Hold Me Close: A Cinnamon Roll Box Set

by Talia Hibbert

  He’d had a playful glint in his eye, along with a sweet little smile that reminded her of Beth. But at her question he grew sombre—or maybe it was the edge of hard suspicion in her voice that wiped away his cheerfulness. Either way, he released the trolley and stood up straight, until a damned mile of height separated them again.

  She’d spoken loud enough to blow her cover, which was fine, because she’d had enough of gossip for one day. When Nate replied, though, he kept his voice low. “I was looking for you.”

  “Well, you found me.” She threw the crushed bagels into the trolley. “Which can’t have been hard, since I told you exactly where I’d be.”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged, wrinkling his nose. “I had to wander through the dairy aisle for a bit, and those fridges are fucking freezing.”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  “Watch your—” his words cut off like brittle wood, that lazy-sexy grin fading. Nate’s pale brow creased in a rather ferocious frown, and he rammed his hands into his pockets. He seemed trapped between two opposing forces, bobbing along on a current of charm only to be tugged into frustration by a riptide.

  “Watch my what?” Hannah arched a brow.

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” He flashed her an expression that was 50% wince, 50% sheepish smile, and 100% adorable.

  And you, Hannah Kabbah, must be 100% deranged.

  “I came to apologise,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She stared. “For?”

  “I was rude. At the house. I mean, I was in a bad mood, and I worry about you climbing all over the furniture, and—” he shrugged his broad shoulders. Hannah put a tight leash on the sensations that said shoulders inspired in her. “Sorry,” he finished simply. “That’s all. I just wanted to say sorry.”

  She continued to stare. Even though she’d been furious, half an hour ago, she was now struggling to remember why. “So… less than an hour after speaking to me in a manner that was slightly less than friendly—”

  “It was rude.”

  “It was brisk, at worst.”

  “It was… curt,” he said grimly.

  “Less than an hour after speaking to me rather curtly,” she allowed, “you felt the need to hunt me down in the middle of the supermarket and apologise?”

  He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Looks like it.”

  She stared at him in silence a moment longer. Just enough to make him nervous, his wide mouth tightening the way it did when Josh and Beth got a little too quiet. Just long enough to get her ridiculous heart, which wanted to melt at his hesitance, under control.

  Then she said crisply, “You need a haircut.” And pushed the trolley away.

  For a moment, she walked alone, Nate standing behind her as if frozen. But then he jerked into movement, catching up with those long, loping strides. He put a hand on her shoulder, only to snatch it away a second later as if he’d been burned.

  Ah, yes. That was why she’d been furious with Nate; because he had the temerity not to want her even though he desired her.

  Which, now she considered it, seemed rather unreasonable. On her part, not his.

  But also his.

  “I’ll do that,” he said, pulling the trolley from her grip—careful not to let their hands touch, she noticed.

  “Oh, will you?”

  The corner of his mouth twitched. “Evidently.”

  “Are you staying, then?”

  “Might as well. Who were you listening to?”

  Oh, crap. She’d really hoped they’d move smoothly past that. “No-one,” she lied abominably.

  “Okay. What were you listening to?”

  “Nothing.”

  He squinted down at her as he pushed the trolley. “Hannah. You’re a horrible liar.”

  “Take the hint, then.” She paused by the store’s little bakery and grabbed a few plastic bags and a pair of tongs. “Clearly, I don’t want to tell the truth.”

  “Which makes me more determined to find out.”

  “That shows very poor character.”

  “Unsurprising, since I am a man of very poor character.”

  She frowned over at him. “No, you’re not. You’re absolutely not.” Oh dear. That sounded far too earnest. She cleared her throat. “I was just thinking how nice it is that you spend so much time with your mother.”

  He snorted. “Seriously? Don’t start thinking I’m son of the year. I ran off like a spoiled brat and left my family behind so I could deal with my own bullshit. When they wanted to see me or the kids, they had to come to London because I was too pathetic to come back here like a man. I robbed my children of time with their grandma just because this place used to make my skin crawl.” He scowled, his voice flat and hard. “I don’t even remember why I hated it so much. I mean, I remember why I hated it, but the anxiety…”

  She bit her lip, studying the baked goods in front of them because it was better than staring at him. “Sometimes bad feelings don’t make sense.”

  “Well, that’s true. Bad feelings never make sense.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” she said softly. “You’re here now. That’s all you can do.”

  He didn’t answer. She didn’t push. Instead, she checked her shopping list and went about collecting pastries, until finally he said, “Jesus, woman, how many bloody croissants do you want?”

  “These are for your permanently ravenous children, thank you very much.”

  “A likely story,” he muttered. But humour danced through his words again, lighting them up. As if that dark, self-flagellating speech hadn’t even happened. Before she could think about that too hard, he asked mockingly, “You alright there?”

  It was quite obvious that she was not alright there, since she was currently making a fool of herself, jumping up and down to reach the highest shelf. But Hannah paused in her indignities, pulled herself up to her full and majestic height—which was actually rather negligible—and said, “Fine, thank you.”

  Nate rolled his eyes, plucked the tongs from her hand, and got her a Danish.

  Reluctantly, she muttered, “Cheers.”

  “So, the shopping list was a cool idea,” he said, as they wandered toward the next aisle.

  Hannah tried not to smile. “I can’t claim credit. I believe they’ve been popular for centuries at least.”

  “You know, you could just take the compliment.”

  “Oh, was that a compliment?” she asked innocently. While internally she screamed It better not have been a compliment, because I’m too high-strung to deal with attractive men who occasionally devour me with their eyes and infrequently compliment me with their… mouths.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m glad you’re mostly in charge of food now. You actually make real meals.”

  “You make real meals.”

  “I plonk as many of the necessary food groups on a plate as I can,” he corrected. “You cook shit that makes sense, like… like curry.”

  “It’s true,” she said mildly. “I am an eminently sensible cook.”

  Hannah was used to her sense of humour going completely unnoticed. She constantly made what she thought of as jokes, only to have those around her take each word completely seriously. She had decided long ago that her comedic delivery was simply too atrocious to save.

  So when Nate laughed, she thought that she must be hallucinating or something.

  But she wasn’t.

  Nate had no idea why Hannah seemed to think that he would let her carry the shopping. But she did get strange ideas in her head, sometimes, bless her.

  Still, once he made his position on bag-carrying clear, she didn’t argue. Instead, she took great satisfaction in ordering him about, telling him exactly how to unpack everything in his own bloody kitchen. And he took even greater satisfaction in her casual bossiness and easy smiles and the way she rolled her eyes at his teasing, because it meant he hadn’t ruined anything. She didn’t know he was currently suffering through a mortifyingly creepy attracti
on to the woman he paid to watch his kids. In her mind, the two of them were… friends, maybe. Close enough to talk and joke like this, anyway.

  And that felt fucking fantastic.

  “It’s amazing how much more smoothly things go,” she mused from the kitchen island, “when I have someone large and obedient to hand.”

  “I am not obedient,” he grumbled, as he arranged the fruit juice in the precise order she’d asked for.

  “Obedient,” Hannah repeated. “Like a well-behaved child—”

  Nate growled. It was an excellent way to hide how much fun he was having, and also how much he’d like to put her over his knee.

  “—with unusual strength,” she finished. “Are you growling at me?”

  “If I were, would you shut up?”

  “Nothing can shut me up.” She grinned, then ran her tongue over the edge of her teeth. Which he had never seen her do before. He had no idea what it even meant, but the sight of that smiling mouth and that curling tongue and the gleam in her dark gaze…

  He was standing in front of her, shopping abandoned, before his brain fully grasped that his body was moving.

  She looked at him, her smile nowhere to be found. Now her laughing eyes were wide, her lips slightly parted, and he could see the soft, pink inside of her mouth beyond the armour of her lipstick. He wanted to taste that mouth.

  But he wouldn’t. He shouldn’t. He couldn’t. It was just kind of unbelievable how much he needed to. How he felt fucking desperate to, as if he’d give anything to kiss her, including his damn principles.

  It’s not about you. It’s about her. And even though she smiles for you, and laughs with you, and whispers in the dark with you, that doesn’t mean she feels anything like the shit you feel. So back away. Now.

  He stepped back.

  “Nate,” she whispered.

  Another step.

  “Nate, you—”

  “Let me know,” he said casually—as if he hadn’t just stood there staring at her mouth—“if I can help you with anything else.”

  She stared for a moment, the slow rise of her chest visible as she dragged in a breath. Then she said, “Like what?”

  He cleared his throat. “Like dusting places you can’t reach. I feel bad about you risking your neck to clean the house.”

  She nodded slowly. And then the tension in her body dissolved, the heat in her gaze fading, until he could almost forget the last thirty seconds had even happened.

  Almost.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, refolding a tea towel that looked perfectly fine to his mortal gaze. “I barely do anything. I’m beginning to feel as if I’m swindling you.”

  “You do plenty,” he said. “You get the kids from school. You scrub my house to within an inch of its life. You cook, and you got us a…” He grimaced. “A family calendar. Seriously, you have no idea how much peace of mind it gives me to know that you’re here. That if there’s any kind of emergency, I won’t be caught between looking after the kids and looking after Ma.” He rubbed his eyes, suddenly tired. He still wasn’t sleeping well. And he couldn’t stop reading medical articles, even though they made his head throb like a motherfucker.

  Something just wasn’t sitting right with him.

  Hannah distracted him from that familiar tangent when she said, “I meant to ask you, actually, about the boxes in the dining room. I wanted to unpack, but I don’t want to go through private things—”

  “Nothing’s private,” he said. Which was true. He’d had a single box of items that might be labelled private, and that had long since been unpacked in his room—but he had the oddest feeling that he wouldn’t mind Hannah seeing any of it anyway. “It’s just shit we don’t necessarily need, so I didn’t get around to it yet. I’ve been lazy. I’ll do it.”

  She gave him a wry look. “Lazy is not the word I would use to describe you.”

  “Maybe you don’t really know me,” he winked.

  She didn’t smile back. Instead, her eyes sliced him open and examined him from the inside out. She opened her mouth to say something that he knew, instinctively, would ruin him.

  So he was relieved when his phone rang, interrupting her.

  But he wasn’t relieved for long.

  10

  “My body is not my enemy. My body is me.”

  - Hannah Kabbah, The Kabbah Code

  Waiting rooms were the ninth circle of hell. Especially when you were sitting in the Respiratory Department with your mother, trying to wipe your sweaty palms against your jeans while she flicked serenely through a magazine.

  They need me to come in, she’d said. They have something to tell me, she’d said. And then, her calm voice wavering just a little: Apparently, it’s urgent.

  And that was all they’d said. Urgent. No details, no explanations, no reassurances.

  It was a good thing, Nate decided, that they were at a hospital right now. Because he could feel himself creeping closer to a fucking heart attack with every passing second.

  Nate had been telling himself for a while now that his mother was going to die. Not because he believed it; he didn’t. But when Ellie had died so suddenly, it had felt like the moment a brawl turns bad, when you’re drowning in kicks and punches from every direction. Like, bam, your wife’s dead, and you weren’t expecting it at all, so here’s the dress she ordered last week—and here’s her favourite food in the fridge, chocolate pudding, because you picked some up to surprise her yesterday—and here’s an email about the holiday you booked for next year, and…

  Hit after hit after hit.

  If he was prepared for his mum’s death, even a little bit, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much. Because Nate couldn’t fucking cope with that again. The threat of loss hovered on the surface of his mind, slick like oil over clear water, and he was stuck in that greasy pool trying not to drown.

  You thought that she would live forever and now she has cancer and you’re waiting for a last-minute appointment in a healthcare system that doesn’t do last-minute appointments, and Jesus fucking Christ, maybe you were right—maybe she’s going to die.

  Beside him, Shirley huffed out a little laugh at something she’d read. The tail of her silk headscarf lay over her gaunt shoulder. He stared at the paisley pattern for a second or an infinity, and then it occurred to him that his mind was turning dangerously blank and heavy, and he should think of something else. He glanced up at the clock on the wall and realised it was almost four. Hannah would’ve picked up the kids by now.

  Hannah, who’d turned grey as the dust she loved to vanquish when he’d told her where he was going, and why. For a moment, she’d looked almost as terrified as he’d felt. But then she’d cleared her throat and stiffened her spine and told him in that cool, calm voice that he mustn’t worry, and that everything would be fine, and that he was to go right now and do whatever was needed and not think about the kids for even a second.

  Nate wondered what he’d done in a previous life that had led him to meet so many wonderful women.

  And then, finally, a nurse appeared and called his mother’s name.

  They entered a clinical little room occupied by no less than four strangers. His heart plummeted like a ten-ton weight, tearing through every inch of flesh and bone in its way.

  A woman with enormous brown eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses stepped forward to shake his mother’s hand, then his. Which was not usual doctor behaviour, in Nate’s experience. So what the fuck was going on?

  She wore a smile that could only be described as politely grim. The other inhabitants were men, two scruffy-haired and tired-eyed, one razor-sharp in a well-cut suit. That suit alarmed Nate more than anything else about the situation. It was an indisputable truth that once corporate fuckers got involved, shit was heading rapidly downhill.

  “Ms. Davis,” the woman murmured. She must be a consultant. The consultants in this department all spoke like that—as if their patients were inches from death, so loudness wouldn’t be appropriate. “
I’m Doctor Yaszia Irshad. With me are my colleagues Dr. Brown, Dr. Law, and Mr. Young, who is a member of the hospital’s board. Please, take a seat.”

  Shirley actually smiled at the murder of crows before them, then toddled off to her chair as if they were all taking tea together. But not before shooting Nate a look that quite clearly said, Don’t you dare make a fuss.

  So Nate didn’t make a fuss. He kept his mouth locked tight, so his fear and his fury and his rising nausea couldn’t escape. He sat beside his mother and clutched the arms of the chair until his knuckles ached. He absolutely did not make a fuss.

  For now.

  “We called you here urgently because there has been a re-examination of your scans and symptoms. Dr. Brown is a specialist consultant in respiratory diseases, and Dr. Law specialises in a condition called sarcoidosis. They are of the opinion that you have been misdiagnosed, Ms. Davis. That, rather than suffering from lung cancer, you are suffering from sarcoidosis.”

  Somehow, despite the fact that he was suffocating, Nate managed to croak out, “Pardon?”

  “We made a mistake,” said Dr. Irshad.

  Shirley stared. Nate stared. The consultant offered a smile that looked more like a wince.

  Finally, Nate said through lips that felt frozen stiff, “You made… a mistake?”

  The doctor cleared her throat. “Unfortunately, yes.”

  And then the suit slimed into the conversation with a sharklike smile and a soothing tone. “This sort of thing is unbelievably rare, and highly unfortunate. Human error, you understand. Of course, you have our utmost apologies—”

  “I don’t give a shit about apologies. What, exactly, was the mistake? What the fuck is going on? Explain. Now.”

  “Nate,” his mother said, her voice severe, her glare pointed. That was the Behave yourself look. The Don’t lose your temper look.