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Nero pushed a button on the side of his seat, and it slid back. “Now we wait.”
“Oh, okay.”
He held his hand out over the cup holders between us, and I took it, my heart rate picking up at the simple touch. Since we’d met, with the exception of the time I’d spent with Julius in the basement, Nero was always touching me, even if the contact was subtle, like our legs brushing while we ate breakfast or standing with our shoulders touching while we brushed our teeth. Every tiny contact made my blood heat, bubbles of desire poppingand fizzing through my veins. I loved it. The contact made me feel wanted and special, and the desire that constantly hummed through me made me want to spend every minute tangled up in Nero.
“This is the worst part. It’s nice to have company.” He smiled at me, and I melted a little more.
I let his words hang between us in the silent car as I soaked up his presence and the feel of his fingers tangled with mine. With every breath I took that was laced with Nero’s scent, I relaxed a little more until I felt more chill than I had since I’d started digging into Amanda Vanderkaamp.
Breaking the comfortable silence between us, I asked Nero something I’d been thinking about since the night I’d hacked into Julius’s files. “Tell me about your grandmother.”
“What do you want to know about her?”
“Where is she? You live in her house, right?”
“She lives in Alaska. She’s a classics professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It’s her ‘retirement’ job. She used to work at the University of Puget Sound. She was head of the department.”
I laughed. “You’re kidding?”
Nero cocked his head. “No. Why?”
“I’ve seen Julius’s files, remember? I know her specialty was stealing Greek and Roman artifacts and antiquities.”
“Yeah. She has the best cover ever. And the University of Alaska has one of the largest Roman art collections held by an academic institution.”
“That’s not a coincidence.”
“No, definitely not.”
“What was it like growing up with her?”
Nero shrugged. “She recognized our strengths early on and helped cultivate them.”
“So you were born to be an art thief?”
“Sort of. I always had a choice, but I love her—she’s one of my favorite people on the planet—and I jumped at the chance to join her crew when she asked if I wanted to.”
I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like. My parents had always expected me to do something legal and productive with my computer engineering and programming degrees. They definitely hadn’t been impressed when I’d gotten arrested for hacking.
Nero’s hand tightened around mine. “Where’d you go?”
I smiled at him. “Just thinking about how different our childhoods must have been.”
“We didn’t know any better. I’m not even sure we really understood that our grandmother’s job wasn’t exactly legal until we were older. We just knew she took things from bad people who stole them first when she wasn’t teaching classes about really old shit. I swear Quin thought she was a spy or something until he was ten, even though she’d been training him to forge paintings since he was practically old enough to hold a paintbrush and had shown promise with a crayon.”
“Can I be honest about something?”
Nero squeezed my fingers again. “Yes. Always.”
“I’m having a hard time picturing Quin covered in paint.”
My mate laughed, the sound echoing through the car and wrapping around me. I loved his deep rumble of a laugh. “I can see that.” Then his expression turned thoughtful. “When they were younger, Cal and Quin were inseparable. They were more alike than they were different, and they were always up to something or getting into trouble. At some point, I think Quin felt like he needed to be different, so he stopped going along with Cal’s half-thought-out plans and started trying to be the responsible one. I wonder if the time he spends in his studio is the only time he feels like he doesn’t have to put on a show.”
“I understand that. At least kind of.”
Nero adjusted in his seat so he was looking at me. “What do you mean?”
“My parents were both really smart, and I always felt like I was trying to prove myself. Maybe it’s not exactly the same as Quin, but I know what it’s like to pretend to be something you aren’t and then let that go behind closed doors. My parents were always trotting me out in front of their friends. ‘Look at Felix—he just graduated from high school. Valedictorian at only thirteen.’ ‘Felix just got into CIT early decision.’ And on and on and on. I was just a kid who had an affinity for computers, but my parents pushed me to excel at everything. Was I successful? Yeah, I guess. But I was also lonely AF. It’s tough to make friends when the people in your classes are old enough to drive and buy cigarettes, but you’ve barely hit puberty.”
