Page 55 of Cross To Bear

“See, it all worked out in the end,” he told me in a low voice. “You just have to trust us, Maddie. Trust us and we’ll have you feeling so good.”

Part of me wanted to protest that, fight against his assertions, but when they laid me down on the bed, I was too full of feel good hormones to do anything other than snuggle down into each one of them.

I just intended to lie there for a little while, rest my eyes for a minute, before working out how to get home. To pack myself back up behind the barriers I needed to erect again, but it didn’t happen. Instead, I dropped down into the most luxurious feeling of satisfaction, and in some ways that was the greatest pleasure of the day. To not want for one single thing as I was sucked into sleep.

That feeling of peace—it stayed with me right up until I opened my eyes again, not to the darkness of night, but the thin grey light of dawn. I jerked up on the bed, or would’ve if I’d been allowed to move. Each man was snuggled in tight against me, arms crisscrossing my body, keeping me right where they put me.

But I couldn’t stay.

Blame it on the rush of endorphins, chemicals that swirled through your blood to make pain far less intense, or just good old post coital bliss, I’d been feeling things I had no right to. So I wriggled and wriggled, dislodging one man, then another before fighting my way free.

“Maddie…”

Hawk’s eyes opened just a crack, and I wondered then if he’d been dreaming of me, just as he said he had when… I abruptly cut that thought off. No good would come from confirming or denying that, so I just smiled at him and said, “I need to go to the loo.”

He nodded, eyes falling closed again, head rolling back onto the pillow, looking for all the world like Cayden’s twin, one dark, one light.

And perfect. Let’s not forget perfect.

Which was why I scrambled off the bed and picked up Cayden’s discarded shirt, wrapping it around me like a dressing gown, before slipping out of the room.

I needed to find my phone, get dressed, and then get a goddamn Uber home, stat. Anything to quieten the frantic swirl in my head. What the hell happened last night? What did it mean? I knew the answers to every question I had, I just didn’t like them. I was looking around me as I crept through the living room, sure I’d put my phone down somewhere, when I heard a dark voice.

“Looking for something?”

I hadn’t seen Razor in the darkness. It took him flicking on the nearby lamp to make clear that he was sitting alone on one of the armchairs. He held up a familiar looking phone, a sharp smile on his lips.

“Ah, yeah—”

“Looks like you had some fun last night.” His eyes slid down my body. “Did the boys look after you?”

“After driving me half mad.” The words came out far too fast for me to stop, some of the frustration I’d felt still there in my tone. “But yes—”

“Well, then we need to get you ready for today.” When he got to his feet, I saw that he’d stripped down to just a pair of jeans, his chest and all his tattoos on display, his bare feet peeking out from under the cuffs. “Don’t go looking at me like that. Not yet, at least. You can look at me like that all you like tonight when I take you out.”

“Oh, well, I thought—”

“Bjorn’s waiting for you at the shop. Got something planned for you.”

“I need to get home.” That grin appeared, sharp as a knife blade in the darkness, as if I was being terribly predictable. “To have a shower, get clean clothes.”

“We’ve got a perfectly good shower here. Clean, too. And as for clothes?” He nodded to a shopping bag on the coffee table. “Got them too. Everything you need is here, Maddie, so…”

He held out his hand like it was a battle flag, waved right before we were about to go to war. It was either a warning or a call to arms, and I had to see if I was brave enough for one or scared off by the other. That look in his eyes, that made clear he knew I was prevaricating, hovering on the edge of a precipice, wanting to listen to the very sensible part of me that told me to back the hell away.

If I listened to that internal voice, I would never have allowed myself to get within ten feet of any of them.

So I stepped closer, loosening my grip on my shirt, watching his eyes glow brighter as he spied the slender gap in the shirt and the flesh that it revealed.

“So what now?” I asked him, sliding my hand in his.

“Now I get you ready for my brother.”

Chapter 33

Razor

Our girl was getting ready to bolt. I saw it in the whites of her knuckles as Maddie clutched that shirt tighter around her. I caught her looking around for the stuff she’d discarded when she came inside, but she wouldn’t find them. I knew she’d react like this, wanting to slip out the front door and go scuttling back to her safe space.

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