Inked in Lies (The Fallen Men 5)

Dane had made me promise I would stay safe, locked up in the Booths house like some princess in a tower while he worked through whatever it was he had to do with the military in order to finally come back home to Entrance for good. And I was absolutely not going to break the first promise I made to my brother after years apart even though I was going stir crazy.

I also stayed because of the club.

They wanted me safe at home while the police investigated Irina’s sex trafficking ring and Dane’s boss’s operation out of the Middle East. They didn’t want me disturbed or interviewed by the many camera crews rolling through town, and they wanted me accounted for at all times.

There was always a brother in leather at the Booths’ house.

Almost every single one of them took up rotation, for their own peace of mind and for mine, I thought. Boner always made sure he was there for dinner because he loved Diogo’s grub, Bat and Cy dropped by to keep up my self-defence training, and Axe-Man sat with me in the garden while I worked, handing me tools or weeding with me when I asked him to. He was a quiet man who liked quiet things, so I enjoyed his company in the chaotic, over stuffed house.

Nova didn’t visit.

After holding me on the freighter and the entire trip home on one of Diogo’s fishing boats he’d lent the club for the operation, Nova had gone with me to the hospital in Vancouver so I could get checked out. He’d held my hand, eyes to me every single second as if he was afraid I’d disappear, and then ironically, when we’d separated so the doctors could give me a CT scan to check for a possible concussion, he’d disappeared himself. I’d asked the Booths about it as soon as I noticed him gone, but Hudson had distracted me by arriving with a bottle of my favourite kombucha and a burger brought all the way down the mountain from Eugene’s.

What I didn’t realize until the last day of that second week, was that no one would let Nova visit.

Harleigh Rose explained it to me while we were out in the garden that day, her head tipped to the sunshine, the new, gleaming engagement ring on her hand twinkling in the light.

“He’s paying his penance,” she told me.

“What?”

She sighed, lowering her aviators to give me a look. “Babe, he broke your heart. Everyone’s fuckin’ pissed. Oliver actually fought with him about it. You should see his shiner, it’s a real beauty.”

I gaped at her. “What? How has no one told me this?”

She shrugged. “Um, maybe because you were just stalked through the woods, abducted, and almost sold into a lifelong career of sexual slavery? Or the fact that your long-lost brother is alive, helped save you, and he’s moving back to Entrance?”

I shut my mouth with an audible click. “Yeah, there’s stuff going on, but there always is with the club. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to see Nova.”

Or that it hadn’t hurt, thinking he didn’t want to see me, that even after almost losing me he was so wholly unaffected by it.

“Oh, babe, it’s not that he didn’t want to come see you,” she said with a beleaguered sigh. “You should look at yourself right now. So filled with hope… girl, I don’t want to get your hopes up, but he’s come to the house every day since you’ve been here. That’s why he and Oliver fought, he tried to duck around them, and Oliver wouldn’t allow it. You know how boys solve conflict.”

My heart had been cold in my chest since the morning after the party at the clubhouse, like something used up and left out to dry.

But hearing that, it stirred and began to unthaw.

“I want to see him,” I demanded. “Next time he’s here. I want to see him.”

She pursed her lips then looked up over my shoulder and laughed. “Your wish is my command.”

My pulse roared in my ears as I hesitated then turned over on the blanket in the grass to look at the house.

Nova stood by the side of the porch, staring at me like I was an eclipse, some rare and mesmerizing event he would miss if he so much as blinked.

The sight of him illuminated by the noon day sun, every inch of his long, broad form highlighted in gold, his hair cast to copper and his eyes deep, dark pools trained unerringly on me… he was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I knew that would never change.

“Jonathon,” I whispered, so soft even I barely heard the sound, but he flinched all the way across the yard as if I’d breathed the word into his ear.

He was wearing a plain black tee that clung to the quilted muscles in his chest and shoulders, highlighting the sheer strength he possessed, and contrasting the vivid colour of the ink penned from his fingertips to the lower half of his hairline.