Eat Crow (Cheap Thrills 6)

The woman remembered embarrassing things she’d done while she was sleeping! That’s how big a problem it was.

Me: Christ, tell her to stop oversharing with everyone. She’s only going to regret it tomorrow and hide every time she thinks about it now.

Mace: Just be grateful I’m not recording them trying different things in her mouth to see what happens. She has a pickle.

It buzzed again almost immediately after I received his text.

Mace: No, wait, she had a pickle.

Me: Hide the wine.

Mace: They finished it all. By the way, your kittens are cute.

Me: You’re not having any.

Mace: I’ll take the tiny gray one if you don’t hurry the fuck up and save me.

Me: Noted.

“That’s some conversation you’re having there,” Alex mused as we pulled to a stop. Looking around us, I saw we were parked at the side of the road behind the other vehicles. “We need to go on foot from here.”

Patting down my vest and feeling along my belt, I made sure I had everything I was going to need. Maybe it was superstition, perhaps it was just to prepare me mentally, I didn’t know, but it felt like I had to do it tonight.

I was good, I hadn’t forgotten anything.

“Ava decided Bexley needed wine, so she took some over, and they’re having a ho-mance,” I told him as we waited for our instructions from DB.

“Poor bastard,” Alex chuckled. “What the hell’s a ho-mance?”

“It’s like a bromance, except with hoes. They invited Mace to join in, but apparently, he’s a party pooper.”

He wasn’t, but it wasn’t my story to tell. Mace was going through a lot, what with his dad in prison after being convicted of murder and all of the other shit going on in his life. I think at this point, the only things keeping him sane were Ava, his sister, his business, and his friends. Aside from them, he didn’t have a lot going on to make him laugh, and my heart broke for the guy.

Just then, DB sent a text out to us. We were going in.

And that’s when I made a mistake: I put my phone on silent and switched off the vibration notifications.

I just didn’t realize it was a mistake until I took it out of my pocket later.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Bexley

“Do you hear anything?” Ava whispered.

An hour ago, Mace had jumped up and put both of us both in the bathtub with a comforter over the top of us, and then he’d disappeared and come back with the kittens and Prince, followed by a pissed off Doyle. We hadn’t heard a thing since.

And I’d like to point out at this juncture that wine breath wasn’t nice, and I was stuck under a comforter in close confinement with Ava, who’d helped me consume two bottles of the stuff.

“No, all I can hear is the kittens and Doyle panting,” I said back as quietly as I could, then jerked my head away from the fumes of my breath. “Oh, jeez, that packs a punch, doesn’t it? It didn’t taste as bad as it smells.”

“I know. I keep trying to get away from it, but it’s following me,” she agreed, jerking her face as far back as she could.

Lifting the edge of the comforter, I almost moaned a the cool, wine breath and stench-free air hit me full on. Granted, I could smell the litter box that we had for Prince and the smell of the baby poop that needed to be cleaned out of their nesting box, but even that smelled better than wine breath.

Seeing my face, Doyle let out a faint whine and pushed his nose against me. “It’s okay, baby. You might not want to get too close, though. My breath will take the fur off your face.”

Did he heed the warning? Did he hell. That big bastard pushed his head under the edge of the comforter I was holding up and managed to move his bulky body so that he was sitting in the bath on our legs.