Never Trust the Living (Battle Crows MC Book 7) Read online

  She nodded, and I was just about to pass her to head out the front door when an urge to touch her struck.

  And instead of denying that need to touch, I chose to stop and honor the need.

  I caught her around the neck and pulled lightly, pressing her body close to mine before leaning down and giving her a kiss.

  It wasn’t long. It wasn’t short, either.

  And there was zero tongue.

  But the way she melted into me made my heart fuckin’ soar.

  “And even if you don’t need me, feel free to call.”

  • • •

  “What do you mean, you’re moving?” Haggard looked stunned.

  Sophia blinked, turning to look from me to Haggard and back, before getting up and quietly walking out of the room.

  Shine, Tide, Price and my father were also in the room.

  “I’m moving to Florida,” I repeated my earlier statement. “I’m gonna go there where Dory has a job interview. We’re going to try to sort out our shit.”

  It was my mother who said, “Maybe that’s for the best.”

  I raised a brow at her in question.

  But it was Tide’s. “I don’t know why you would think him leaving us would be a good thing. In fact, all I can think of are bad things. Such as, isn’t this the place that she was attacked, and nothing was done?”

  I’d been thinking about that, too.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “It was. But I’m already on the horn with a few people there that are looking into it. The man that lives up the street from where she was renting, Wake Westfield, has been giving me updates when they come in. Which, I’ll admit, aren’t very often, or very good. It looks like the sheriff isn’t really doing anything about it.”

  “Well then I don’t see how that’s a good idea,” Tide argued. “I mean, what if it happened again?”

  He wasn’t saying anything that I wasn’t thinking.

  “It won’t, because I won’t allow it,” I told him bluntly. “I’ll stay on her. She’s not stupid, either. She won’t go putting herself into danger when she doesn’t have to.”

  Tide sighed. “And I’m sure, you being there, it’ll be easier to look into. That’s one of your reasons, right?”

  “The least one,” I agreed. “Her safety is my first priority. But she doesn’t want to be here. And I can’t make her be here if that’s the case. Not to mention, she had this job interview. She was excited about it, and I want her to live out her dream.”

  “We can’t argue with you,” Shine said. “Because then it’ll make us assholes. But how do you expect us to repair anything if you won’t keep her here?”

  “You can’t repair anything until I repair what I’ve broken first,” I told them honestly. “So, we’re leaving, and we don’t know when we’ll be back.”

  “That sounds pretty permanent,” Dad said. “Are you sure?”

  Are you sure it’s worth it? She was worth it?

  Hell yes, she was worth it. And him asking that sent a ball of fiery anger through my veins.

  “Was Mom worth it?” I asked.

  Dad stiffened.

  “I think it’s a great idea,” Cannel finally chimed in. “I can’t say that I’ve been the best sister-in-law through the years…” She trailed off. “But I want to fix that. And if I have to come to Florida to do it, then I will.”

  I smiled at my sister.

  God, I loved her.

  I was so glad that she was better, too.

  Her being sex-trafficked right out of the supermarket parking lot near the Air Force base in Florida had changed a lot of lives that day, the most of all hers. She’d had a lot of hurdles to get over lately, but she was scaling each better and better as the days passed.

  “So when are you leaving?” Shine asked, looking the most sullen of the bunch. “What about that party for her welcoming home you were talking about?”

  “We’ll have to postpone it a few months.” I shrugged. “We leave tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Motherfuckers think they can have their cake and eat it, too. Well, wrong bakery, bitch.

  -Dory to Bram

  BRAM

  We were in Florida exactly twenty-three hours later.

  “What do you think?” I asked as I pulled into the driveway of the house that we would be making our home for the next few months.

  I looked over to find Dory’s mouth all but falling open.

  “It’s… gorgeous!” she exclaimed. “Holy cow! You weren’t kidding about being on the water! Look at this!”

  I looked at where she was directing and grinned. “Yeah, the water literally comes up to the back porch. It’s going to be extremely nice not to have to mow weekly.”

  There was no grass at all anywhere around the house. It was all landscaped rock, which I assumed was because of the water.

  Not that I really knew shit about tides.

  I was born in East Texas. There wasn’t a fuckin’ tide to be seen anywhere near us.

  “We need a boat,” she murmured. “Then again, I don’t know if I can handle a boat. I can barely handle the rocking of the car.”

  Truer shit had never been said.

  Her hyperemesis diagnosis from Dr. Proctor had all but taken care of with her excess intake of only sweets and the occasional healthy meal with the ingestion of nausea meds. We were handling it much better than we were last week at this time.

  “I think I might like to have a boat,” I agreed with her assessment. “Though, just sayin’, but I’m not sure how well I would know how to navigate a whole ocean.”

  She started to giggle, and I felt my heart pound.

  God, her laugh.

  Her smile.

  Her everything.

  I got out of the car to keep from snatching her to me and burying my face in her throat.

  I tried to move very slow when it came to her. Tried to allow her to make all the moves.

  But dammit, it was getting harder and harder as the days went on.

  Hence getting out of the confines of the car while she was looking so damn cute.

  When I rounded the front, it was to find her already standing on the ground, raising her arms up high over her head, causing her shirt to lift.

  The tiniest of baby bumps swelled softly from her belly, and I couldn’t stop myself from reaching forward and skimming my finger from the top of her belly to the waistband of her pants. “It’s growing.”

  She smiled softly at me, then distractedly looked toward the bay.

  “A dolphin!” she cried, pointing.

  I looked toward the bay to where she was indicating and saw a whole bunch of nothing.

  That was, until a spray of water, followed by the rounded back of a marine mammal, crested the water.

  Then another. And another. And another.

  “Cool.” I smiled. “That’s gonna be fun to drink coffee and watch.”

  “I wish I could have coffee,” she grumbled. “I didn’t realize how much I would miss it until I couldn’t have it anymore.”

  “Decaf,” I suggested. “We can start doing that.”

  That sounded like hell… but if it worked for her, well, then I would drink it. I would do just about anything.

  “Come on, let’s check out the inside,” I suggested.

  Turns out the inside was just as good as the outside.

  The inside was an open concept, the living room, dining room, kitchen, and entryway all rolled into one.

  The showstopper was the wall of windows at the back of the house that looked out over the bay.

  “Wow,” we both breathed at the same time. “This is… holy shit.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” I murmured.

  “Why would anyone ever want to sell this?” she asked. “If this were mine, I’d keep it, and live in it during the good season.”

  “What constitutes a ‘good season,’ babe?” I teased.

  She looked at me with shining eyes, her mouth kicked up in a small grin, and said, “When the sun shines all day long, you go outside and risk getting burned, and the two minutes of rain that happens every day that makes it feel like a swamp.”

  I agreed with her.

  “Let me start getting our stuff inside,” I said as I placed my phone and keys down on the counter.

  She made an ‘okay’ sound and I took that as my sign that I was dismissed.

  Just before I got out the door, I heard my phone ring.

  “Hey, will you answer that?” I called out.

  “Sure,” she said quietly.

  I left to the sound of her voice saying, “Hello?”

  When I got back, loaded down with all of our bags, it was to see her holding the phone out to me at the front door.

  “Who is it?” I asked, walking the bags inside as well as trying not to hit her.

  I didn’t altogether succeed, but she didn’t get mad.

  “Mimi,” she said softly.

  “Tell her to call my brothers or something if she needs anything. I don’t live there anymore,” I murmured.

  Jesus Christ.

  I’d known she was in town for months now, and she’d known I was there, too.

  And it was as if she thought we would get started where we left off.

  But the thing was, I didn’t want to get started with Mimi ever again.

  Sure, seeing her had been a shock.

  But not even the good kind of shock. The bad kind. The kind that reminded me how fuckin’ needy she’d been.

  “Umm.” She hesitated, unsure if that was what I wanted to say.

  I dropped the bags in the entranceway, scooped the phone up, and pressed it to my ear.

  When Dory went to leave, I caught her wrist, pulled the phone away from my ear, and put it on speaker.

/>   “Yeah?” I answered, looking into Dory’s eyes.

  “Bird?” Mimi said, sounding annoyed.

  “Yes, it’s Bram,” I said. “What do you need?”

  Dory sucked in a breath at the use of ‘Bird.’

  But that annoyance was definitely more for my benefit than hers.

  She knew that I hated to be called Bird. By anyone.

  That was what Amon had called me while he’d held me hostage in his storm shelter for days.

  When Dory had found me, she’d heard Amon call me that, and my reaction.

  And now, she didn’t let anyone call me that. Not anyone from high school. Not my brothers. And definitely not Mimi.

  God, I should’ve known way back then that she was protective of me. That she felt something real for me.

  I was such a fuckin’ idiot.

  “Hey,” Mimi said. “So I was hoping that you could come…”

  “Don’t live there anymore, Mimi,” I said. “We moved to Florida to raise our baby in the Sunshine State. If you need anything, you could always try my brothers. But with them all married, getting married, and with babies on the way, I highly doubt they can find time to spare.”

  More, I didn’t want them spending time with Mimi, forging a relationship that I definitely didn’t want forged.

  Dory’s eyes widened.

  “Baby?” Mimi squeaked.

  “Baby.” I trailed my eyes down the length of Dory’s body. “A boy.”

  Mimi sucked in a breath, but it was Dory’s sniffle that had me looking up at her to find tears in her eyes.

  “Gotta go,” I said. “Bye.”

  I hung up without waiting for her to reply and moved so that my hands were cupping Dory’s shoulders. “What’s wrong, baby?”

  She wriggled her nose before saying, “You claimed our baby. It was just… these hormones…”

  I smiled. “It’s my baby. Or, I guess, ours. I can’t wait to meet him.”

  Her lower lip quivered, and I could tell that she needed a moment.

  So when she pulled away, I allowed her to.

  “If you don’t mind,” she said softly. “I’m going to go take a shower. I feel like I need it.”

  I winked at her. “I’m going to go catch up with Wake anyway. Let him know we made it and talk to him about what he was able to find out today.”

  She waved me off before all but slamming the door in my face, and I grinned.

  A couple of minutes later, I arrived at Wake’s place to find him outside working on an old car in his driveway.

  “Wake,” I called to him. “It’s me, Bram.”

  Wake’s eyes had already been on me, but he grinned when he heard the name.

  We hadn’t met officially as of yet, but we’d been doing a lot of communication over the phone after Easton had procured his number for me.

  “Bram.” He wiped his hand on a red rag, then offered it to me. “How’s it going?”

  “Okay,” I admitted. “She threw up almost every hundred miles like clockwork, so it took us a bit longer than we expected.”

  He started chuckling, but then his face sobered. “I have a sister. God, she was so sick when she was pregnant. I’m talking, couldn’t even get out of bed sick. If Dory’s upright, she’s doing okay.”

  Oh, I’d done my research. I knew that hyperemesis was bad. Or could be worse than what Dory was presenting with.

  I’d talked to Tide about it, and he’d said that she was doing well for the hand she’d been given.

  So I was hoping that it never came down to that. But hell, we had four and a half months left. To say that she wasn’t out of the woods yet would be an understatement.

  Which reminded me, we needed to find a doctor in Florida that could take over her case.

  “What’s got that look on your face?” he asked. “Everything okay with the wife?”

  I smiled. “Everything is great… mostly. She’s already got an eating disorder and this nausea isn’t helping her situation. I was just thinking that I needed to help her find a doctor here. Sooner rather than later.”

  “I know a guy.” He smiled. “My brother. Just don’t tell him that I sent you, okay?”

  I sensed a story there but knowing that he was likely as private as I was… well, I chose to let it lie.

  “Hit me with the number.”

  CHAPTER 17

  I married a stale ham sandwich.

  -Dory to Bram

  DORY

  To say that I was living in a fairy tale would’ve been too tame of a word.

  We’d been in the rental house on the bay for exactly a week. That was seven days of time that I’d spent with my husband.

  Today would be the eighth day, and today, both of us were going off to our respective jobs.

  Our brand-new jobs, in our brand-new town, in our brand-new rented house, with our brand-new lives ahead of us.

  To be honest, it was everything that I ever wanted, and it was inevitable that something was going to go wrong.

  “Don’t go anywhere without carrying,” he ordered, his eyes intense and severe. “After talking to that incompetent sheriff, there’s no way in hell that you should be doing anything or going anywhere by yourself without something to protect you if you need it.”

  Bram had learned yesterday, after the sheriff had done nothing but brush him off for the week that we’d been here, that they hadn’t done a single thing to try and find the man that had attacked me.

  That’s why, for the last day and a half, Bram’s made it his life mission to make sure I was safe.

  I felt warm, and protected, and for the first time in an eon, happy. Well and truly, completely and wholly, happy.

  It was an odd feeling.

  I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. For something to go wrong.

  Except, it hadn’t.

  I was happy.

  And I was going off to my big girl job, and I’d do just about anything to assure Bram that I would be okay.

  Because he wasn’t playing. He was scared for me. I could read it in the intensity in his eyes.

  By the way he looked like he was about to let me go out in the wilds of the world without him at my side.

  “I’ll be okay,” I said, moving into him without thought.

  That’d been happening a lot, too. Me moving toward him and touching him in some way.

  I’d never done that before. Never allowed myself to do it before. Because that was the fastest way to find myself disappointed before—before this newest truce with Bram, which I called the BNB (Before New Bram) Era in my head—to try to touch Bram. Or get any sort of intimacy out of him. It was the fastest way to shut him down. So, at some point in the years that I’d spent being his wife, I’d learned not to touch him.

  But now, my touch was almost like some sort of signal to him. A signal like a red flag to a bull. The moment I touched him, he took that as the sign he needed to bring me into his chest. To press his lips against my forehead. To touch me in the ways I’d only ever dreamed about him touching me.

  It was, literally, my dream.

  And I was living it.

  “I promise you,” I said to my husband who was looking at me with his heart. “I’ll be smart. You’ve taught me well over the years.”

  And he had.

  He’d gone out of his way to make sure that I was always safe. He encouraged me to take protection classes—weapon and physical classes that would cover me in every situation—and I had. Now that I was expecting something to happen, I would be more prepared. I wouldn’t be caught unaware again.

  Which I decided Bram knew. That had to be the only reason he allowed me to leave him.

  “Just keep aware. Always know what’s going on with your surroundings. I’ll bring you lunch so you won’t have to leave to do that. And please, if you do need to leave, call me. I want to know when you leave, when you get home, and make sure you set the alarm if you get home before me, okay?”

  The pleading in his eyes were my undoing.

  I couldn’t stop myself from pressing my lips to his jaw, which happened to be the only thing I could reach.

  I hated being short. Being short meant that you couldn’t kiss what you wanted on tall people like my husband—such as his lips.

  But, realizing that I couldn’t quite reach where I wanted, he bent down and brought his lips to mine.

  I sighed, feeling what felt like rightness spread through my veins.

  I’d missed the intimacy. Well, the physical part anyway since I had been apart from him so long. The emotional intimacy I don’t think I ever had with Bram.