Page 90 of Rock Giant

She sighed.“Can we walk?”

“Castle, is there something about your meeting that’s—”

“There was this guy in Valencia.The site manager on the fruit farm we were all working at.He kept pestering me, and then there was an issue with stuff going missing and he thought… Someone said they’d seen me with some of it, so he…”

He risked a rebuke and curled his hand around hers.She let him.Even allowed him to lace their fingers together.

“Nash and the guys…mostly Lee and Balin.They interceded.The guy… He wasn’t very nice.He kept threatening me.Saying that if I didn’t do what he wanted, he’d have me arrested.All I kept thinking was who would take care of the cats?”Another tear tracked down her cheek.She hastily brushed it away.“I don’t know why I get so wound up about it still.Nothing happened, and I met the guys.They kept me safe after that.It was like having five brothers.”

“Brothers, not boyfriends?”He didn’t much care for the idea of them all vying for her attention, bad enough that he had to put up with one of them making a prior claim.

“Brothers,” she confirmed.“Except way better than my real ones.”She made a face.“They were there for me, but I wasn’t shagging them all, or anything.Although, I guess it wasn’t entirely platonic either.We all shared beds.”

Yeah, he definitely hadn’t needed that factoid occupying space in his head.It was bad enough reconciling his feelings with the notion that she was intimate with Nash.Her plus four, wait… “Five?”

“Five,” she confirmed.“Nash, Lee, Balin, Jez and Jez’s ex-boyfriend, Rune.Actually, six, on the occasions Lee’s kid brother Austen was around.”

“They realise that you did take the stuff?”

She jerked her head to look at him.“I’m not a thief.”

“Chill Castle, I know.You’re just magnetic.”He planted a kiss on the top of her head.“You onlystealbuses.”

“You mean hearts, right?”she countered, giving him a playful shove.

He was prepared to give her that one.

She rested her head against the top of his arm.“Also, please don’t say that too loud.I don’t want to wind up in trouble.I’ve never told anyone about that, or about anything that happened that night.”

“Me neither.”

It seemed he’d surprised her, given the way she was peering up at him with a furrow in her brow.“You haven’t?How come?”

Once or twice, he’d come close to saying something, especially in the six months immediately succeeding Bertha Bus’s drowning, but something had always held him back.He liked having a secret…keeping her to himself.

“If your band don’t know that it was me, then they must think that you—”

“Drowned Bertha.Yeah.”He grinned.He’d taken and continued to take oceans of stick for that.“Don’t you go telling them otherwise.You’ll destroy my reputation.”

“Your reputation for what?”

“Being a mad bastard.”He pulled out his sunglasses and perched them on his nose.“Still want to walk?”

She nodded.

He noted how twitchy she’d become if she was confined to one place too long, the way her fingers would beat a nervous tattoo against the side of her thigh.Recognised it as a precursor to the hand wandering that happened when her anxiety truly kicked in.“Tell me what happened after you left that morning.”

“I went to the vet.Then home.Realised sharpish that I couldn’t stay there with the cats, so I moved out.”

“On Christmas Eve?”He hoped that wasn’t what she meant.He didn’t much care for Christmas as a religious celebration, not being religious himself in the typical sense, but he did believe in it as a time to spend with family of all varieties.

“Seemed the best plan.”

“To move out on Christmas Eve?”

“Yeah.”She tried not to laden the word with too much ballast, but he saw through the false breeziness.The woman he’d met three years ago had a shitty home life, no job, no support, no real friends, and mental health problems that meant the previous things were unlikely to materialise.

“Where did you move?”