Page 180 of I Will Revel in Glory (Death by Daybreak MC 3)
None of that is what’s mesmerizing to me; it’s all gone up slowly, over the last several weeks. Just one hard day of labor after another. I even helped with a fair amount of it. Doesn’t stop the guys from trying to pamper me or put my feet up, shower me with overprotective alpha male urges. Sometimes, I let them. Sometimes, I stay on my knees and dig into the earth, pulling plants from their pots and teasing their roots with my fingertips before I put them in the ground.
No, the reason I’m mesmerized right now, the reason I’m staring … is because all four of my men are shirtless and wearing jeans, dirt smeared on their hard chests, their arms. Sin is even wearing gardening gloves which makes me wet my panties like they’re going out of style.
Crown and Beast are maneuvering the new table into place. It’s this long, wooden farmhouse table that looks like it came straight from a magazine. But no, they built it.
You heard me: they built it. The four of them.
They also strung up lights, Edison bulbs dangling above us and waiting for later, when our guests show up and we switch them on for a warm, companionable glow.
We’re having a party here tonight; did I mention that? Not a big one. Just a welcome-home thing for Nellie. She’s just gotten out of rehab and for the time being, she’s going to be staying here with us. I don’t know how I feel about that, but I also can’t leave my mother alone right now.
She might be clean, but that’s only a for now sort of thing.
We’re selling her house—that house, the bloodstained one—and then we’ll look into finding something more permanent for her. The thing is, her identity is tangled up in the club. She doesn’t know who she is if she isn’t the president’s wife. I imagine she’ll marry herself off to one of the other old-timers.
I know René, the treasurer, has been visiting her in rehab whenever she’s allowed visitors. I think he’s lonely, too. He misses his son and granddaughter, and his wife passed almost ten years ago. He’d be good for my mom. She needs that, anyway, to be a club wife again.
She can’t really be a mother anymore, not that she ever really acted like one anyway. But with Queenie and Posey gone, with Gaz … err, missing, and me here with four lovers and a baby on the way, she needs a new hobby.
“You okay there, wife?” Beast asks, moving over to me and offering up an enigmatic smile. “You like what you see, huh?”
“I, uh,” I start, trying to remember what I came out here to do in the first place. Fem prances past me, lifts his leg to piss on a new rose bush that I planted, and then proceeds to trot after Grainger. He’s fallen in love with him. Fem, I mean. He likes Cade now. They even cuddle sometimes when neither of them thinks I’m looking. “Here. Beers. I brought you beers.”
I have this weird flashback of a memory where Nellie is bringing cold beers to Cat and his friends. It makes me a little dizzy when I think about it; I never wanted to become my mother. This though … it’s different.
“Thank you, sugar,” Beast drawls, kissing my cheek easily, even though I’m standing on the step and he’s on the ground. Evens out our height difference a bit. “You like it?”
“I love it,” I say, admiring the table as I come down the step and hand Crown his drink next. He takes it from me with a grateful sigh, reaching up to swipe his arm across his forehead as he looks back at the table.
“It was a lot of work, but worth it,” he says, nodding his head. Being president has taken up a lot of his time, but he still makes sure to make time for me. He even helped the other guys with the table construction. More like … he drew up the plans and told them how he wanted it done, and they did it. But still.
“So worth it,” I say as Sin comes up behind me and wraps his arms around my waist from behind, making me groan as he puts his chin on my shoulder. He smells heavenly as fuck, like fresh sweat and dirt and cloves. Oh my God. I know we don’t have a lot of time before our guests get here, but I might need to fuck … “Take your drink and stop smearing sweat and dirt all over me,” I grumble. In reality, I mean the exact opposite of that, and Sin knows it.
He chuckles at me as presses a kiss to the side of my neck, taking his drink and then moving up to stand on my other side. Grainger comes over to us last, patting my dog absently on the head as he turns around to look at the table.
