Page 70 of Crow

“I’m kidding about all that. Don’t come to the shop on your day off. Those hours are precious.”

“There’s nothing I’d rather do than spent them with you.”

He teases me a little bit more, then slides off me. It takes all my control not to pull him back. He swings his legs around to sit on the edge of the bed. When he stretches his arms overhead, I’m treated to the hottest fucking show, all his ink and his back muscles shifting in tandem.

“I was thinking that I might… Umm… that I might try and go over to my parents’ house. I need to talk to them at some point and the longer it stretches on that I haven’t done it, the more anxious I feel about it.”

He cranks his head over his shoulder to study me. “Careful, babe. I have a weak stomach in the morning. Talk of your parents might cause me to spray the dog with vomit and wouldn’t that just make for a terrible morning?”

I gather the sheet around me, laughing. “Morning, Raven. It’s been a few days. I’ve missed you.”

“Morning, babe.”

I never thought that I’d like beingbabed, but when Raven uses that word, it makes me want to laugh and shiver in pure desire at the same time.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you? I can’t cancel on my client, but we could go later.”

“I’m not saying this because you’re Raven and not Crow. I’d be telling him the same thing. I’d like for you to be there, but I think the first conversation that I have with them needs to be alone.”

“They’ll probably act like a bunch of tool bags, calling you a Jezebel and what not, and then I’ll really be hard pressed not to fashion an impromptu torture chamber out of the kitchen and treat your dad to a little bit of lighttickling.”

My robe is hanging on the back of the door and Raven passes it to me. It’s cotton, a butter yellow with little flowers. It’s worn out and ancient, but I loved it so much it was one of the things I brought with me when I left my parents’ house.

I slip it on, knotting the tie. “Jezebel?” I frown at him. “Do you know that from somewhere, or have you been doing some reading?”

“I’ve been pounding the Bible hard,” he winks at me. “We’re almost three quarters of the way through. There’s a distinct advantage in having a second fresh mind to pull shifts. It’s really quite something, working together for a change. It’s astounding what we can accomplish.”

“Wait!” I steer him to the bathroom down the hall, I’m going to thrust us both into the shower. There’s no way I’m not taking advantage of having enough time to leisurely wash each other’s hair and discover all the ways we can drive ach othercrazy with just tiny little touches. “You’ve read three quarters of the Bible in three weeks?”

He shrugs, cranking on the spray. “I’m a fast reader. Don’t tell him I told you this, but Crow’s even faster. It’s probably the only thing he’s better at than I am.”

The house is a smaller two-bedroom, though one bedroom is so tiny I’m not sure how it qualifies as anything other than a storage room. He did extensive renovations when he purchased the little bungalow, including new vinyl plank flooring in a dark gray that matches the walls. He redid the kitchen and the bathroom, the star of the show is the wide tub he managed to fit in. It makes showering in there doable, but just barely, given that Crow and Raven are fucking massive. When we switch spots, he still has to guide my hips when we change positions under the spray so that I don’t slip and fall, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s a bonus.

We strip off our clothes and get in. Whether it’s Raven or Crow, they both prefer to give me most of the water and take the overspray until they have to rinse their hair. Crow says it’s the gentlemanly thing to do. He doesn’t want me to get cold. Raven says people used to think that bathing would kill them, and he hasn’t quite evolved out of that reasoning.

It strikes me right in the middle of squeezing shampoo onto my palm, ready to lather into Raven’s black hair, that I’m falling in love with them. Both of them.

I reach for his wet hair with shaking hands. He closes his eyes, giving an exaggerated purr as I massage his scalp. This man might look like a big baddie, but under all the ink and the black clothes, his dark hair and eyes, he’s soft. He’s soft for Connie, for me, and for the men of his club who are making areal effort to understand who Crow and Raven both are, after he admitted that he has more than one personality.

I couldn’t believe it when he slipped into bed, my first night in the bungalow, after settling Connie on the foot. It was almost three-thirty, but I hadn’t been asleep. It wasn’t that the place was strange or new to me. After spending so much time with him in Vegas, it feltwrongto be alone. I missed him.

I’d folded myself into him as soon as he climbed into bed. He’d kissed my forehead and told me that he’d come clean with the club. No one called him a freak, a liar, or told him to get help. They’d accepted his truth the same way they accepted that if he wanted to talk to any doctors or other professionals about what was going on with him, then he would. He’d promised that it wouldn’t change anything, except that Raven was more social and sarcastic. They’d probably get tired of his mouth in short order. Bullet—who I know from Patti’s, raised a beer bottle in a toast to that. Outgoing or not, he was still their Enforcer.

“Are you double sure that you don’t want me to come with you? I could give you moral support by staying in the car and creeping the house like I have no chill.”

I laugh, some of the tension ebbing away and the anxiety spinning in my stomach settling. Raven knows what to say because he’s sometimes painfully observant. He likes to think he doesn’t have much in common with Crow, but he’s wrong. When they set their heart on something, they do it all the way.

“You won’t stay in the car. You’ll be scoping out the house, walking crazed circles around it. They don’t need another window punched in and you don’t need another bloody first.”

“I’ll be sure to boot the door down then. Let it take the brunt of the blow.”

I roll my eyes. “Sometimes my dad is the kind of person that could tempt even the saintliest person into bitch slapping him.”

“And I’m not exactly saintly.”

I wipe the soap suds away from his forehead, so they don’t end up in his eyes. “That’s right. But l—” I cut myself off, realizing what I was about to say. I cover fast. “like that about you.”

He doesn’t nail me on that. He does claim my lips, forcing me back under the water, drenching us both. I break away, shoving at his chest.

---