Shane tugged on a lock of my hair, forcing my attention back to him. He gave me that sexy as hell grin I love so much and I didn’t try to resist the temptation to kiss him. “If I weren’t so hungry, I’d beg you to take me to bed,” I whispered in his ear, making my man practically tremble as I let my teeth skim over his lobe. “But I’m starving and after that mind-blowing session back in the park, I need nourishment before I will be able to go again.”
“Where is that damned waiter?” Shane demanded to no one in particular and I giggled as I snuggled closer to him. “I’m ready to eat.”
“Calm down, brother,” Drake told him. “They said forty-five minutes and it’s only been twenty.”
The food arrived ten minutes later, and I signed the receipt making sure that the waiter got a generous tip for being so quick. I wanted—needed!—some alone time with Shane before we went out for the night. This was our last night over at the Halloween Horror Nights and I wanted to thank him for being so strong as we walked through all the houses, something I have always wanted to do. Some of the houses had some serious gore to them, and Shane and gore… Yeah, that didn’t mix well.
Shane had been the one to suggest this as our bachelor/bachelorette party, knowing that Halloween was possibly my favorite time of the year. I had a thing for scary movies, and getting to walk through the houses with some of my favorite horror characters was just short of paradise for me. He was always thinking of me, always giving me what I wanted before I even realized I wanted it.
Why had it taken me so long to realize that this man loved me unconditionally?
Feeling a little sad—and yeah, maybe a little mad at myself for all I had put him through—I picked at my food, no longer hungry.
Strong fingers grasped my chin gently, lifting my head to meet that blue-gray gaze that never failed to melt me inside and out. Shane didn’t say a word, just raised his brow. I swallowed hard, feeling stupid and emotional and just wanting him to make love to me. I bit my lip, and he growled, “Love you, beautiful.”
“Bed,” I whispered.
That was all it took. That one word and he was up and I was being flung over his shoulder in one graceful move. “Later!” he called over his shoulder on his way to the door so that we could get back to the second penthouse and our room.
“Harp!” I raised my head to find Dallas coming back into the living room. She was freshly showered and dressed to make Axton suffer. There could be no other excuse for what she had on. A pair of cutoff jean shorts that could be described as nothing but Daisy Dukes. A top that tied around her neck and her back that showcased the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Not that she needed one. Girl had the perfect rack and I half hated her for it. Her tattoos were abundant and just enhanced her long limbs. Her piercings only drew a person’s eye to her beautiful face. “You’re leaving me? I just got here, you bitch.”
I grinned. “I’ll be back.”
“Maybe,” Shane muttered, smacking a big hand across my ass, causing my sex to clench with need. “Depends.”
Dallas
As soon as the door closed behind Harper, I flopped down on the couch beside Lana who was still curled up on Drake’s lap. I rolled my eyes at her. “You’re pregnant, woman. Not helpless. Drake, dude, let her feed herself at least.”
That just got me a giggle from my friend and a frown from her husband, as he lifted yet another bite of what looked like eggplant parmesan to her lips. I rolled my eyes again, figuring I would be doing that a lot over the next few days. Linc, seated on the floor in front of the coffee table, slid a covered plate and a box of pizza toward me and I grabbed it up, smelling the Texas toast, mashed potatoes, and steak as well as the garlic of the pizza sauce before I even lifted the lids.
“Steak sauce?” I asked to the room at large around a mouthful of pizza. I had to have it or the whole meal was going to be ruined. Not for the steak, but for my toast.
“Here, babe.”
My eyes snapped up from my plate to Axton, who was holding the steak sauce and offering it to me. The bitch in me wanted to say screw it—I didn’t need that steak sauce that bad. I didn’t want to even touch the bottle after he’d had his hands on it. But the hungry, exhausted person that I was already snatching it from him and drizzling it over my toast, trying to avoid touching the place his hand had just been. I didn’t offer a thanks, or look in his direction again.
Unable to cut the steak and hold the plate steady at the same time, I picked the steak up whole and took a decent sized bite of the perfectly prepared medium steak. The meat was juicy and some dripped down my chin. I smirked before wiping it away. If only my mother could see me now! Damn, she would have a coronary watching me eat with my fingers.
“Quick, someone take my picture!” I pulled my phone from my pocket. Natalie caught it when I tossed it her way and I lifted the steak, tearing into it like a barbarian. Laughing, Natalie started punching away on the touch screen, already knowing what I had planned for the picture.
“Don’t you think you should stop pissing your mother off so much?” Natalie said even as she was hitting send on the text she had just typed. “I’m about fed up with her calling the apartment just to bitch.”
I hadn’t known Natalie as long as I had everyone else in the room, so she didn’t know even a third of what my mother had put me through growing up. Sure, she knew some of the bigger things—forcing me into pageants when we lived in Texas, followed by signing my life away to some modeling agent when I had been ‘discovered’—but barely anything else. So I refrained from jumping down her throat. Instead I just shrugged and kept eating my steak, dipping it in the potatoes from time to time.
“Dallas could never piss her mother off enough,” Linc told Natalie. “The next time she calls to bitch to you, tell her how happy Dallas is. That will really piss her off.”
Yeah, that was probably the truest statement ever made about my mother. She hated how happy I was, living my life the way I wanted to instead of how she had imagined me living it. Her plans had been for me to keep modeling—even though she knew I hated it. Maybe start an acting career—although I couldn’t act to save my life. Marry some Hollywood-type guy who had a big name and even bigger wallet. All the things she wished she could have done if she had been pretty enough.
Instead I had destroyed my body—her words, not mine—with my ink and piercings. And then I had worked my ass off to get into one of the best nursing schools in America. A school that had required every spare moment I possibly could have had in the last two years. Seriously, Linc had had to do my laundry because I hadn’t had the time to! After graduating at the top of my class, and suffering through clinical training at one of the busiest hospitals in New York, I now had my license and was an RN—something I had been dreaming about since I was a little girl.