Page 42 of Watch Your Back (Devil’s Backbone #2)

She’s going to love her new car, but I’m fully prepared for her to push back. My Squirrel hates being handed anything, and although I love how fierce and independent she is…I wish she’d let us spoil her like she deserves.

R oyce let me drive his Chiron the whole way back to Nevaeh and didn’t even try to mess around while I was driving like I’d done to Carter.

He was perfectly content to just enjoy the drive from his own passenger seat and play DJ with the radio station.

It was nice, and the whole time we had the added safety of knowing both Nate’s and Carter’s cars tailed us like fucking Secret Service.

If anyone hit a deer, we’d all be there to help out.

We got back to the apartment in the early afternoon, and I immediately set up my laptop and textbooks on the dining table.

As fun as the weekend had been, I wasn’t going to risk failing my classes.

Heath happily joined me, while Royce and Nate parked on the couch to play video games with the sound turned down far enough it wouldn’t bother us.

Carter had to go and collect his dog from Mrs. Brown, the lady downstairs who pet-sat for him on the regular, then ended up taking her to the groomers for a blowout—the dog, not the pet-sitter.

When he returned home, Lady looked like the pampered princess she was with a shiny new bow in her fur. Red, of course.

After some hours of working on my assignment, I was starving and my back ached.

“Can we get Chinese?” I suggested, abandoning my homework to join the guys on the sofa. Heath had already finished the project and joined Royce in an intense game of Mario Kart . “I’ve got a craving for beef and broccoli with fried rice.”

“Shit yes.” Royce enthusiastically agreed, tossing down his controller and grabbing his phone. “I’ll put the order in.”

The guys took turns telling him what they wanted, and he added all the dishes to his shopping cart before asking me if I wanted anything else.

My eyes were already bugging out at how many dishes they’d ordered, so I just laughed and shook my head.

“Maybe some fortune cookies. But otherwise I think you’ve done the whole menu already. ”

He grinned and shrugged, then submitted the order. “Bass, come with me to pick it up.”

Carter sighed but handed his controller to me. “Fine. Let’s go in your car, though. I don’t want my leather smelling of MSG for days.”

“Because then it wouldn’t smell of Ashes anymore?” Heath teased, and my face heated with embarrassment as I glanced Nate’s way.

Carter seemed totally unashamed, though, laughing as he pulled his shoes on. “Yep, exactly. C’mon, Royce, let’s go. Now we’ve started talking about it, I’m starving.”

The two of them left, and within a few minutes, Heath’s phone dinged with a calendar reminder.

“Crap. I’ve got an online therapy session in five minutes,” he muttered, checking the notification. “Don’t let Royce eat all the sweet-and-sour pork. He’s a fucking pig.”

Nate snorted. “Pun intended?”

“Funny guy!” Heath called over his shoulder as he carried his laptop to his bedroom to set up for his therapist appointment.

Alone all of a sudden, Nate switched the game over, then arched a brow at me. “Well?”

I glanced at the screen to find he’d swapped from Mario Kart to Call of Duty . “Uh…I don’t know how to play.”

His lips curled in a lopsided smile. “Great, gives me an advantage. Just don’t die, Layne. Easy as that.”

Grumbling under my breath about crappy instructions and how he must really need the head start, I slouched down on the sofa to concentrate on the game. After I died for the third time, Nate gave an exaggerated sigh and actually explained more about the game and objective and strategy.

Only then was it a fair fight, and I started racking up some kill points myself.

We only played for about half an hour before the guys got back with food, but the whole time, I couldn’t help feeling like Nate was watching me. Every time I tried to catch him, though, he was engaged with the screen so I figured maybe I was imagining things. Which was entirely possible.

“Bass, check it out,” Royce called out, carrying the stacks of food to the coffee table. “Nate’s getting his ass handed to him in COD .”

Carter chuckled, shaking his head. “That’s a first. Put a movie or something on while we eat.”

Nate didn’t comment on his subpar gaming performance and used the remote to turn off the console and select a movie.

“Heath has a therapy session,” I told the guys, picking through the boxes until I found the sweet-and-sour pork, “so we’re saving this one for him.”

Royce pouted. “All of it?”

“Yes, all of it,” I scolded, swatting his hand as he tried to take it from me. “Eat one of your other sixty-five thousand options.”

Carter fetched plates and forks from the kitchen, and I stared at them in horror as they dished up the food. “What the fuck are you doing?” I asked when the shock faded enough to let me speak.

“What?” Carter replied, clearly confused.

I grabbed one of the twenty sets of disposable chopsticks that had been included in the bags and snapped them apart. Then, holding his gaze, I opened a box of stir-fry and snared a baby corn directly from the container with my chopsticks.

“Takeout does not involve silverware and dishes, you animals. Eat from the fucking box like a real man.” I demonstrated by delivering the baby corn into my mouth and was delighted to see laughter bubbling up on his otherwise-stoic expression.

Royce reached over and grabbed a set of chopsticks for himself, then proceeded to use them like stabbing instruments to pick up a piece of Mongolian lamb, and I stared in disgusted fascination as he dropped it twice before eating it.

“Fucking hell. Never mind, just use a fork.” I wrinkled my nose and tried not to watch as he tried to manipulate the chopsticks between his fingers. “Christ, Roycey, for a man so good with his fingers, I expected you to know how to use chopsticks.”

His eyes snapped to mine, his brows hitched, and I only then realized I’d said my inside thoughts out loud.

“And there goes my appetite,” Nate grumbled, pushing up from the couch but taking a box of food with him as he disappeared down the hall to his bedroom.

“He’s just cranky because he hasn’t gotten laid in ages,” Royce informed me with a knowing smile. “And now that he’s fake engaged to you, none of the other girls at Nevaeh are an option or it’ll get back to Paige.”

Crap, I hadn’t even considered how that snowballed lie might be impacting his actual sex life.

For a moment, I felt a little bit bad about it, then I remembered that he was the one who’d started the farce in the first place, specifically to get Paige to leave him the fuck alone.

So really, it was entirely of his own making.

The three of us settled in to eat and watch a movie, with Heath joining us after his therapy session. When he realized I’d saved the whole box of sweet-and-sour pork, he kissed me so hard, I almost forgot we were meant to be eating.

A few minutes after that, Nate announced he was going out and slammed the front door before anyone could ask him where he was going.

I frowned after him, concerned that perhaps he was starting to feel uncomfortable in his own home with all of us being so cozy on the sofa and said as much to the guys.

“Maybe,” Heath agreed thoughtfully, “but I wouldn’t read too much into it. He was looking at real estate the other day, searching to see if there were any five-bedroom properties near campus.”

“Really?” I squeaked, floored that he wasn’t searching for studio apartments to get the hell away from my man-harem.

This was apparently not such shocking information for the guys, as they effortlessly shifted into another topic of conversation while I sat there dwelling on the fact that maybe Nate wasn’t so annoyed with me after all.

We were all so exhausted from the weekend, I had to wake Royce up to send him to bed before the movie even finished. Heath, yawning heavily, half dragged Royce down the hallway and went to bed himself after kissing me a dozen times.

“You.” I pointed to Carter. “My bed. Now.” He grinned like I’d just offered his very favorite dessert, and I laughed. “To sleep. You’re wrecked as well, and I don’t care how snuggly Lady is, you can’t be comfortable on the fold-out every night.”

“Hey, no arguments here,” he replied, already stripping out of his clothes before even getting through the bedroom door, “so long as you’re in here with me, Spark.”

I groaned, shaking my head. “Tempting, really fucking tempting, but I need to finish another assignment tonight or I’ll fall behind schedule. I’m going to go make a coffee and stay up late to get it done.”

“Or…” he said with a sly smile, reeling me in with his fingers hooked into the waistband of my jeans, “hear me out. You come to bed with me now and get a really good rest so you’re fresh to work on it in the morning.”

Goddamn, he was hard to say no to. Which was probably why I found myself making that coffee almost two hours later, with blankets draped over the coffee machine to muffle the sound and avoid waking everyone up.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Nate drawled from somewhere behind me, and I nearly jumped out of my damn skin.

I whirled around to find him standing there looking more than a little disheveled and perplexed as he eyed my blanket soundproofing. “You scared the crap out of me!” I exclaimed in a strangled whisper. “When did you get home?”

“Just now,” he replied. “Why are you awake and…making coffee?” He squinted down at his watch like he was second-guessing what time of day it was. If I were a betting kind of woman, I’d say that Nate was drunk. Or tipsy at the very least.

“I need to finish another assignment tonight,” I said quietly, willing my heart to stop racing from the fright I’d just had. “And I’m fucking exhausted from the weekend so…coffee. Where have you been?”

I didn’t intend it to come out as needy as it sounded and winced when I heard myself, but Nate didn’t seem to notice. He just leaned against the island counter and stuffed his hands into his pockets with a sigh.

“I went to meet up with a girl,” he muttered, shifting his weight between his feet like he was testing that sprained ankle. He’d been limping a little today but nowhere near as bad as the day before.

I cleared my throat, turning back to the coffee machine. “Oh yeah? Have fun?”

Fuck. Why did I sound like that? I sounded…jealous.

“Not really,” he admitted, sounding irritated. “Because apparently I can’t get my fake fiancée out of my head.”

“What?” I squeaked, spinning around to stare at him in shock because surely I’d just misheard or misunderstood. He just scowled back at me like I was the source of all the bad things in his life, and a shiver ran down my spine. “Because you’re worried Paige will hear you’re cheating on me?”

He rolled his eyes like that was the dumbest statement in the world, then pushed off the counter and closed the gap between us, his hands braced on the counter behind me for balance and our faces way too damn close. Even with the significant height difference.

“Yeah, Layne,” he said with heavy sarcasm, “because of Paige. God forbid you accept the fact that it isn’t my slutty ex-girlfriend buying up all the real estate in my head these days.”

My breathing hitched and the implications of what he was saying thundered through my chest. “Nate…how drunk are you right now?”

He inhaled deeply, his eyes closing for a moment before he shook his head.

“Nowhere near drunk enough.” Then he cupped my face in one hand and tilted my head back.

I had a chance to push him away right then, but I didn’t move.

I didn’t push him away, and when his lips met mine, I fucking gasped like some kind of sex-starved bodice-ripper heroine.

He took that as the encouragement it was and deepened his kiss with a near-frantic enthusiasm. Our tongues twisted together, the smoky taste of whiskey filling my senses as he kissed me like he wanted to climb right inside my heart and never leave. He moaned, seemingly hungry for more but then…

I was kissing Nate. What in the fuck was I thinking?

Panicked, I shoved him away and gasped for breath. “Nate, what the hell?”

He stared back at me in shock, like he was as confused as I was about what’d just happened.

Then his expression darkened in a scowl once more.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Layne. I just needed to see what all the fuss was about.

I’m not exactly lining up to take a turn through your revolving bedroom door anytime soon, if that’s what you’re worried about. ”

I sucked a sharp breath, his words striking like knives after kissing me with such intensity and sincerity. He hadn’t been faking, and that was not a hate-kiss.

“You’re drunk, Nate,” I said, reminding myself as much as I was him. “Go and sleep it off before you say or do something you’ll regret.”

His eyes narrowed and he swiped a hand over his mouth. “I’m not drunk.”

“You are,” I scoffed. “You reek of whiskey.”

Anger and frustration flared in his eyes. “And you reek of Carter.”

Shocked outrage saw me bark a laugh. “Well, that’d be because I just spent the last two hours with him fucking me in about twelve different positions all over my room.

Maybe when I finish my assignment, I’ll activate that revolving door and see whether Heath or Royce wants a turn, seeing as apparently I’m a slut like that.

” I was shaking. Actually shaking. “Go the fuck to bed, Nate, before you do any more damage.”

My eyeballs were hot, but I desperately didn’t want him to see me cry, so I turned back to the coffee machine to finish making my espresso.

He was silent for a long, tense moment. Then he just muttered a quiet curse and left the kitchen. From the corner of my eye, I caught him scrubbing his hands over his hair with frustration as he disappeared down the hallway, but I didn’t relax until I heard the click of his bedroom door shut.

Then, and only then, did the tears start falling.