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A chill ran down Bree’s back, and she wondered if those were nature or nurture because as sweet as Aiden and Jane were, there were times when the darkness washed over them. The neighborhood gossips would sayWhat did you expect with a mother like Misty, but Bree had shared more than a glass of wine with the woman and wasn’t about to blame her. Even with dropping out at sixteen, Misty had made her way with a sharp mind and street smarts.
“Then I’ll let him in, but I’m not opening my door to anyone until I know who they are,” Bree countered and realized she was arguing with a five-year-old that came to her waist and probably weighed the same as her left thigh. “Go sit, and eat your snack.”
His jaw tightened, and the sweet boy shook a balled fist at her.
“Excuse me, I am not one of your little friends, sir,” her mother’s voice somehow coming out of Bree’s mouth even though it was thousands of miles away. The child, knowing salt from sugar, stomped his way initially toward her kitchen until her mother appeared again. “Aiden Winter, since when are you disrespectful in Auntie Bree’s home?”
“Sorry,” he grumbled as he sat, with arms crossed, at the table.
Gathering herself, she unlocked her door and stepped out onto the small porch, almost running directly into a firm chest. She glancing up, the height difference smacked her proverbially in the face. He hadn’t seemed this tall or firm from across the street. Then again, the T-shirt under his leather coat was practically outlining every dip and cut between his muscles. The smell of sandalwood and teak contrasted with the well-worn leather as she stepped back to not get caught in the mesmerizing testosterone throwing out pheromones meant to disable her completely.
“You the one with my kids?” The gruff tone and lack of salutation could have been misconstrued as grief knocking off the man’s social graces, but Bree was pretty sure this was his way of saying hello.
“And you are?” she countered, not about to be spoken to any kind of way, especially when her pseudo niece and nephew’s lives were in the balance—even if her heart rate was cresting a thousand beats a minute and she had a reasonable fear that the man’s hand could capture her throat faster than she could react to move.
“Don’t play dumb with me, bitch—”
“Oh, and that’s not going to fly either.” She held up her hand, not about to give an inch to this man. Anxiety turned her stomach as every inch of her skin rose as if the temperature had dropped fifty degrees in the last two minutes.
“You’re trembling. Keep it up and I might get confused and install a pole for you.”
Bree fisted her hand to stop the motion and let out a long breath because the last thing she wanted was to have him see he’d done anything to her. “Don’t offer me a pole without expecting me to shove it somewhere highly uncomfortable.”
“Whatever makes your titties perk,” he said, giving her a halfhearted shrug before trying to shove her to the side.
“Did you just put your hand on me?” she snapped, grabbing his hand, only to see how much it dwarfed her own. Scrappy was one thing, stupid was another, and her mother didn’t raise a fool.
His smoke-colored eyes locked on hers as he twisted her hand around and somehow had his fingers intertwining with hers. He pinned her hand to the trim outside her front door as his body shifted, locking her to the doorjamb, causing Bree’s heart to stop. Jane’s story of Misty yelling until she passed out made a hell of a lot more sense. The bit of scruff on his chin accented his full lips as he pulled them in just enough to wet them with the bright pink of his tongue, and every fiber in her body was in conflict. How could she be turned on and pissed off in the same heartbeat?
“Now,” he growled, his other hand resting on her hip as his thumb found the space between the waistband of yoga pants and the camisole she wore. The baggy sweatshirt might as well be back in her closet because the man was literally undressing her on the front step. “Normally I’d be all in for a full-on wrestling match with a woman with curves as dangerous as yours, but right now you could bat those pretty brown eyes and pout those lips and it means as much to me as my prez whipping it out. No matter your deepest fantasy, I don’t swing that way, and I hate sharing a prime piece of ass. In other words, it’s an annoyance slowing me down.”
“As if I’d let—”
“Uptight women like you don’t let,” he said, the scruff of his beard brushing along her jawline as he nipped her ear, sending heat rushing over her skin as if she’d slipped into a warm bubble bath. “They usually fake indignation, then crawl on their knees begging. Let’s not break this beautiful friendship we’ve created.”
“Trust me”—she scowled, glancing over to the patch that readICEand tightening her jaw.—“Ice, the last thing we are is friends.”
“Good,” he purred and leaned back so his smokey gray eyes could visually scan her trapped body. “I never believed that whole friends-with-benefits thing truly works.”
“You need to take several steps backward,” she said, finally finding her free hand and placing it in the center of his chest like a damn moron. The fucking thing refused to push any harder than what was necessary to let the heat of his body warm her palm as she did her own scan of the firm muscles and dip between his pecs.
A swath of headlights cut between the two of them as an older minivan pulled into her driveway, the invasion enough to have him taking a step backward and holding his hands up in surrender as she wrapped her arms around her belly. The porch light illuminated enough she could see the tribal-style tattoo designed with sharp lines cutting through the suntanned skin on his neck.
“Look, woman—”
“Don’t talk to Auntie Bree that way, Daddy.” Jane nudged her way past Bree and stood, two fisted with her chin raised, staring up at him.
“What did you say to me?” he questioned, dropping to one knee and allowing the mighty warrior princess to gather his shirt in one hand as she pulled him nose to nose with her.
“Auntie Bree is my friend,” the little girl growled, until Ice started tickling her, holding her around her torso and flipping her upside down as little-girl giggles filled the air.
The man had gone from Yes, Daddy to Ward fucking Cleaver in about two seconds as the kids he rarely saw fell in line. While most of the kids she’d grown up with were from two-parent homes, a handful had two homes, and most threatened to move out to live with their dads. They told of how it was better, fun, and their mothers would bemoan having to be the heavy all the time to her mom, looking at Bree’s father with awe because he was in the home, doling out the punishment or at least backing up her mother.
Her phone buzzed. She knew it was her weekly check-in with her parents, and she quickly silenced it on her watch. Gadgets were her thing, but it wasn’t as if her video doorbell had caught sight of what happened across the street, and right now that was all that mattered. All it had done was let her see the barefooted and self-dressed messes as they came to her door.
“Thanks for taking them in,” he said, ruffling the spikes out of Aiden’s hair, and Bree almost snapped on him because it was the way the boy wanted it. Jane was on his hip and glanced at Bree as if she was supposed to allow him into her home. “You have a bag or something for them?”
“You think you can take them? You’re on a motorcycle,” she balked, wishing she could pull the two close, but they were in daddy mode, and that meant all other people mean shit.
“Yeah, that’s why Grandma Moses followed me,” he said, nodding his head to Mrs. Parker from Children’s Services as she walked up the pathway to the front door. “She’ll toss the kids in the back, and we’ll head to my place.”
“Mr. Winter, that wasn’t what we agreed to,” Mrs. Parker said as she grumbled toward the front door. “Can we come in, Ms. Stanton?”
Bree shook from the insanity that was her life and opened her home to the group. What had been agreed upon? Once the doctors said the kids weren’t harmed, she’d opened her mouth, because Jane had been resting in her arms eating the cheese sandwich the ER provided, Aiden had been nibbling on graham crackers, and both had her figuring out the mechanics of a juice box straw. With a degree in structural engineering from Georgia Tech, she was a bit ashamed of her struggles. Then Mrs. Parker, pitying hazel eyes, offered to let her go home because it would be hours before they could find emergency foster care for the twins, and Bree did what she always did, offered to let them stay with her so they weren’t stuck at the hospital.
Now Ice’s long right leg stretched out from the barstool at her kitchen island as she stood in the corner by the stove and Mrs. Parker unloaded a stack of paperwork on the granite top. Misty had made mistakes in her life, but for the twins, she was doing everything she could to keep them from going the direction of her past and their father—which meant, as much as she questioned her skills past auntie duties, she had to protect the wild Winter twins.
