of me, but don’t touch that cunt, Lila, she’s mine.
I smiled so wide it bruised my cheeks as I typed a response.
Lila: I woke up dry as the Sahara if you must know.
He responded twenty minutes later when I was just stepping out of the shower.
Nova: Rose are red
Violets are blue
Don’t pretend you aren’t wet
Every time I’m around you
I laughed so hard I had to double over to catch my breath, and then I took another moment to wonder if it was possible for my body to withstand this level of happiness for long. Like an overwatered plant, I’d worried I’d die from the excess.
Working quickly because I had to get ready, and I wasn’t a low maintenance girl, I dropped the towel, posed in the mirror and snapped a shot of my still glistening body. I attached the photo to the text and wrote:
Lila: Then don’t pretend you didn’t wake up hard having slept beside this all night.
Nova: Oh, babe, don’t think I’m not hard right fuckin’ now lookin’ at all that’s you. Ridin’ a Harley with a hard-on is fuckin’ uncomfortable, so I’m gonna go think about grandmas knittin’ sweaters or some shit before we ride out again. Stay safe, and I’ll see ya tonight.
Lila: xoxo
I stared at the hugs and kisses for a long minute after a sent it, regretting my enthusiasm a bit. It was easy to forget myself with Nova, to act as naturally as I usually did.
But everything had changed with the addition of sex to our friendship, and I was already at a distinct power disadvantage.
He was older, significantly more experienced, and the sexiest man in Entrance, if not the entire country.
And he knew I’d once had a crush on him. So I had to be careful.
I was just grateful he didn’t know I’d been unconquerably in love with him since I was thirteen.
I needed every advantage I could get in this wicked game we were playing, so I wasn’t surprised when I opened the door for Bat, and his eyes went wide with awe.
“Wow, Li, you got a hot breakfast date or somethin’?”
I grinned at him, striking a pose with my hand on my hip and my leg extended in my suede boots. I was rocking a patterned dress with a slit that opened in the front running from mid-thigh to my feet, and what little fabric there was for the top just barely clung to the full rise of my breasts from a strap tied behind my neck. My hair was in messy waves with little braids done up here and there, woven with sprigs of daisies I’d plucked from the little, overrun garden behind Nova’s shop.
“Nova’s Flower Child, huh?” Bat said after taking another look at me, his eyes shrewd and mouth pressed into a line. “You’re bein’ careful, yeah?”
“Yeah, Bat,” I said with a grin, because I was being as careful as I could be given I’d willing signed up for eventual heartbreak. “Sweet of you to care, though.”
“Always,” he pledged in that way the brothers had of casually offering their loyalty to their loved ones like it was only natural.
It wasn’t natural.
It was sublime.
That was the magic of bikers. They were rough-hewn men, ruled by chaos, and claimed by the road, but for the right people, their people, they would lay down their lives with a smile if it meant their loved ones wouldn’t suffer.
There was so much power in love like that that, it was no wonder I’d always wanted it for myself.
A bone deep love with its own gravitational pull like Harleigh Rose had with Lion Danner, Cress’d had with King, and Loulou had with Zeus.
My smile suddenly felt wooden on my face, but luckily Bat was already turning to walk down the wrought iron stairs leading to the street where his black and chrome bike was parked.
I almost ran smack into him when he stopped abruptly beside the bike and faced me, his handsome, stern face conflicted.
“Please, don’t feel like you have to give me a lecture on Nova,” I hastened to say. “I know he’s called Casanova for a reason, okay? I’m not totally naïve.”
His smile was twisted and sharp like heat warped metal. “Not gonna say shit about it. You do you, girl. God knows I don’t have any right to judge. No…what I wanted to say is about your brother, Dane.”
Immediately, my heart arrested, caught in the amber trap of his words. “What?” I breathed.
He grimaced and ran a hand through his