AllFreeNovel
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I watched him piece the car together over the course of a summer. And when he’d finished it and he’d taken it for its first real drive, I’d been the girl in the passenger seat. He’d been home alone, and I’d been “reading” out front.
Except I’d been “reading” the same book for three months because my gaze could only focus on Crew instead of the words typed onto the page.
Warm hands settled on my shoulders as Crew crowded my back. “We’ll have to take her out together.” His lips pressed against the side of my neck.
A shudder rolled down my back, and I found myself leaning back against him.
Clearing his throat, Crew turned us around. “Kellan, can you give Hazel a quick tour of the house?”
Kellan grinned and held out a tattooed hand. “Let’s go, sugar.”
I wound my hand around his and let him pull me through the garage and up a set of stairs. When he opened the door at the top, it led to a large mudroom. Kellan didn’t hesitate to toe his boots off, and I kicked off the plain slip ons the hospital had given me. My feet met warm tile.
“Heated floors,” Kellan explained. “We can control everything through an app on our phones. Rhett turned them on before we left the hospital. We tend not to wear shoes in the house. Jude bitches about the shit on our shoes, and he even made us watch some YouTube documentary.” Kellan grimaced and shuddered. “But if you’re more comfortable?—”
“I’m fine. Really. I actually prefer being barefoot,” I admitted. Something about shoes felt like a cage for my toes.
Kellan’s smile was soft and indulgent. “Let’s continue the tour.” He opened the door separating the mudroom from the rest of the house, giving me my first glimpse of what lay inside the sprawling mansion.
Three steps in, I jerked to a stop, my eyes going wide as I took in the cornflower blue cabinets and gleaming white quartz countertops. Stainless steel appliances shone under industrial pendant lights hanging over a large island with a butcher block countertop and a line of barstools pulled up to one side. A large window overlooked the side yard with a round, glass table and five chairs around it.
Once upon a time, I was a girl who loved baking and cooking. Walking into this space felt like coming home.
“You like it?” Kellan seemed uncertain.
I turned to him with a beaming grin. “I love it.”
He exhaled, relief slumping his shoulders as he smiled back and pulled me into a large dining room with a shiny mahogany table and matching chairs set for ten. Next was a large family room with a sectional couch that looked like it could swallow a pack whole. Across from it hung a TV screen bigger than any other I’d seen.
An honest-to-goodness library boasted floor to ceiling bookshelves and leather sofas that begged me to curl up and read. Through a set of French doors attached to the room was an office that Kellan said Crew mostly used.
There was a formal sitting room that led out onto a large deck overlooking the woods beyond the garden, as well as an in-ground pool and connected hot tub.
As we finished up the ground level part of the tour, I had to ask. “You guys all work for the FBI, right?”
Kellan nodded, pausing at the landing for the stairs.
“I don’t think I knew the government paid this well,” I mumbled, looking around at the crystal chandelier hanging over my head.
His lips quirked into a half-smile. “They don’t. We technically pool all of our incomes into a singular pack fund, but the bulk of that account is coming from Crew and Rhett.”
I frowned, confused.
“Crew went into law enforcement, but he’s still a shareholder of his parents’ company,” he explained. “He gets dividends every quarter from that investment, and it’s more than enough to keep us all living like kings, to be honest.”
“Oh.” That made sense.
“Rhett’s parents are old money and he had a seven-figure trust fund that also went into the account when we formalized our pack status,” Kellan added. “It’s Jude and I that are the slackers.”
“Don’t say that.” I shot him a glare.
He grinned. “It’s all right, sugar. It took both Jude and me a while to accept that we’re a pack, and that means sharing everything together. When you’ve been shot at and taken the risks we have in our job, you learn pretty quickly that shit like bank account balances don’t matter.”
I made a soft, distressed noise at the reminder that their lives contained more than a little violence.
Kellan winced and pulled me against his chest. “Ah, shit. Sorry, sugar. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“It’s fine,” I lied and pushed a fake smile back onto my lips. “Let’s keep going.”
