall perpendicular to the TV.
I also hated that he’d kept me tied up on the couch while he moved around the apartment, and then hated, too, that he’d used that time to draw a bath for me with the dried flower bath salts I liked then locked me in there to ‘calm the fuck down’ so we could have a mature conversation about what was going to happen moving forward.