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Curious, though I damn well knew I wasn’t supposed to be, I made my way up to the bar, waiting for Chet to come toward me with a beer.
“What’s up with Nyx tonight?” I asked, watching as his shoulders slumped.
“I thought it was just me who noticed it,” he said, looking relieved that he wasn’t alone. “I dunno, man. But she is definitely off. Maybe shit with her aunt again,” he said, shrugging and walking off when she came back out of the kitchen with the container full of lemons.
Her keen-eyed gaze moved from Chet to me, and I felt like she was seeing more than she possibly could have been.
“How’s your aunt been?” I asked, looking for a casual topic of conversation. And we’d talked about her aunt a few times since we’d often hooked up in Vegas when she was on her way back from visiting the woman who was mentally deteriorating, a fact that clearly worried Nyx who lived hours away and couldn’t keep a really close eye on her like she wanted to.
“That’s a personal question,” she told me, tone icier than I had ever heard it. “You don’t get to ask me personal questions,” she added.
I had to admit it. I could be a proud man. But even I had to admit to myself that her words were cutting. Expert fucking precision. The words, the tone, the cold look in her eye. I felt fucking eviscerated.
“Right. My bad,” I said, nodding, trying to act like my guts weren’t all over the fucking floor.
It wasn’t like I’d never heard Nyx be cold or cutting.
The fact of the matter is, as much as she could be warm and flirty when she wanted to, she could be a stone-cold bitch as well. I wasn’t even saying that shit negatively. Working a job like she worked while looking like she looked, a lot of shitheads got handsy or mouthy. She needed to be able to put them in their place.
She did.
Frequently.
But she’d never been that cold to me.
Did that mean this was the beginning of the end? Would all the out-of-town hook-ups be over? Would I be going back to trying to find some other, random woman who wouldn’t be completely fucking terrified of me to take home and fuck?
It shouldn’t have mattered.
Casual was supposed to be casual.
But there was no denying the way my stomach dropped at the idea of it being over. Or nearly over.
“If you see Cillian, can you tell him I’m here?” I asked, some masochistic part of me wanting to double-check that the attitude wasn’t a fluke.
“You can tell him yourself,” she said, waving her knife toward the door that had just swung open from the back, revealing the eldest Murphy brother, the leader of his Irish mafia family, and her boss.
“Slash,” Cillian said, giving me a nod. “Thanks for coming,” he said, coming out from behind the bar.
Nyx was, objectively, nosy.
I think it was a career occupational hazard of being a bartender. Especially in a smaller-sized town where everyone used you as their therapist, and you knew everyone’s dirt.
So she was fucking always eavesdropping, always getting the information.
Which made it extra strange that she knew that Cillian, the head of the Irish mob, had called me, the head of the local outlaw MC, in for a private meeting, and she didn’t want to know what it was about.
In fact, she didn’t even spare us a glance.
She just walked off to finish cutting her lemons. Out of earshot.
Fucking weird.
Maybe she figured she would get the dirt through other means, though. Her best friend was shacked up with one of my men. She worked for the Murphy brothers. The information would likely leak somehow.
“You were cryptic as fuck,” I said, taking one last swig of my beer, sensing what Cillian was going to say next.
“Take a walk with me.”
