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Oh, so he really did get it then. There was a flicker of vulnerability in his gaze, a hint of the boy he’d been not that many years ago. She wanted to see pictures of him like that—young, sweet, and not yet jaded. He would have been adorable.
“I’m sorry, Fox. Were you close to her?”
He nodded. “Very. I was her first grandchild, and she lived with us for a while between when she couldn’t live alone and when she needed a nursing home. She’d get confused and wander off, and my dad and uncle were always terrified we’d find her facedown in the pool. After we moved her into the nursing home she was safer, but even though we visited every day, it wasn’t the same as living with family.” Absently, he kissed her forehead. “We should have hired 24/7 care and kept her home, but her caregivers might have figured out what we really did for a living. It was too dangerous, but that choice still bothers all of us. Sometimes I think the experience of her living with us is why my cousin Macy decided to go into medicine.”
Macy was Luke’s baby sister, if she remembered correctly. She knew their family had visited, but Fox had hinted strongly that she stay away. It wasn’t that she minded giving him space to visit with his family, and she knew their relationship was new, but it had felt more like . . . he was hiding her. He’d barely texted her the whole time they’d been in town, but maybe they’d been busy or he hadn’t wanted to be rude. She’d spent those days feeling like a fourteen-year-old girl with an unrequited crush, constantly checking her phone in the hopes he’d texted. It was damn embarrassing, even though she never planned to tell anyone.
“Did your grandma know about the family business?” she asked, curious. She couldn’t imagine telling her grandparents where the sudden chunk of money for them to be together was going to come from. She’d need a good cover story before showing up with it. Would they buy into the whole lottery thing? Crap, that story would fall apart as soon as someone tried to look it up online.
Gramps would have been the one with the biggest objection and the most likely to sway her from her current path, but she only ever got the smallest glimpses of the real Gramps now. The disease had stolen most of him away.
She shook off the weird sense of delayed loss that came with the territory. It was like he’d died but his body had been too stubborn to read the memo. Then, once in a while he’d show up a little then disappear again. Maybe she shouldn’t be upset about having had the chance to say good-bye several times, but it was like a prolonged torture where she could never decide if it hurt more or less than if he’d died suddenly. Watching everyone struggle to help him understand who they were on his less lucid days filled her with a monotonous, enduring horror that hadn’t lessened over the past two years.
Would the same happen to her parents some day? To her?
Back to what she could control. Maybe she’d tell them she got an awesome part-time contracting job in her field with an incredible sign-on bonus
“No,” Fox said, pulling her out of her thoughts.
For a moment, she couldn’t remember what they’d been talking about. Oh, she’d asked whether his grandmother knew about their business.
“She didn’t know,” he continued, giving her a nudge off his lap. As he moved back around to his workstation, his smile was regretful. “We had to lie to her. She would have kicked my uncle’s ass if she’d had any clue. If she hadn’t been deteriorating, we never would have gotten away with it.”
Addison moved in next to him and started fitting the pins in the back of the opener but his sad sigh made her turn to watch him work. He was staring down at his section of the p
roject, his brows drawn and looking stern. It was almost the expression he got when he was bossing her around in bed—sexy, confident, determined. It was hard to ignore the urge to interrupt him.
She was good for about five minutes, watching the play of muscle in his arms, studying his forearm tattoos—the dead trees tattooed in as much realistic detail as the cathedral tattoo that took up his entire back. Lower . . . well, there were tattoos on his legs too, but she’d yet to have the presence of mind to study them closely when he had his jeans off. There may have been gargoyles involved, or maybe she’d just been cross-eyed.
“So it’s your uncle’s business?” she finally asked, when he paused.
He looked up again, and she was struck anew by his dangerous good looks. His eyes were so blue, and his reddish-blond hair and beard made him all the more tasty. Her friends posted pictures of guys like him on Facebook, but they were tattoo models, not their boyfriends. Fox was too hot to be boyfriend material, if that made any sense. It was hard to believe that she could deserve this kind of demigod full-time.
The smile he bestowed upon her made her breath catch.
“My uncle Scott started the business, but he retired. It was probably supposed to go to Luke, but Luke is . . . Luke. He’s good at stealing cars, but doesn’t like organizing the business end of things. Luke can get pretty impulsive and disappears sometimes. He prefers not to be nailed down to details. We were all raised together anyway, trained together, and the others agreed I was the more appropriate choice. I’m business-minded.”
“And not Atlas?”
“He was too young at the time, but you never know. He might fight me for it one day.” He chuckled. “Hopefully he doesn’t maim me too badly in the process.” He quirked a brow at her. “Do you have any siblings? Why don’t I know this?”
She raised a brow sardonically. “You tend to keep my mouth busy when we’re hanging out together. You can’t blame me for that.”
“Behave,” he said with a smile. “If you distract me and I put this together wrong, the guys will kick us both out of the group.”
So hard to be good around him. He only had himself to blame.
“I’m an only child,” she answered.
“Huh. That must have been nice.”
“Nice?”
He shrugged. “It seems like it might be. No one to break your shit or convince you to do stupid things.” He chuckled as if remembering something specific.
He reached for her and trapped a lock of her hair between his fingers, then slowly twirled it, but it was her eyes he was watching. Even though nothing inherently sexy was happening, there was a constant current of electricity between them.
At first she’d thought it was just her, but he seemed to feel it too. Not just a sexual connection either—something deeper. She kept pushing it away, trying to stay away from labels and conversations about the future, but he made her question her former opinion about staying unattached. What did she really want out of life?
