Page 1 of The Question of Us (Fisher & Church #2)

CHAPTER ONE

Madigan

The coffee ran hot and delicious down my throat, but it wasn’t nearly as delicious as the man currently sprawled across my bed. I leaned against the doorjamb and watched him sleeping.

Nick Fisher . Fifty-four. Silver-fox gorgeous. Smile lines to die for. Exasperating. Intriguing. And sexy as shit. Temptingly seductive in that prickly, abrupt, bordering-on-rude, don’t-want-to-want-you, and certainly don’t-want-to-need-you kind of way.

All in all, seemingly irresistible to my fifty-five-year-old jaded heart that had never been in love and had suddenly forgotten what was good for it and what wasn’t.

Which of those categories this troubling man fell under was still undecided—a rather big oversight, considering I was falling like a stone into his sizeable ocean.

Nick Fisher . In my bed. In my life. And damnably, in my heart.

Invited in the first two instances. Unexpected and turbulent in the third, but also inevitable.

Nick had upended my quiet, carefully curated if somewhat reclusive life in only a few short months, and I was still reeling, struggling to find solid ground between us.

The feeling was mutual; I knew that much, had known it from that very first meeting in the care facility shortly before Nick had lost his husband.

Hard to believe that was only a few months back.

At the time, Nick’s husband, Davis, had been in a persistent vegetative state for eighteen months following a traffic accident, meaning Nick and I became no more than friends.

But Davis’s death had unleashed a world of secrets, propelling Nick—and by circumstance me—into the dangerous world of identity fraud and underground railroads for domestic abuse.

We’d been lucky to escape with our lives, but the experience had brought us closer.

Close enough to begin to admit that crackle of attraction we’d felt for each other was only getting stronger.

Close enough for me to throw common sense aside and take a chance with this mercurial man who was still grieving his first love while trying to understand a host of unexpected feelings he had for me.

Yep.

A bag of snakes if ever there was one.

And yet there he was.

Nick Fisher.

In my bed.

Have I mentioned that already? Seems worthy of another plug since no one of any importance had graced my sheets in... wow... long enough to be embarrassing.

But it wasn’t just Nick in my bed. Oh no.

That would be far too simple. It was Nick Fisher and his cat, Shelby—a small detail that seemed excruciatingly important for some reason.

It added an element of domesticity that spoke to something much deeper growing between us.

Even as I watched, the silver tabby watched me back from where she was nestled in the crook of Nick’s bent knee. Silver on silver, a matching pair.

The temptation was almost too much to simply walk over and slip between the sheets once again.

Nick’s bottom arm stretched across my side of the mattress like he was waiting for my return.

Not surprising since it’s where I’d lain for around three weeks, held tight against his beating heart like I might escape if he didn’t secure me in place.

I gave a soft huff at the ridiculous notion.

Like there was anywhere else I’d rather be than in Nick Fisher’s arms.

Nick snorted but didn’t wake. His snoring was something I’d grown accustomed to remarkably well, considering I hadn’t displayed the same tolerance with previous boyfriends, not that there’d been a lot of those.

And not that Nick and I were... well, boyfriends.

Although maybe we were. Who knew? It just seemed an odd term to use when you were both over fifty.

But regarding his snoring, I found the soft buzz at my back almost reassuring.

A sign that he hadn’t run away... again.

The fact that he punctuated the nasal symphony with a kiss to my shoulder whenever he woke definitely helped.

It all helped in my ongoing battle of feeling secure with this complicated man.

I sipped on my coffee and ran my gaze down the long line of Nick’s back, the sharp curve of his hips beneath the sheet and the tempting swell of his arse. He’d been eating better the last few weeks with me watching him like a hawk, even if he was still a little lean for my liking.

Lean or not, I only had to look at him and my blood fired up.

Every. Single. Time. Being in his arms was even worse.

It was impossible to hide the way my body lit up at his touch, and so I’d stopped trying.

He had too, his erection all too often pressed shamelessly against my crease, neither of us saying a word.

And if he wasn’t spooning me, Nick was on his back with me tucked fiercely against his side, my leg slung over his, my arm resting on his waist.

At first, I’d baulked at his almost bossy commandeering of my body.

The whole alpha protective shit tended to rile me no end, but somewhere along the way, I’d grown okay with it.

I came to understand that his need to hold me close was less about me than about Nick himself.

Out of the blue, he’d lost a husband. There at breakfast. Gone.

Or as good as gone by dinner. And then he’d lost him again eighteen months later.

There had been no one in Nick’s bed at all for almost two years, so maybe he needed the reassurance too.

Maybe we weren’t that dissimilar. I could live with that.

Neither of us was at our best emotionally, and the whole idea of giving this thing between us room to breathe and grow could and probably would go tits up at the first hurdle.

I tried not to think about that, suspecting rightly or wrongly that of the two of us, I’d likely walk away the more broken, and the why of that was still too tender to dwell on.

It sat in a dark corner of my heart, too frightened to come into the light.

We’d been together, slept together for three weeks, give or take.

Ever since my kidnapping and the takedown at the marina.

Three weeks when Nick hadn’t once tried to move things along between us.

Three weeks of talking and cuddling and sleeping naked in each other’s arms. Three weeks of making out but never anything more.

No sex. No intimate exploring. Not even a shower together.

Nick was always quick to shut things down if they became too heated.

And I got it. I did. Or at least I thought I did.

We’d agreed to take it slow. Nick was only a few months out from losing his husband, after all, so I was trying not to take it personally.

Then again... naked bodies... in bed together.

.. touching... holding... and yet Nick didn’t want more?

It was hard not to wonder if I simply wasn’t enough to move him past whatever was holding him back.

As for me? Read: three weeks of blue-balling frustration that I worked hard to keep under wraps. Three weeks of jerk-off marathons in the shower and a libido that had suddenly found a fuel injection option after thirty years mooching along in second gear.

So yeah, it was getting increasingly hard to fend off an inevitable hit to the self-esteem, regardless of how many times I told myself it’s not always about me. For all that Nick professed to want me, and I believed he did, he was still grieving his husband, feeling guilty and confused.

Well, join the club. Because right then, Davis was living rent-free in my head as well as my bed.

I could almost hear him breathing at night, like a third presence in the room.

Not judging Nick and me. Just... there.

Like a question mark. And if it was like that for me, I couldn’t imagine how it was for Nick.

All of which had left me kind of paralysed about what to do.

Nick had to be aware of the tension, and yet he wasn’t initiating any discussions.

I had no idea how to play it. But as I watched Nick’s chest rise and fall with every slow breath he took, I knew with a troubling certainty that a conversation was looming and that I’d need to be the one to raise it.

We couldn’t afford to play this game. To pretend. To avoid facing the elephant in the room. If we didn’t talk about what was happening between us, about Davis, and keep talking, we’d never have a chance at anything of our own.

Like he’d heard me thinking, Nick snuffled and straightened his legs. Shelby leaped from the bed and shot me a disdainful look like I was personally responsible somehow. She sauntered past me into the hall and headed in the general direction of her food bowl. I almost smiled, knowing it was empty.

With Shelby out of the way, Nick fell onto his back, exposing his chest and a tightly muscled thigh with the barest glimpse of a soft cock poking out from under the top sheet.

The sight of him spread out in my bed like a wet dream made me shiver.

A spiderweb of lines marked the corners of his wicked mouth, his soft lips parted, slack in sleep, and ringed by a thick stubble that I itched to feel against my palm.

Silver-tipped hair ran thickly over his pecs and down his stomach.

The grizzled thatch disappeared under the sheet only to reappear over those mouthwatering thighs, the grey glinting almost gold in the early morning sun that striped the bed.

No grooming tool had been anywhere near that body in decades, and I was more than good with that.

I swallowed a shaky sigh because, damn, the man was fine.

My gaze lingered over the tattooed owl atop his heart—his mother’s favourite bird. A mother who’d left Nick with his arsehole father when Nick was barely eight. Too young to understand the complexities of her decision.