I needed to get a grip.
My gaze dropped from his beautiful eyes to an area below the belt.
I really needed to get a grip.
Or laid.
“What are you thinking right now?” Nick asked.
“Huh?” My gaze flew to his face. “Nothing.”
He turned his head slightly. “Yeah, I don’t believe you. Your face is suddenly flushed and your eyes are unfocused— Wait, are you feeling okay? Is it the—”
“I’m fine.” Not like I was going to tell him I was horny. I pulled my hand free and clamped them between my knees. “So . . . what was I right about?” Without looking at him, I knew his gaze was fastened on me, and it was that intensely unnerving gaze that made you feel like he was seeing right through you.
“You were right about the not-texting-back thing. I should’ve texted you back sooner.”
Surprised, I glanced at him sharply. “Are you for real?”
He ignored that question. “But you also should’ve had the balls to call me out on it immediately. We could’ve dealt with it then instead of you stewing for two days over it and me having to ask Roxy yesterday if you were dead.”
“What?” I leaned away from him. “You asked Roxy if I was dead?”
A completely unrepentant look settled into his features. “Well, I didn’t say those exact words, but I saw her at the bar this afternoon when I swung by and asked if she’d heard from you. My point is, you should’ve had the balls to call me out on it.”
“I don’t have balls,” I said snidely. The crazy thing was, in any other situation I would’ve called his ass out on it immediately. I wouldn’t have stewed over it.
One side of his lips quirked up. “Then you should’ve had the fertilized eggs to call me out immediately.”
I jerked. A laugh roared out of me. “Fertilized eggs?”
His grin spread. “That’s the next best thing to balls.”
“Oh my God.” I smacked my hands over my face as I laughed. “That just sounds all kinds of wrong, Nick. So wrong.”
“Yeah, you’re right. It does sound weird.” He chuckled as I lowered my hands.
Warmth crept into my cheeks and I squirmed uncomfortably. “You’re right,” I said. “I should’ve said something or asked, or at least I should’ve responded. It was childish, and normally I’m not like that. I guess I’m . . .”
“Stressed?” he supplied gently, nudging my leg with his.
I nodded. “Yeah, I am, but that really isn’t an excuse. It’s not—”
“There was a reason why I didn’t get back in touch with you until later, on Monday night. I take care of my grandfather.” That statement jarred me. Nick was looking straight ahead, all the earlier humor vanished from his striking profile.
“What?” I whispered.
His throat worked before he spoke. “My grandfather—his name is Job.” His full lips twitched into a brief grin. “I know that’s a weird name. My family is Romani. You probably know us by the other term. Gypsy. Though most of us don’t like that term. At all.”
Wow, my guess that he had a Hispanic background was way off target. He was an actual Romani? For some bizarre reason, I was absolutely fascinated by this, probably because I’d never knowingly met one. There were some Romani who lived near Martinsburg, according to one of those reality shows on TV, but I’d never seen them. However, this really wasn’t the time for me to ask a hundred questions about his heritage and come across sounding completely ignorant.
“And before you ask, my family has been settled in this area for years. I went to public school and I didn’t grow up in a caravan of RVs,” he continued, his dark brows knitting. “I know there are a lot of stereotypes about our culture, but most of them aren’t true or they’ve been completely romanticized.”
Now I felt entirely stupid for thinking what I did, but I never thought less of Gypsies—er, Romani—or anything like that. “I’m part Cuban,” I told him.”
He looked at me, his brows raised.
“Well, my grandfather grew up in Cuba. He made it to the U.S. when he was a teenager,” I told him, shrugging a shoulder. “Anyway, just thought I’d . . . throw that out there.”
The smile that formed on his lips was small, but genuine. “Good to know.” He paused. “My grandfather has been very ill, and there’s no one . . . left nearby to take care of him, so I do. I live with him so someone can be with him during most of the day. There’s an in-home care nurse who stays with him in the evenings to give me a break and also when I’m at work.”
I was floored as I listened to Nick. I didn’t have a clue about any of this, but something Reece had said the night I’d been at his place came back to me. It was his response to Nick saying that he had a lot of time on his hands. Reece had called bullshit on that, and now I knew why.
“He has Alzheimer’s,” Nick explained.
Oh no. My heart squeezed with pained sympathy.
“It’s been pretty severe this last year or so, but it hasn’t always been that way. There were weeks when no one would even know anything was wrong. You know? He’d just have moments of confusion. Like he’d sometimes repeat something he’d said about an hour earlier and then he would show up with his shirt buttoned incorrectly—little things. And then it changed, but that’s the way the disease is. It progresses, and he has these episodes when I need to be there for him. He gets pretty stressed when he doesn’t recognize the nurse. Hell, most of the time he doesn’t recognize me.”