Page 59 of The Moment He Couldn’t Walk Away

Nina felt a warm little body weave through her legs and bent to pat Deirdre, The Gnat’s cat, on her long, sleek back while she composed her face.

The man whom she’d used as a pillow after amazing sex was now in the room. The room she was being interrogated in about things he already knew.

“Don’t let her lick you. She was crunching some kind of insect a few minutes ago,” Cill said with a shudder.

“Hey, bud,” JD said to Finch after doing the man shake. “We’ll get to your haircut. Just grilling Nina about stuff.”

“Why are you grilling her? Surely if she wanted you to know things, she’d tell you?”

Everyone studied Finch after those words. Unlike Nina, who was uncomfortable, he just stood there, large and unflustered, arms folded. She liked those arms.

“That’s not how this friend thing works, Finch,” Cill said. “Let me school you.”

“Yippee,” he said, his voice dry.

“If a friend is hiding something from you, it’s your job to get it out of them and then work through the issue,” Cill continued, unimpressed by his sarcasm.

While her friend talked, Nina studied Finch. He was wearing jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt with an army logo on it. She knew the body beneath those clothes intimately and couldn’t discount wanting to go there again, even as she’d told herself that wasn’t happening.

“Right, now that everything’s been explained to Finch, spill. Everyone in here is good for it, Nina,” Cill said.

“It doesn’t really need to be a secret, but I’d rather it wasn’t town gossip.”

“Well, that’s me out. I’m the worst gossip,” Sawyer said with a straight face.

“Fine, but I’m not giving you all the details, like names, and I don’t really know what it means, only that Sheriff Dans told me not to go looking for him and alert him to the fact I live here,” Nina said.

“Which tells us nothing and makes us more curious,” Jonathan said, taking the seat Fox had recently vacated. “Starting with who is ‘him’?”

Nina’s eyes shot to Finch and then away just as quickly. “I wasn’t born Nina Winters; my name was changed legally by Mom when I was three.”

“Why?” Cill demanded.

“For her safety and mine,” Nina said. “My father, who I thought was dead, isn’t. He’s a drug smuggler and had been in prison since Mom left him, but he recently got out.”

It wasn’t often that this particular group—minus Sawyer—was silent, but she’d just done it.

Jonathan broke first. “If someone told me this was the plot to a movie, I’d say it’s not realistic. But shit, girl.”

Finch didn’t speak but moved to the rear of the group and leaned on the wall to stare at Nina in that way that made her feel hot all over.

Sawyer whistled softly.

“I always thought there was something a bit shady about you,” JD said.

“Amen,” Cill added.

And then the interrogation started.

Chapter 17

Finch’s family had booked him a haircut. He’d protested and then stomped out of the house with his keys. Of course he could have said no, but he didn’t. Nina worked at The Gnat, and this gave him a chance to see her without it looking like he was specifically doing that.

Which made him sound like a horny teenager and not a grown man who had been navigating the treacherous waters of dating for years. Not that he and Nina were dating, but still, the woman had wormed her way into his head, and he couldn’t stop thinking about her.

Plus, there was the issue of her father. He’d googled the man, and the results hadn’t made Finch sleep any easier now that he was out of prison. Would he come looking for his daughter? Finch knew if he was a father, he’d move heaven and earth to find his child. But Finch wasn’t a drug dealer with no morals.

Arriving at The Gnat, he’d glared at Birdie, as was expected of him, and told her he could make his own damn appointments, to which she smiled and got out of her chair to hug him.