Page 60 of Naz & Roz

TWENTY

“I can’t play.”

Naz blinked at the woman standing just beyond the front door of his apartment. “Roz?”

It wasn’t that he was unhappy to see her there. Quite the fucking opposite, really. He missed her like nothing else. But he’d been so damn busy with handling his business, and the extra work put on his shoulders by his father for his fuckups that other than a call or text, he didn’t get to see her much at all. An hour over the week to sit on her parents’ porch, and watch the fucking sky, but that was nothing.

Nothing that he wanted to do, anyhow.

Roz looked him up and down like she was just seeing him standing there in nothing but boxer-briefs, and not as though she had been standing in his doorway for a whole minute staring at him. “Did you just get out of the shower?”

Naz dragged his fingertips through his wet hair to slick it back out of his eyes. “Yeah—came running when I heard the door. Shit’s crazy, babe, so it could have been anybody with something for me to do.”

Because that was his fucking life now.

Not that he wanted Roz to know it.

He really didn’t want this girl thinking that just because he was too wrapped up in her to take care of other business that it was automatically her fault. It wasn’t. None of it was her problem. This was all on him, and he needed to handle it one way or the other.

Like his father said … find a balance.

“I called you earlier,” Roz added. “You didn’t pick up.”

Naz let out a slow breath. “I just got home, and went straight to the shower. My phone has been going off nonstop, and it might have gotten lost in the other shit. Sorry.”

She frowned. “Oh.”

“Hey, don’t do that.”

“No, you’re … busy. Like you said. I don’t want to bother—”

“Roz.”

Her head snapped up, and those beautiful, big blue eyes of her latched onto his gaze, and held strong. He refused to let her gaze drop, too, as he stepped forward with arms already open. She let him take her into his embrace, and he dropped a quick kiss to her forehead. Nothing felt better to him than having this woman in his arms, and it was strange as hell to him how that worked.

His whole life was one giant ball of stress right now. He couldn’t fucking escape it if he tried. Not even a quarter of a bottle of whiskey before bed would do the trick, because fucking right, he’d even tried that.

But just having Roz there, and his arms around her … shit was good again. His chaotic mind stopped the continuous chatter, and went silent. She was there, and that was all that mattered to him. It was no wonder that he had been so willing to just let shit slide in other points of his life when this wonder was what awaited him.

“You’re not a bother,” he promised. “And I was going to call you once I jumped out of the shower, anyway. I might have had a whole evening to myself if nobody calls, so I thought maybe you’d want me to spend it with you, huh?”

Roz nibbled on her bottom lip, and peered up at him. “Yeah?”

“Yep.”

She smiled. “Okay.”

But his evening wasn’t really a guarantee, either. All it would take was a call from a Capo, or his father, or even Zeke … and shit, there he would be, sent running somewhere again. It never ended, it seemed.

He also didn’t have anyone to blame for that but himself, too. Naz was quite aware of that, so he didn’t bother to complain. It wouldn’t do him any good. He was going to handle his business like he should have done in the first place.

Naz didn’t care about any of that right now though because he was a little concerned with the anxiety he found staring back at him from Roz. He wondered if that anxiousness had anything to do with her greeting—that wasn’t really a greeting—when he’d first answered the door for her.

I can’t play.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She kept quiet, but Naz didn’t need her words to confirm what he felt. In his heart, he just knew something was off.