Page 103 of Nash
I pull her against my side. She presses her face into my chest, laughing and crying at the same time, and my arm wraps around her.
"Let's go," I say. "Our godkids are coming."
Ruby pulls back and wipes her face with both hands. She looks at me, bright, overwhelmed, grinning through the tears.
The clubhouse empties. Everyone moves. Malachi and Candace. Knox and Sloane, Sloane already on the phone with the hospital. James and Maggie. Kyle and Rider. Frankie. Arden. Amelia. Lawrence and Raine, her mother gripping her father's arm as they follow the crowd. They're not my in-laws yet. But watching Lawrence follow his daughter's motorcycle club to a hospital to welcome two babies into a family that didn't exist a year ago, the word feels closer than it should.
Ruby takes my hand. We walk to the bike.
"Nash."
"Yeah."
"Drive fast."
Chapter 24
Ruby
TheboyhasEast'sjaw. The girl has Darla's nose. They're both so small that Nash's hands dwarf them completely, his tattooed fingers cradling a head smaller than his palm, and the sight of Nashville Sutton holding a newborn against his chest while a second one sleeps in the crook of his arm is doing permanent structural damage to my cardiovascular system.
"You're staring," he says.
"You're holding two babies and your face is doing the soft thing. I'm allowed to stare. This is a medical event. My ovaries are staging a revolt."
"Your ovaries are not staging a revolt."
"They are. They're holding meetings. Drafting a formal proposal. The proposal involves you, your arms, and the way you just adjusted that baby's head without looking." I press my hand to my chest. "I should leave this room before I say something I can't take back."
Darla is asleep with her hand still wrapped around East's fingers. East hasn't moved from the chair beside her bed, his eyes red and swollen, his jaw clenched against whatever keeps threatening to surface on his face. Sloane left an hour ago after checking vitals one final time. Knox took Maggie and James home. Kyle is slumped in a waiting room chair with his mouth open, and Amelia is in the chair beside him, holding a magazine she hasn't turned a page of in twenty minutes.
Nash hands the boy to the nurse's waiting hands, the transfer slow, careful. Then the girl. His thumb brushes her cheek before he lets go, lingering on the soft skin for a beat. My chest does something I'm not going to examine in a hospital room.
"Let's give them some time," I say.
We walk down the hospital corridor, Nash's hand low at my hip, thumb hooked into the waistband of my jeans as if he has no intention of letting me drift too far. Fluorescent lights buzz. My boots squeak on the tile. The hallway smells like antiseptic and the vending machine coffee someone spilled near the elevator.
"Nash."
"Yeah."
"I need to tell you something."
"That sounds ominous."
"It's not ominous. It's embarrassing." I push through the exit door into the parking lot. Warm night air hits my face. The sky is clear and wide above us; his bike is parked under a light at the far end. "I need to confess the number of times I wanted to climb you while you stood at that wall at Amaranth."
His hand tightens on my waistband. "How many?"
"Conservatively? Every single day."
"Every day."
"Every. Day. You'd stand there with your arms at your sides doing the perimeter thing and I'd be trying to tattoo a straight line while my brain ran a parallel program that was exclusively about your forearms." I glance at him. "Do you know what your forearms do to me, Nash? When you cross them? The way the tattoos shift when the muscles flex? I almost put a line through a client's butterfly because you rolled up your sleeves."
"You never said anything."
"Of course I never said anything. You were my security detail. You had the emotional availability of a cement wall. I wasn't about to announce that I was having graphic sexual fantasies about the man assigned to protect me while he scanned the street for threats."
