King had helped Eugene make some custom furniture for our sunken living room so that everything felt rustic and mismatched in a way that worked with the space.
From the bookshelves taking up every spare inch of wall space in the small home to the painting Nova had done for us of a girl holding an apple falling into a waiting palm and the massive print we had hanging in the hallway of King and me on our trip to Graceland, this home screamed us.
And I loved it more than I could ever say.
I’d been married to a man for seven years before I’d met King. We’d lived in a big, expensive house in Vancouver next to other big, expensive houses filled with beautiful, expensive things, and I’d never once felt at home there the way I did in Shamble Wood Cottage with King.
It made me understand in a way I never could have before that it was people who made a home.
I was a girl living a dream she’d never before thought possible to dream, and I didn’t feel any shame in glorying in it.
Softly, I sang along with Elvis as he crooned over the speakers, swaying my hips as I put the dough to chill in the fridge and started in on making the caramel sauce. I smiled when the door opened quietly, but quickly stilled when the air didn’t charge with King’s presence.
Trying to be discreet, I carefully moved my hand along the counter to grip the handle of the butcher’s knife I’d used to cut through the apples and called out easily, “Thanks, honey. Did you get them, okay?”
The old wood floors creaked behind me. Before I could even monitor my thoughts, I was dipping low and sweeping in a circle to bring up the knife to the groin of the unknown assailant. Less than a second later, a gun pointed at my temple, a cold, hard kiss of metal with a deadly mouth.
We froze, suspended in a stalemate for one long breath.
Then the man relaxed his grip on his gun and chuckled. “Fuck me, Cress. That how you always greet visitors?”
I peered up through my dishevelled hair to see Wrath grinning down at me from his awesome height. The adrenaline flooding my system ebbed and was replaced with hyper relief.
I laughed as I dropped the knife, and he offered me a huge, tattooed hand to help me stand. I brushed the flour off the handle and dropped the weapon to the counter before I wrapped the biker in my arms.
“Priest,” I explained into his rock-hard torso, used to hugging men who seemed like slabs of marble. “He and King made it their mission to educate me in the finer arts of brutality should I ever need them.”
He patted my back, a bit too hard even though I knew he tried to temper his strength. “Glad to hear it. How’s it hangin’, Queenie?”
“Like you care,” I teased as I pulled away. “You just want to know how Kylie is.”
His smile was beautiful because everything about Wrath was beauty incarnate. If I wasn’t so head over heels in love with my own biker, I might’ve been struck dumb by the perfection of Wrath Marsden’s features. Combined with his looming height and quilted abundance of muscles, he had to be one of the most intimidating men I’d ever seen.
Yet I couldn’t think of him as anything but a great big teddy bear after seeing the lengths he went to in order to protect the woman he loved. The smile carved into his face, lighting his luminescent blue-grey eyes and creasing his bearded cheeks was a prime example of that.
“She good?” he asked, instead of protesting my comment.
Nothing meant more to him than Kylie.
I wiped my hands on a tea towel and stirred the melting sugar in the pot on the stove. “She misses you and her mum, but whenever I see her, she seems good. I think Eugene’s got a soft spot for her, and she’s made great friends with Lila.”
“Good,” he grunted, leaning his six-foot-six frame against the counter. “Called ’im and they’re on their way now. I’ll take her out for a bit, bring her back, and then we can all grab some grub together?”
“Don’t worry about us. If you want that time with her, take it.”
“We don’t got a lotta people we can be ourselves with…It’d be nice to hang with you and King,” he admitted.
If he’d been anyone else, I would have hugged him again. Wrath had brought his girlfriend Kylie to us a few weeks ago to protect her from, of all people, her father, Reaper Holt, the MC President of the Berserkers, who would rather see her killed than see her with any of his brothers.
It was fucked up, and we’d been only too happy to help them out. After all, if anyone knew what it was like to have the world against them, it was King and me.