No Strings Attached

Chapter Twenty Four

"What was all that about?" Shannon was looking at Nate thoughtfully, a slight furrow in her manicured brows. She was achingly beautiful - even without her make-up, and he lifted his thumb to smooth out her eyebrow.

"Just smoothing out a few details," he murmured evasively. He didn't want to think about Dobrev, or Sebastienne - he just wanted to hold his woman close, curl up somewhere in a quiet corner and live out the rest of his days. He'd waited for the opportunity for long enough.

She sighed heavily, her voice grim when she finally responded, "And the stuff about 'newbies'? I thought we weren't keeping secrets anymore?"

"There's such a thing as too much honesty. It's nothing for you to worry about, babe," he closed his eyes and dropped his lips to her forehead - hoping and praying that that was the truth.

"So what about Tourniquet? Did you get in touch with Clarke?" She ran her palm absently over the ridged muscles in his chest - the smooth skin calming her ravaged nerves. She'd woken up to a Gangland meeting ... in the kitchen ... with tea and biscuits no less! This shit was surreal!

Add to that the fact that she could see he was hiding something from her - something big, she just knew it - and it unsettled her.

"Yeah, he's stopping by later - Jay's got the files on the girls."

"Files?"

"Pictures, background checks, all the details on them both basically."

She pulled back to look up at him, her eyes filled with a quiet adoration for the strong, taciturn man in front of her - for all his strength, for all that radiant power that poured out from him - he was concerned for these two girls, willing to put his own neck on the line for the two of them.

"You're a good man Nathaniel Casey," she said quietly, "Even if you don't believe it. For anyone else, those girls would probably just be payroll."

A faint blush emerged over his stark cheekbones, and she chuckled lightly, hiding her head in his chest.

"No they wouldn't, they wouldn't be in this position if they weren't working at the club - we obviously need to up our security there if we're going to carry it on once all this is done with."

"You want to close it?" She was more than a little surprised by that - Asylum was their new baby - it was so much more to Jayden than all of the other clubs, because it brought him and Tori together, he'd said so multiple times, much to Nate's embarrassment. Sure, they had other clubs - ones they were relatively shifty about to be honest - but Asylum was the biggest, and most profitable, and it had a strong clientele from what she'd seen - closing it seemed a little of an overreaction.

"I don't know. It depends on what Jay wants, I definitely don't want to be as involved in the running of things as I was before."

Something about the way he said it - something hard and guttural in his voice - had her drawing back from him, climbing out of his lap and busying herself with the dishes from the night before quietly. How involved had he been? Had he been an active participant? Had he been one of the Doms that girls like Clara would go to - someone they trusted? Was that even ethical?

"I can practically hear your imagination working overtime," he murmured, enveloping her in the heat from his almost naked body as he snaked his arms around her waist and kissed her bare shoulder, "I haven't fucked anyone at the club for a long time, way before seven months ago. Nobody feels like you do, and the extra thrills just stopped being ... enough for me."

With her hands immersed in warm dishwater, it was hard to throttle him like she wanted to, so she choked on the rising bile in her stomach - that raging jealousy at the mere thought of him with someone else, even if it was just sex. The image in her head of his hands on another woman's skin - of him dominating someone else - it physically hurt.