Derek managed a wan smile. “I’ll figure it out, if you call Kat for me. She’s going to rebel just to spite me if I tell her to lay low, but she listens to you.”
“So you call Andrew and get him to run interference. Kat’s too smart to cut off her nose to spite her face. If it means hanging out with Andrew, she’ll suck it up and deal.”
He was marginally sure Jackson wouldn’t find the idea as entertaining if he’d watched Kat grow up. “Sorry, I’m still trying to recover from the fact that Andrew told me Kat tried to climb into his pants last night. The mental image is a bit much.”
Jackson chortled and headed for the porch steps. “Sucks to be you.”
That pretty much summed up the whole fucking day. “At least no one’s shot me yet, smartass.”
“Not yet,” he grunted as he clomped up the steps. “But break my best friend’s heart, and I might remedy that myself.”
“I might let you.” It was the cocky response expected of him and seemed better than admitting the truth.
If anyone’s coming out of this with a broken heart, it’s me.
Chapter 7
Nick reread the same paragraph for the fifth time and tossed her paperback on the coffee table with a groan. “I can’t concentrate, and I’m terrible company. I should just go to work.”
“And leave me all alone?” Derek peered at her over the screen of his laptop. “I’m almost done answering email.”
“I’m losing my mind.” She needed to be doing something useful. She needed to be at the safe house with Michelle.
But Jackson and Alec had warned them that the last thing they should do was traipse back and forth constantly, potentially leading people from the city to the remote location where Michelle and Aaron were staying.
“It’s for the best, Nicky,” Jackson had told her. “Just for a few days.”
A few days. It had been less than one, and she was already going crazy.
Nick sat up on the sofa and took a deep breath, then released it in one long, slow exhalation. “How are you at poker? I’ve seen you play at the bar a few times, but I don’t know if you’re any good.”
“Not bad.” His gaze dropped to his computer again as he typed something. “I quit playing with Kat though. Between the statistical analysis and the fact that you can’t bluff her, it’s completely pointless.”
“You should have known better than that anyway.” She studied Derek’s bent head and relished the tingle of attraction that bloomed inside her. “Have you noticed it’s not so bad anymore? The attraction?” It came out wrong, so she tried again. “It’s not so primal, I mean. Mindless.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” But his grin was teasing. “The mindless part seems to come and go, but it hasn’t been uncontrollable at least.”
She wished she could give him a lighthearted reassurance, but she couldn’t hide her solemnity. “Because we stopped fighting it. We made our claims on each other.”
“Ah.” After a few more clacking keystrokes, he closed his laptop and set it aside. “As enjoyable as frantic sex on the kitchen floor was, I’m glad.”
“Me too.” She’d meant to tell him it was all right for those claims to be short term, that it wouldn’t hurt her feelings if they didn’t last. The words wouldn’t come. “I’m glad too.”
He reached out and smoothed a finger down her forehead and along the bridge of her nose. “You’re frowning and getting cute little wrinkles.”
It would have been easy to relax into his touch and encourage more. To forget words. “Do you know me, Derek? Who I really am, not what most people see?”
“Hell, Nicky. I’ve spent so much of the last two years trying not to look at you that I don’t even know what most people see.” His finger followed the same path again. “Alec says the mating urge is like a blind date with better sex. You have to do the getting-to-know-you part after you remember where you left your clothes.”
“Alec is a little bit of a pig, but he’s not wrong.”
“So?” He tapped her in the middle of the forehead. “Poker. Strip poker. Strip poker with revealing personal questions?”
Not quite what she’d had in mind, but appealing all the same. “You’re not wearing enough layers to make that fair, baby.”
“I’m not planning on losing.”
“That’s what they all say.”
Five minutes and a winning hand later, Nick slapped her hand on the coffee table. “Give me a shoe and tell me what you wanted to be when you grew up.”
He leaned down and tugged at the laces on his left boot. “I wanted to own a restaurant. Be one of those crotchety but brilliant chefs.”
“Brilliant, yes. Eccentric, maybe.” She grinned at him. “But you’re not crotchety.”
“Oh, I could have been.” He got the boot off and dropped it to the floor. “However, when I was sixteen I had teenage rebellion and decided it was unmanly to follow in my mother’s footsteps.”
“Hence the hard hat and construction boots. I see.”
His eyes twinkled. “It’s very manly.”
“Indeed.” She pushed the cards across the table so he could deal the next hand. “I wanted to be a princess, until I realized that I sort of already was. Then I wanted to be anything else in the world.”
“Like a bar owner in New Orleans?” He shuffled with quick, efficient movements, his gaze on her face instead of the cards. “How’d you end up with the bar, anyway? I mean, you bought it from Mahalia, obviously, but what made you do it?”
Nick shrugged. “May was looking to retire, and it seemed like a solid investment.” More than that, she’d been fascinated by the mix of patrons—witches and wizards, psychics and shifters. Everyone mingling, no one making judgments. “I liked how everyone could go there. It didn’t matter who they were. I hadn’t seen a lot of that before I came here.”
He dealt the cards with the same careless grace. “I’ve noticed. I send Andrew on business trips these days. He doesn’t have to worry about getting challenged by shapeshifters.”
Derek had had a hard time of it, and it made her feel ashamed, as though she could control their society. But she couldn’t, so she changed the subject. “Anything you want to know? I’m feeling more generous with the information than with the clothes at the moment.”
“Hmm. Favorite food?” He looked sneaky. Devious.
“Pepper steak,” Nick answered absently. “What are you plotting?”
“Dinner.”
“Reason number sixty-five to keep you around,” she teased. Her cards sucked, so she threw in two and hoped for better ones. “I’m still going to win though.”
It wasn’t even close. Before long, she’d only lost her shoes and shirt, but Derek was down to his boxers…and she was holding three kings and an ace. “You are so screwed, mister.”
Derek waggled his eyebrows at her. “How do you know I’m not cheating?”
“Because there are easier and more expedient ways to get naked if that’s what you want?”
“I thought easy and expedient was our problem.” He ran his fingers over the top of his cards and eyed her. “I want more answers. First kiss. Tell me.”
Nick swallowed. “Nate Kelly. He was the housekeeper’s son, and Michelle and I practically grew up with him. I was sixteen.”
“Shapeshifter?”
“Human. Psychic, actually.” She laid her cards on the table. “His abilities didn’t manifest until a year later. My father looked high and low for someone to help him but, that late, there wasn’t much to be done.”
She saw sympathy in Derek’s gaze. “It was rough with Kat. She was reading people’s emotions before she could walk, and thank God that’s all she could do. Her powers spiked during puberty, right before our parents died, and she was still unstable when I took over as her guardian. The tutor I found for her said that if she hadn’t built a strong foundation growing up, the shock could have killed her.”
The shock had killed Nate, slowly but surely. First, it had driven him crazy. Then, it had driven him to suicide. “How old were you when the accident happened?”