Raven shrugged as she continued to clean up the mess that she had made putting together my sandwiches. “Bash is still sleeping. Hawk took Gracie out for a ride. Raider and Colt are over at Matt and Tanner’s house. And Willa went for a run. It’s just me and Lexa for the moment.”
“So I’m crashing girl bonding?”
Raven wrinkled her nose. “Yes, but it’s okay. We like having male attention, don’t we Lexa?”
The three-year-old giggled again and nodded. “We like you, Uncle Spider.”
I touched a huge finger to her little button nose. “I like you too, Lexa.”
I was just swallowing the last of my second sandwich when the backdoor opened and in a sweating Willa walked. She didn’t glance my way as she went to the fridge, took out a pitcher of water and poured herself a large glass. Raven moved around as if she didn’t notice the other female, cleaning up the drops of milk Lexa had dripped on the table.
My body reacted instantly to the sight of her. She was wearing short, tight, neon pink running shorts with a white tank top that showcased the fact that she was wearing a neon pink sports bra underneath. Her toned thighs and calves flexed with every step she took. Her hair was a mess with damp strands falling from her ponytail and clinging to her neck and face. She looked exactly how I remembered her most evenings back in Vegas four years ago. My balls tightened, making it nearly impossible to stay seated without causing myself some irreversible harm.
I stood and took my empty plate to the sink to rinse. It had been a while since I had been in the Hannigan house, but I was more comfortable here than I was at my uncle’s house. Before Bash had come back and brought Willa and Lexa with him I’d been a regular in this house for dinner. Raven had taken care of me and I would always take care of her.
The sink was right beside the fridge where Willa was still standing with her back to the room as she gulped down the rest of her water before filling the glass up again. She shut the fridge door and turned to face me. I was surprised she wasn’t glaring at me, but she sure as hell wasn’t happy to see me. “I guess you’ve decided to untuck that tail of yours and come back around.”
I stiffened at her accusing me of being a cowardly dog. Sure, I hadn’t been coming around to visit Raven. She had enough shit on her plate at the moment without me adding my shit to it. She would want to take sides and I didn’t want her to do that when she was just now starting to accept Willa. “Figured I’d let the waters calm down here before I stuck my toes in it and made them muddy again,” I bit out. She raised a brow at me but didn’t say another word to me as she moved to sit at the table beside Lexa.
“Lexa, go wake your daddy up,” Raven told the little girl. “He doesn’t get to sleep all day just because he came home at two in the morning.”
“Don’t get mad at him, Rave,” I told her as I dropped down into my chair again. “He was out with me.”
Lexa bounced out of the room before Raven turned to frown at me. “I’m not mad at him because he was out with you.”
She might not have been mad about that, but it was obvious that she was mad at him about something. I reached for her hand, tugging her toward me so I could look at her closer. Her face was pale, and I could see that her eyes were tired. “Are you feeling okay?” I asked, noticing that her hands were trembling slightly.
“Just an upset stomach, Spider.” She gave me a small smile and pulled away, busying herself with more cleaning.
“Again?” Willa inquired with a concerned look on her beautiful face. “You’ve had one all week. Maybe you should see the doctor?”
“It’s nothing. I’m fine.” Raven’s tone was firm but she smiled a little as she wiped down that table again. “I know what’s wrong with me. I’ll be okay.”
Before I could even open my mouth to ask her what it was that was wrong with her the backdoor opened again and Gracie walked in. Her cheeks were flushed and her hair was a mess, but she looked happy as she greeted us before practically skipping through the kitchen headed for the stairs. A minute later Hawk came in with a grin on his face.
Seeing Hawk Hannigan grin was a rare event. He was always so serious and brooding-looking. Next to Jet he was the Hannigan you didn’t want to fuck with. He was the reason that I was working my ass off trying to find out what Kevin Samson was up to. If I didn’t find out what that little scumbag was doing then people I loved would end up hurt.
“What’s for dinner, Rave?” Hawk asked as he pulled a beer out of the fridge before dropping down into his usual seat at the table. “I’m starving.”
“Spaghetti, garlic bread, and salad.” She winked at me when I grinned up at her. She was making my favorite. “Apple cake for dessert.” I groaned in appreciation and she squeezed my shoulder as she passed. “I have to fatten some people up around here. They’re wasting away into nothing.”
As soon as Gracie returned to the kitchen she started helping Raven make dinner. The cake was going into the oven when Bash joined us. When Gracie greeted him he grumbled something unintelligible and dropped down in the chair between me and Willa.
“You didn’t drink that much last night, bro.” Bash shook his head and leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed as if he were going to go back to sleep right there. “You feeling sick too?”
“Nope. Just didn’t get to sleep until nearly six.” His eyes snapped open. “Who’s sick?”
“No one is sick,” Raven assured him as she placed a mug of black coffee down in front of him. “You wouldn’t have been up until six this morning if you weren’t trying so fucking hard to get me pregnant.”
There should have been fog in the room the way the temperature dropped so quickly on one side of the table and while it got scorching hot on the other. I watched as Bash’s face paled while Hawk’s turned blood red, his nostrils flaring. I gritted my teeth, not sure how I felt about Raven’s accusation and who I was going to protect if—when—Hawk reached for Bash to beat his brains out.
Raven was obviously good mother material. The way she had taken over as Lexa’s mother figure even though she had and still was struggling to accept the fact that Bash had had a kid with someone else, proved that to me. The thought of Raven pregnant, however, just didn’t sit well with me. Yes, I knew she had sex—had actually walked in on her and Bash just a few weeks ago. That didn’t mean I wanted even more proof of the girl I thought of as my sister actually having sex.
If I was having those feelings then I knew that Hawk—and any of her other three brothers—wasn’t going to take it well either. It wasn’t going to matter that Bash was the MC’s president.
“Raven…” Bash started but she cut him off with a glare that would freeze over an active volcano.
“Don’t try to make excuses. I’ve known for a while now that you were trying, but by then it was too late to do anything to stop you.” Raven slammed her hand down on the table making Gracie jump and Willa flinch. “Congratulations. You can stop trying now.”
And she walked away, leaving a piece of glossy paper on the table.
Chapter 9
Willa
Four pairs of angry eyes turned toward Bash, mine included. How could he do something like that to anyone, let alone Raven—the woman he said he loved more than life itself?
Before I could stop myself I was demanding an answer to that question.
I jumped to my feet and turned toward him. I’d never been so angry with Bash before in my life. In the fifteen months we had lived under the same roof we had become as close as brother and sister and we had confided in each other about nearly everything that was important to us. There had been times when I’d wanted to scream at him and even kick his ass a few times but I’d never been so close to murdering my surrogate brother until right this minute.
“How could you do that to her?” I found myself yelling instead of asking the question rationally.
As if there weren’t three other people in the room giving him the stare of death, two of which could probably break every bone in his
body without even really trying, Bash stood and glared down at me. That glare didn’t hide from me the complete and total fear in those eyes shooting lightning down at me. “I need for her to be pregnant. With that connection to hold us together I know I won’t lose her again.”
“Didn’t you think she should have a say in when she got pregnant?” I poked my finger into his hard chest. “It’s her body; she’s the one who will have to carry that baby for nine months and then push it out. You took all of the choice away from her. Whatever connection you might have had with her just got a lot thinner.”
His jaw clenched so hard I was sure he was going to break off a few teeth and I hoped he did. “Fuck…” he muttered under his breath and turned to glare out the kitchen window.
“You are such a fucking prick sometimes, Bash,” I yelled at him as I turned and left the kitchen.
I found Raven in the room I shared with Lexa. She was sitting on the rug in front of the bed playing with the dollhouse that she had bought my niece just days after Lexa and I had moved in. She had a smile on her face as she played with the three-year-old but it didn’t reach her olive-jade eyes, which were bright with a mixture of stormy emotions. In the short time I had known her I’d found out that it took a lot to make Raven cry. She didn’t like to get emotional about anything. So if she was close to tears then this was really upsetting her.
Or maybe it was the pregnancy hormones?
When I stepped into the room her head snapped up and her gaze turned a little less friendly when she saw me. She was still struggling with the whole idea of me living in the same house, alone with Bash for so long. I didn’t know how to prove to her that Bash and I would never have slept together even if there had been chemistry.
I sat down beside Lexa and picked up one of the dolls still on the floor between the two other females. “Wanna talk about it?”
“I’ve been dying to talk to Flick about all of it. She could help me through this, help me figure out how to handle this…” Her chin trembled for a few seconds before she bit her lip and shook her blonde head. “But she’s not here and I have no idea where she is or if she’s even okay.”
I nodded, knowing that Felicity’s running away was hurting her. Her best friend hadn’t told her about the biggest kind of tragedy and she felt as if she had failed her friend. “I’m sure she’s okay, Rave. She just needs some time to herself. You could talk to me, though. I’ve never been pregnant before and I don’t know what I would do if I were in your shoes right now… Probably cut the prick’s dick off if a guy did that to me…” I glanced at Lexa to apologize for my bad language but she wasn’t even paying attention to us. Her imagination had kicked in and she was off in her own little world with her dolls inside the dollhouse.
“You must think I’m an idiot for not realizing what he was doing sooner.” She grimaced and shrugged. “In the past he was always responsible for protecting us. He always wore something to keep me from getting pregnant… Honestly, back then I was so sure that we were going to be together forever that I started to resent those stupid condoms. I wanted his baby and thought that maybe if I did get pregnant, my brothers would go easier on him since he was the father of their niece or nephew.”
“That might have gotten him killed more than protected him.”
Raven laughed but it sounded hollow. “Yeah, I realized that as soon as I saw him in the hospital after Jet got finished with him. I took one look at how badly my brother had beaten him and knew that if we had gotten pregnant Bash would have been in the morgue instead of ICU.”
Remembering how bad Bash had looked days after that beating I shuddered at how he must have looked right after it had happened. “Bash said he didn’t try to fight back.”
“Jet said the same thing. Bash took his punishment and didn’t make a sound.” Raven reached for Lexa and pulled her onto her lap. “Which was why I couldn’t understand why he had left me… Why he would stay away. I thought that Jet had beaten his love for me out of him. I wouldn’t have blamed Bash if Jet had.”
“He didn’t,” I assured her. “Bash loves you more than anything or anyone.”
Her face closed up and she didn’t speak for nearly a full minute. “I love him, but I don’t know how to handle this. I don’t know how to feel about being pregnant with a baby I wasn’t ready for. Our relationship is still so rocky. I’m trying to learn to trust him again.”
“Forget about Bash for the moment. Don’t worry about him and just concentrate on you and that baby growing inside of you. Figure out what you want and screw everything else.” I stood and lifted Lexa into my arms. “Go for a drive and clear your head. If you ask Spider nicely he won’t let Bash near you for as long as you need.”
I left her sitting there, a thoughtful look on her face. I carried Lexa downstairs and sat her on the couch in the living room before turning the TV and Netflix on so that she could watch Daniel Tiger. I heard raised voices coming from the kitchen and hurried in there to stop anyone from killing anyone.
I found Gracie standing between Hawk and Bash. Bash wasn’t attempting to defend himself while Hawk called him all kinds of nasty names. Gracie had her hands on Hawk’s chest, the only thing keeping him from setting her out of his way and tearing his MC’s president into a billion little pieces.
What really surprised me was that Spider was still sitting at the table, drinking a beer now as if he were watching a show on TV. It obviously didn’t bother him that Hawk was about to eviscerate his best friend. “Enough,” I yelled as I put myself between Gracie and Bash¸ adding just a little more protection to the beast of a man standing behind me. “Everyone just calm down and take a deep breath. Hawk, you knew that Bash and Raven were together so you can’t exactly be surprised that she’s pregnant.”
His cheeks turned pink and if the situation hadn’t been so serious I would have laughed at the fact that he was blushing. Of course it was a mixture of rage and the thoughts of his sister actually having sex, but still, Hawk Hannigan blushing? Hilarious. “She didn’t exactly agree to get pregnant, Willa.”
“That doesn’t mean that she didn’t consent to the sex. Nothing is ever a hundred percent effective and that’s the chance you take when you have sex. So chill out and worry more about the fact that your sister is struggling to feel happy about having a baby instead of offing the baby’s father.” Hawk seemed to relax a little and Gracie pushed just hard enough on his chest to make him take a few steps back and I breathed a sigh of relief. Murder averted.
At least for the moment.
The sound of tires squealing in the driveway told me that Raven had taken my advice, which surprised the hell out of me. I figured she might do the complete opposite of what I had suggested.
“She must have gone out the front,” Hawk said as he glanced out the kitchen window, watching his sister peel away in her Dodge Challenger. The thing was an SRT and fast as hell, so I could understand why he was looking concerned.
“Damn,” Bash exclaimed from behind me and I heard him pick up the keys to his bike.
“Oh no you don’t,” I snapped at him and snatched the keys from his hand before he could attempt to stop me. “She needs some time to clear her head. If you go after her the two of you will either kill each other or screw each other’s brains out. Neither are exactly helpful to the situation at the moment.”
The look on Bash’s face would have terrified the piss out of a lesser person. I glared back at him determined to stand my ground no matter how big of a rage he went into. I was standing between him and his lifeline but Raven needed some time to herself or she was going to go off the deep end.
“She’s driving crazily, Willa. What if she wrecks?” He raked a hand through his long black hair, his eyes full of lightning in his worry for Raven.
“Raven will be fine.” I put his keys in my pocket, knowing that he wouldn’t dare attempt to take them if they were in such a personal place.
“Fuck you, Willa.” Bash walked around me and faced Spider. “Go m
ake sure she’s okay. She will at least listen to you.”
I watched as Spider considered his friend for a long moment, his face emotionless except for the look in his black eyes. He stood slowly, making his height all that much more dramatic when he was finally standing straight. “I’ll take care of her. Like I always do. Getting really tired of having to wipe up her tears over you though, fucker.”
Raven
I was driving around with no set destination. My stomach was roiling and my hands were still shaking slightly. It was hard to figure out what I was feeling. For the last three days I’d kept the knowledge to myself about the baby, still too stunned to accept that the doctor had confirmed my suspected pregnancy with an ultrasound.
Last night after Bash had made love to me until I was exhausted I had realized that it really was true and that he had set me up to get pregnant from the very first time we had been together again. I had been angrier at myself than at him at first. The fact that I hadn’t realized he was deliberately not using protection had made me feel all kinds of stupid for trusting my body to a man that had already shattered my heart once. Then my rage at Bash had taken over and I’d been pissed off ever since.
Bash claimed to love me so why was he taking all the choices away from me? There was a difference in loving someone and being a possessive control freak. For me the two didn’t go hand in hand and I wasn’t going to put up with it.
The real problem however was that I was struggling hard to wrap my mind around the fact that I was pregnant. One minute I was excited. I was having Bash’s baby. That was something that I had always wanted. The next minute I was an angry mess. I wasn’t ready, nowhere close to being ready. How dare Bash take my right to choose when we got pregnant away like that? It wasn’t fair. Plus Lexa and I were still stumbling around getting to know each other. I wanted her to be more settled in, comfortable with me as her stepmother before I added another child to the equation.