34. Nolan
34
NOLAN
I was wide awake when I heard the door to her room open. For once, we were alone in the house and I knew if she couldn’t sleep she’d go looking for Jude.
Plus I’d been worried about her after she’d talked to her brother. She hadn’t said anything about their conversation, but I could tell from the set of her jaw, the sorrow in her eyes, that it hadn’t gone well.
I wanted to know more: why she was estranged from her family, why she’d tried to hide the fact that she was visiting her brother, what they’d talked about that had made her so sad.
It had been pretty obvious she didn’t want to talk so I’d left her alone, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t still worried. Lilah’s life had obviously gotten more complicated after what we’d done to her in high school, which only made me feel like an even bigger piece of shit.
I hurried out into the hall and caught her just as she reached the stairs. “You okay?”
She turned around, a look of surprise washing over her face. She was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie — her at-home uniform. Other than the time we’d run into each other outside the sauna, the closest I’d come to seeing the details of her body was when she went to her shift at Burger Haven dressed in their requisite black pants and white shirt, but even those were too big, designed to leave everything to the imagination.
I still dreamed about the way her bare tits had felt in my hands at the beach, the way her nipple had felt under my tongue, her hot cunt tight around my fingers.
Just thinking about it was enough to send me over the edge, but I hadn’t been able to actually see her, and I was surprised to find the mystery of her body only made me more excited by the possibility of finally exploring it.
“Yeah,” she said. “Can’t sleep, as usual.”
I dropped my gaze to the knife in her hand, a sleek silver number that was probably easy to conceal but capable of doing some damage if she knew how to use it.
“You always carry a knife when you can’t sleep?”
She looked down at the knife, like she was surprised to find herself holding it. “I didn’t used to,” she said. “But now that Vic is out there…”
“Is that really why you’re carrying it around the house?” I wanted to believe she wasn’t still scared of us. “Because of Lombardi?”
“Mostly.” She slipped the knife into her hoodie, then tucked a loose piece of hair behind her ear.
I had an image of it splayed out on my pillow, imagined the silk of it in my fingers, then silently cursed myself when I became hard.
“Jude’s not home,” I said, because I didn’t know what to say about the knife and talking about Jude was better than saying, “Looking at you makes my dick hard.”
“Where is he?” she asked.
“Working,” I said. “He and Rafe.”
She nodded but didn’t ask the question in her eyes.
“My grilled cheese isn’t as good as Jude’s, but I can try,” I said.
“That’s okay. I shouldn’t be up anyway. I should try to sleep.”
I walked toward her, then held out my hand. “Come lay with me. At least you won’t be alone.”
It was a bad idea, but what could I say? I was past the point of thinking I could resist her.
She hesitated, then took my hand.
I led her to my room, glad the light on the bedside table was on so it wasn’t pitch dark. The curtains were open because I liked to wake up to the sun, but there was no moonlight, the view dark beyond the glass.
“Okay if I shut the door?” I’d learned to ask questions with Lilah I wouldn’t have thought to ask with any other woman. I still half expected her to run if I moved too fast, to pull away if I brushed her arm or bumped up against her.
She nodded.
I closed the door and leaned against it, watching her take in the room, trying to see what she saw: a simply furnished but luxurious room with dark wood furniture, a king-size bed, a sofa in front of a fireplace with the embers burning low.
Like all the bedrooms in the house, mine had an attached bath, but the door was half-closed, the light off.
“Your room is nice,” she said, walking the length of it, investigating the books on my bookshelf. “Cozy.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I like it.”
I walked to the mini-fridge under the counter on one side of the room and pulled out a bottle of water. Rafe and Jude had a mini-fridge too, all of them tucked discreetly within cabinets under a long dark counter attached to the wall.
None of us were in the habit of bringing women home to the house, but sometimes you wanted a drink or a snack without hiking downstairs.
I held out the water and she took it from my hand. “You have a fridge up here?”
“Just a small one,” I said as she uncapped the water and took a drink.
“Nice.”
I took the bottle from her and set it down, then took her hand and led her to the bed. “Is this okay?”
She nodded and I climbed in and pulled her down next to me, lifting my arm. She hesitated only a second, then scooted down so she could lie on my chest. I pulled the covers up over us so she’d be warm.
She was stiff at first, but after a few minutes her body loosened against mine. The smell of her shampoo — strawberries, I thought — mingled with the scent of her skin. It worked its way into my blood and I was glad her hand was on my chest so she wouldn’t know I was hard as a rock.
I’d wanted her in my bed, but that didn’t mean we had to fuck. Honestly, I kind of felt like the luckiest man in the universe just to lie next to her, to feel her body against mine, hear the soft inhale and exhale of her breath.
“What are Rafe and Jude doing?” she finally asked. “Like what are they really doing?”
“Do you want me to be honest?”
“Yes.”
“Stealing.” Rafe would have my head if he knew I was telling Lilah a single detail about our business, but I didn’t really care. Lilah was like us, even if she didn’t know it yet: someone who lived on the fringes, who lived by her own rules.
She shifted, turning her head to look up at me. “Stealing what?”
“That part I can’t tell you.”
“Is that what you do for a living?” she asked, her brow furrowed. “Steal?”
“Sometimes.”
“What about the other times?” she asked.
“Sometimes we protect people who need it,” I said. “We rescue people, we?— ”
“You rescue people?”
“Sometimes.”
“What kind of people?”
“All kinds, but usually rich people or the families of rich people.” They were the only ones who could afford us. “You’d be surprised how many billionaires with compounds in sketchy places end up with their kids or wives kidnapped for ransom.”
She frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Which part?” I asked.
“You said you steal, but then you said you rescue people. One of those things is a good thing, an altruistic thing. The other is a crime.”
“Depends on what you’re stealing, on who you’re rescuing,” I said. “But I know what you’re getting at, and I can see where it would be confusing if you didn’t know the rule of our business.”
She laughed a little. “The rule? Your business has one single rule?”
“One single important one.”
“What is it?”
“Never hurt anyone who doesn’t deserve it,” I said.
“That’s it? That’s your rule?”
“That’s it.”
She lay back down, resting her head on my chest. “Who gets to decide who deserves it?”
“We do.”
“Don’t you think that’s… dangerous?” she asked. “Being the arbiters of your own moral code?”
“No,” I said. “We’ve seen enough evil to know it when it presents itself.”
She drew in a breath. “Jude told me some of what you guys went through in the military.”
“I figured he might have.” I couldn’t blame Jude. Lilah deserved some kind of explanation after Rafe’s nightmare, and I assumed she and Jude had some in-depth late-night convos.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I tightened my arms around her. “Thanks.”
She’d started drawing lazy circles on my bare chest with her fingertip. She probably wasn’t even aware she was doing it but the contact sent sparks of electricity to the tip of my dick, which was getting harder by the second.
I covered her hand with mine. “You should probably stop that if you want to sleep, sweetheart.”
There was a long moment when she didn’t say anything, when I could have thought she was asleep if not for the feather-light touch of her fingers against my chest.
“Who said I want to sleep?”
I groaned and flipped on top of her, pinning her body to the mattress.