It was brand new, the realtor had told me, and all I could think about was the five of us on it, naked and writhing and breaking it in.
God, there was something wrong with my head. I was so damned sex obsessed nowadays. Any problem I had could be cured by a deep dish dicking, it seemed.
“There’s a really great garage over there,” Kingston said, pointing at a building near the tree line. “It has enough room for a car collection, and we could work on customizing something for you.”
“Maybe add bullet proof glass to an Audi,” Valen said, lifting his brows.
“Or a fold down bed in a Range Rover,” Archer grinned, then looked at Mom and Nat and sputtered nervously. “I mean for camping. So you didn’t need a tent.”
I rolled my eyes at him, but laughed.
“We could add extra thick panels to a Mercedes G Wagon,” Ryker suggested. “Those things are built like tanks to begin with. Nobody could ever break into one if we tricked it out.”
“All of it sounds good,” I said and took a deep breath. “I mean that. Everything sounds amazing. But please, wait until I move in before we make any big decisions.”
I pretended to be annoyed with all their exuberance, but I couldn’t hide the truth for too long.
My heart was filled with joy.
CHAPTER23
We tookpossession of the house the next day and I got to move in. Ivan came with me and said he would stick around for a week or two, as long as he could stay away from his current work without it being noticeable.
Amara was with me as well. She took the rooms next to mine, and had a few of the guest suites set aside for a full time security detail. They weren’t taking any chances with the Organization. They weren’t giving them any way to snatch me back and send me somewhere farther this time.
Some of the men I’d seen in the club had been from other countries, and some hadn’t spoken English. I had no doubt that I could be sent anywhere around the globe if they wanted me to disappear.
I also had no doubt they would just shoot me in the face and bury my body somewhere if they really wanted me gone.
So thank god for security, and thank god for a guard dog like Amara by my side. She was worth ten of the men I’d seen guarding the Organization’s club and I had no doubt she could fend them off long enough for me to stay safe.
“You seem happy here,” Mom said as we were moving my things in. “I mean beyond the fact that it’s an actual freaking mansion, you seem content with him.”
“I am,” I said and smiled to myself. “I’m content with them, too. I have my father back in my life and I have four guys who are devoted to me. I couldn’t be happier.”
“I didn’t want to ask what was going on, but I picked up on it,” Mom said and paused. “Are you okay, though? Are you doing this to fight back against what happened with Reg?”
“You mean am I dating four guys at once because of Reg?” I asked. “God, no. Not even close.”
“I just wondered. Some people process trauma differently, and this might—”
“Not everything is a trauma response, mother,” I snapped. “You’ve been watching too many TikToks. Sometimes things happen and you didn’t plan for them, and you didn’t expect them, but when it came along you realized that’s what you’ve been missing all along. That’s all that happened with them.”
I still simmered with unprocessed anger about her, and sometimes it sprang up like that, unbidden and uncontrollable.
“As long as you’re happy, I can understand,” she said. “It’s not like I have much place to say anything, I know what Reg did and I know you must think I’m a monster for not doing anything about it at the time.”
“You didn’t know,” I said, and I really wanted to believe that so I repeated it without question. I was afraid to ask her if she did or not, definitively. I didn’t want an answer to it, in the end. I didn’t want to deal with the reply if she had suspected and done nothing. “You can’t fix things if you didn’t know they were broken.”
“Did you shoot him for Nat?” she asked, surprising me. We’d never talked about that aspect of it before.”
“This is a pretty heavy conversation,” I said. “Why don’t we put these boxes in my room before we start piling on more?”
She agreed, and I let the anger go. I had to, for my own state of mind. Even if she had known, it was all over now. Reg was gone and Nat was safe, that had been my end goal all along. One day I’d have time to hash it out with her, but not now.
Luckily we didn’t need to finish that conversation just then, Ivan intervened and took Mom’s boxes out of her arms, leaving me to carry my own. I was a little annoyed at that, and caught on that he was just looking for a reason to talk to her again.
Cute. But again, gross.