The Strength of the Pack (Suncoast Society #30)(25)

I. Am. Pitiful.

Once their orders were placed, she wasn’t sure where to go with the conversation. “So you raised your sister?”

He nodded. “It was a huge adjustment for both of us, at first.”

“Were you close to your step-father?”

“I loved Ken like a dad. He was the only father I had conscious memory of.” He tipped his head and met her gaze head-on. “You can ask, if you want. I don’t mind talking about it now. It was twenty years ago.”

Heat filled her face. “Sorry.”

“No, there’s no reason for you to be sorry.” He reached across the table and took her hand in his, thumb lightly brushing over her knuckles. “If I don’t want to talk about something, I’ll tell you. I’m perfectly capable of laying down boundaries. I won’t play games with you. And it’s nothing personal if I do lay down a boundary. You won’t know unless you ask. Please, never feel bad about asking. Never hesitate to ask. I won’t get upset.” He frowned. “Did Leo ever—”

“No.” She shook her head. “Leo and I…Other than he turned out to be gay, I have no complaints about him as a husband.” She let her gaze drop to Nate’s hand. His fingers were long and lithe, just like the rest of him. Smooth. Leo’s hands were large and muscular and callused from his job, always tender when touching her but so vastly different from this man.

“Leo,” she said, “seemed to have an infinite well of patience with me. He finally reached a point where he couldn’t ignore the truth any longer, couldn’t make excuses. He tried so damned hard to make it easy on me. He did. I’m the one who tried to hang on.”

“And yet you still live together.”

“It made the most sense. For Laurel, and for Leo, after his accident.”

“That’s good, that you can get along so well together, and with Jesse, to raise her.”

“We’re a pack.” She smiled. “It’s what packs do. We love each other and help each other out. If it hadn’t been for Jesse…I’ll leave it at that. I love both of them, and they love me and Laurel.”

“‘For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.’”

“What’s that from?”

“Rudyard Kipling.”

“Ah.

“I see a lot of people into puppy play in the lifestyle who call themselves a pack. I think you’re the first family unit I’ve seen use it more as a figurative than a literal title.”

“Laurel’s the one who came up with it. She watched a special on Yellowstone wolves.”

“Ah. Well, that explains it.”

Eva hesitated, then plunged forward. “You mentioned your parents died in an accident. Car accident?”

“No,” he said.





Most of the time, when Nate talked about his parents, he didn’t deeply engage with the person about the details. How deeply he engaged depended on a lot of variables, such as the situation, the person, his relationship—or potential relationship—with the person, and how he felt about discussing it with them, at that time.

That always determined how he answered—

They died in an accident.

They died in an accident at an air show.

They died in a tragic accident with several others at an air show.

They died when a plane coming in for a landing blew a tire, took out a fuel tanker truck that shouldn’t have been parked where it was, and splashed them and the group of people they’d been standing near with aviation fuel, roasting them alive.

He shut down the memories of the sounds, the sights…

The smell.

To this day, even pumping gas sometimes nauseated him.

How he couldn’t stand the taste of frozen lemonade, because he’d taken Cherise away from where they’d been standing with their parents just minutes earlier—talking with their friends—to make a run to the bathroom and then get her a frozen lemonade.

He’d just bought them and they were drinking them in the shade cast by the wing of an old bomber on display when he heard the plane coming in for a landing. An old fighter—he couldn’t tell the damn things apart and really didn’t give a shit—and then the noise of the tire exploding…

And then…

“Cherise had been bugging me to go to the air show with them,” he said. “It was our first year here in Florida. My parents were both thinking about retiring from the military and had bought the house in Sarasota, making the drive up to MacDill to work. They didn’t want to have to move Cherise to yet another school when they knew they wanted to live down here.”

“You were still living with them?”

“Yeah. I’d started school here and they told me to live with them to save myself expenses. I wasn’t going to argue with that.” He covered her hand with his other, fighting the urge to squeeze, to hold on tight. “Besides, Cherise was so used to me taking care of her while they were working, it was better for her.”

“You sound like you were a devoted older brother.”

“I was. Yes, she was a pain in the ass at times, but I was so much older than her I think I’d grown through the worst of the ‘I hate you’ syndrome. I was twelve when she was born, and I was changing her nappies from that point on.”