“Someone tried to drive their car through the glass,” the young girl, all of eighteen, said from behind the checkout counter.
I blinked, taking another look at the boarded up window, and saw the damage that was concealed by the racks of clothes on the outside, and the rack of Cheetos on the inside.
“Damn,” I said. “Was the guy drunk?”
The girl shook her head and pulled her phone out of her apron pocket.
“No. The lady had a gunshot wound or something to her chest and her foot jammed on the gas. Her son, who’s only seven, saved her life and ours. She almost hit us.” She showed the photo to me, turning her phone around without giving it up.
“Damn,” I repeated. “That’s impressive.”
The girl nodded and clicked the button that shut her phone’s screen off before shoving it back into her apron.
“It was. Kid deserves a gold medal or something.”
I, on the other hand, wondered why the hell she had a gunshot wound.
The picture she showed me didn’t have any bullet holes in the car, which meant that whatever had happened, had happened before she got into the car.
My mind went back to earlier as it tried to connect the dots, but whatever link I thought I could match up was gone the moment Raven’s hand brushed my dick.
It might’ve been accidentally, but she did it nonetheless.
“I’m sorry,” she rushed out as she steered the cart away from me.
I grunted in reply, trying to calm myself and my dick.
My dick, however, didn’t care that it was an accident. All it cared about was the fact that she’d touched it.
With her hand.
Her soft, small hand that would make my dick look massive if it was wrapped around it.
And her hand was so white, that it would stand out starkly against my bronzed skin.
Just the sight of her hand trying to make it around the girth…
“Well, are you coming or what?” Raven interrupted my fantasy.
I sighed.
“Yeah, yeah,” I replied, picking up my speed until I was directly behind her.
The crest of her ponytail, which was on the very top of her head, came up to my collarbone. I could see everything over her head, even the attention she drew from the men buying beer across the store.
“You know them?” I asked her, coming up to her side and glaring at the two of them.
They were both young, likely around Raven’s age of twenty-seven or so.
Both were quite good looking, but it was more than obvious that they didn’t have what it took to capture Raven’s attention, especially if the look she gave them before returning her gaze to me was anything to go by.
“They’re a couple of the tow truck drivers,” she replied. “Billy and…Matt? Mark? Mills? Hell, I can’t remember.”
I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t dare. She’d likely think I was laughing at her, and I most certainly didn’t want to piss her off.
I was still trying to decide what this feeling in my chest whenever she was around or I thought about her was.
It’d been there for months and hadn’t lessened in the time since she’d left. The moment I saw her today, though, it’d gotten stronger.
Became deeper.
“What do you need to get?” I asked her as we started into the produce aisle.
The store was set up in sections. When you walked in the door, the traffic flow was directed to the right and dumped directly into the produce section.
Raven obviously didn’t go for veggies, seeing as she’d sped right past them and straight into the cold section.
The first thing she grabbed was a gallon of chocolate milk, followed by three packages of those break-and-bake cookies, one package of canned biscuits, four packages of cheese and twelve Lunchables.
“You know this shit is filled with harmful ingredients like MSG, right?” I asked her, eyeing the processed cheese she threw into the cart with barely contained disgust.
“I don’t like to cook,” she said. “In fact, I would say I hate to cook. I suck at it. Hence the shit I don’t have to actually cook in order to eat.”
“Hmm,” I hummed. “You know, I could teach you how to cook. Travis is an excellent cook as well. Dante’s wife isn’t half bad, either.”
She ignored the offers and instead focused on an endcap that had marshmallows shaped like dinosaurs. Picking them up, she tossed them in the cart before replying.
“I’m not kidding. I can burn water. And toast. I’ve been known to occasionally burn my Pop-Tarts,” she said as she turned away from the cold section and directed her cart down the canned spaghetti aisle.
She stopped in front of the canned soups and picked up one that claimed to be ‘Beer and Cheese.’
“That looks…gross.” I chose the word carefully, specifically steering my vocabulary away from anything that might come off as sounding like it was vomit inducing.
The next thirty minutes went like this: she picked up unhealthy foods, I commented about their unhealthiness, and she put them into the cart anyway. It continued like that until she reached the end and moved to the check-out.
I grabbed a granola bar made of whole grain oats and nearly ran into her when she turned abruptly.
“Stay here,” she ordered. “Keep my place in line. I’m going to go grab some beer.”
I stayed, but made sure to keep her in my line of sight as I watched her move to the far wall and open the glass doors that held the beer.
Picking up a case of the cheapest beer ever made, she carried it awkwardly to where she’d parked her nearly overflowing cart.
Once she was close enough, I grabbed the case of beer from her and set it on the conveyor belt before walking up to the cashier and paying for my granola bar.
Once I had my change, I stood off to the side and let the grocery sacker, a young man about sixteen or seventeen, stuff the plastic bags so full that I was worried they’d break the moment I started carrying them up Raven’s stairs.
I didn’t say anything and nearly laughed when Raven pushed the boy away from her bags.
“Cold goes with cold,” she explained. “Boxes with boxes. Cans with cans. You don’t intermix them, and you certainly don’t put the bread in with fucking cans.”
The boy’s face reddened, and I saw them narrow.
“Don’t even think about it,” I murmured to the kid softly. “You won’t win this.”
He snapped his mouth shut on whatever rude thing he was about to say and then walked away without a backwards glance.
The checker who showed me the picture earlier on her phone started snickering. “You wouldn’t believe how many people have told him that already. I think he does it on purpose now. You have a very well behaved dog.”
I looked down at Raven’s dog, MM, and nodded. He was well behaved. Marky Mark looked to be a highly trained guard dog. Whoever lost him must have spent a lot of money on his training.
Without another word, we were walking out to the truck while Raven studied her receipt.
“I think they overcharged me for my pickles,” she muttered.
“Go back inside and tell them,” I suggested.
She shook her head.
“No,” she replied. “It’s just a dollar.”
I rolled my eyes and refrained from saying, ‘Then why’d you say anything about it at all?’
Wisely, I kept silent and loaded bags into to the truck’s bed, my mind thinking back to the one time, and only time ever, I’d questioned my wife about something very similar to what Raven had just commented on.
It’d been about a year into our marriage, and I’d gone with Abby to the grocery store, much the same way I’d just done with Raven.
We’d bought fifteen million cans of condensed soup and, on one single can out of the fifteen million we’d gotten, they’d charged us an extra dollar for.
We’d spent a total of fifty-two
dollars and forty-eight cents, and Abby had been livid.
She’d wanted me to go inside and show them my badge and force them to give me my dollar back.
I, on the other hand, had thought that was ridiculous and had loaded the bags in the truck, much like I’d just done, and ordered her into the truck.
She didn’t speak to me for a week for that one.
It’d only gotten worse over the three years we’d been married, and I’d learned to leave it fucking be.
In a last-ditch effort to save our marriage, I, being the dumbass that I was, got her pregnant.
That had not gone over well.
She’d been pissed about that as well, and although she carried the baby we made—one of the rare occasions that she actually gave me her pussy—she hated me. She wanted a divorce, and by the time I realized I wanted it to, we’d found out that we couldn’t divorce.
Not until Abby was no longer pregnant. Apparently, in the great state of Texas, if a woman is pregnant, she and her husband cannot divorce until after the child is born.
“What are you doing out there, catching flies?” Raven yelled from the cab.
I snapped my mouth shut and loaded the last bag into the back before I returned the cart to the buggy return.
My eyes caught on some movement at the back of the lot, and I nodded my head at the shadow.
The ‘shadow’ in question was Mig, a man who was a member of the Uncertain Saints with me.
He was doing some investigating tonight, hoping to catch the person who tried to shoot a few holes in us earlier. It was, of course, a long shot, but we were willing to try anything at this point.
Mig was one of the Saints members who was also a victim of the same identity theft attack that I was and he wasn’t very happy about it.
Mig was a wealthy man and owned quite a bit of stock in Konn Vodka, his father’s company. Although he had safeguards in place, he wasn’t exactly thrilled that he’d had to hire extra people to cover him in case anything got past his safeguards.
Mig was more of a proactive member of the Uncertain Saints rather than a sit back and wait kind of guy.
“Heeellllooooooo,” Raven sang from the front seat. “I kinda have to pee, and you’re taking forever.”
Giving a final nod to Mig, I walked to the driver’s side of the truck and dropped inside.
The moment my ass hit the seat, the smell of Raven filled my lungs.
I started to breathe in deeply, and she started to laugh.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I muttered. “Buckle up.”
She rolled her eyes but did it without question, placing her legs together this time forcing me to sit extra close to her.
However, before we’d even left the parking lot, I realized it wasn’t going to work.
“I need to get it into fourth, and it’s not going to happen with your legs right there. You’re gonna have to spread ‘em,” I informed her, patting her leg for emphasis.
She growled low in her throat, and I had to hide my smile to keep her from taking my head off.
“Fine,” she said, spreading her legs, her left leg pressed against mine on one side of the shifter, and her right leg on the other side of the shifter with her foot sharing the floorboard of the passenger side with Marky Mark. “Should’ve taken my car.”
“Your car is too small for my big ass,” I told her. “I’d be hitting my head on the roof of the car.”
“Travis has no problem getting in,” she offered.
I shrugged. “Travis is also about seven inches shorter than my six foot three,” I pointed out.
She stuck her tongue out at me.
The move, so innocent, set my blood on fire.
I gritted my teeth and faced forward, my eyes working ahead of me and behind me, but making a point of it to not to look at her again all the way back to her place.
She, of course, had no fucking clue what she was doing to me.
I nearly moaned when I shifted down into third.
Although, the first time I actually brushed against her when I’d shifted into third on our ride there, she’d jumped like a scalded cat.
This time, though, I got nothing more than a shiver.
A delicious, full-body shiver that had my eyes drawing to her perky breasts encased in that tight t-shirt that stretched like a second skin across her chest.
She chattered along about this and that trying to hide her nervousness until we arrived in her parking lot and, even then, she continued.
I shifted up into fourth and I felt her breath leave her chest in a rush.
I smiled when I saw the red light ahead, shifting down into third when I wouldn’t usually downshift.
Her pussy was so hot that I felt the heat radiating off her through her jeans onto my hand.
By the time we arrived at the parking lot, I’d not even heard the last five minutes of conversation.
Which was why the minute I exited the car, she surprised me with the topic of conversation.
“When I was fifteen, my best friend and I thought it’d be a good idea to break into our school to save the cats we were dissecting the next day,” Raven started, hefting up two bags in her good hand and starting for the stairs.
I picked up the rest of them and started after her, passing her on the stairs to make it to her apartment first.
Placing the sacks on the floor, I held my hands out for the keys.
“Why would you do that?” I asked. “They’re already dead.”
She handed me the keys and followed closely behind me as I walked into her place.
I checked all of the rooms and walked to the kitchen where I put her keys down on the counter in front of her.
She finally replied, picking the keys up and tossing them in the general vicinity of her purse, which was still on the couch.
“We knew they were already dead,” she amended. “What we didn’t know was that the school had an alarm.”
I blinked, leaning my hip against the counter.
“Every smart person would put an alarm in their house to protect themselves,” I informed her.
She stuck her tongue out once again, and my cock jumped in my pants.
I looked down at said cock, and realized that she would be able to see it if she dropped her eyes in that direction.
Luckily, she was too busy putting away her groceries to notice my hard on.
“We got in, lugged as many frozen cats out that we could, and were all the way at the back of the property when the first cop car came.”
“They arrest you?” I cut in.
She shook her head.
“No. Jessie and I ran,” she smiled whimsically. “Never caught us.”
“What was the point of this story?” I wondered aloud.
She narrowed her eyes at me and tossed an empty plastic bag at my face.
“You forgot to bring my beer in,” she said haughtily.
I grinned and started for the door.
“Make sure you offer Mig an invitation to eat when you go down there,” Raven yelled at my retreating back.
I stopped and turned to look at her.
“You saw him?” I asked.
She nodded, grinning.
Shaking my head, I made my way out of her apartment, my eyes scanning the darkness surrounding the parking lot as I went.
The moment my feet hit level ground, Mig’s silent form appeared beside me.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Not a damn thing,” he replied. “I’m headed home.”
“Annie call?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“No. My mom’s keeping her busy,” he replied. “Gotta get home to check on the dogs.”
I laughed.
Mig had gotten a new dog about a month ago. A new dog who was pregnant, unbeknownst to Mig, when he picked her out. A very pregnant new dog, who had puppies about a week or so
after he brought her home.
When Mig had tried to take them back, Annie had thrown the mother of all hissy fits saying that she’d ‘bonded’ with the dogs, making it nearly impossible to get rid of them.
“You got the tests run on them, didn’t you?” I asked.
He nodded.
“One hundred percent Golden Retrievers. When I called the previous owners about the dog that knocked her up, they asked to have her back since they didn’t realize that the pregnancy took. I told them no, and they refused to hand over the info on the male,” he explained.
I snorted.
“Fucking lucky,” I said. “And I’m assuming you found the sire?”
Mig gave me a Cheshire cat grin.
“I sure as fuck did,” he said. “Gave the owner of the sire pick of the litter like he was promised, and I got the papers from him to sell the puppies. Five hundred bucks a pup is the lowest they sell for. These dogs, though, were of championship lines, meaning I can sell the puppies for upwards of a grand if I could only get Annie to let go of them.”
“She’s not going to let you,” I promised him.
He snorted. “Don’t I know it. Anyway, gotta go.”
I waved him off and grabbed the beer out of the back of the truck before taking the steps two at a time.
The moment I opened the door to Raven’s apartment, my stomach immediately jumped in anticipation at the smell that greeted me.
Chapter 6
The beer and the beard made me do it.
-Raven’s secret thoughts
Wolf
“What are you making?” I asked her as I moved around the counter that separated her living room from the kitchen.
“Give me one of those,” she ordered, holding out her casted hand. “And Alice Spring’s Chicken. I actually do make this one dish. But, that’s really the extent of my culinary talents.”
“Smells fuckin’ awesome. Mig can’t eat.” I ripped open the box and handed her one before taking the case to the fridge.
She stopped me before I could make it all the way.
“You’re staying, right?” she asked.
Was that hopefulness I heard in her voice?
I nodded my head. “Sure am.”
“I got your favorite beer.” She pointed.
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