Page 15 of Cain

I never again wanted to be called ugly names by a man who claimed to have loved me.

And there was no reason whatsoever to believe that Cain would be any different.

So I forced thoughts of him from my mind.

But he came to me in my dreams.

CHAPTER FIVE

Cain

“What are you doing?” Carver asked, making me turn to look over at him in the doorway, some woman’s sparkly makeup still on his bare chest where she must have pressed her face at some point.

“Peeling up this awful flooring,” I said, jamming the edge of the linoleum with a floor razor.

“Can I get coffee?” he asked, nodding toward the counter.

“Yeah, go ahead.”

I took the chance to take a break, pretending not to notice the way my back cracked as I stood.

Carver looked a lot like his big brother Ronan, though he still had that sort of long-limbed, almost gangly look that guys his age always had before they really started to fill in. But he had the same sepia skin, the same strong features, but Carver’s eyes were lighter than Ronan’s—more of an amber than dark brown.

“So why are you peeling up the floor?”

“It’s been peeling itself up for months.” I’d been dutifully gluing it back down. Which I could have continued to do. But the work on Redemption was done, and I was going out of my mind with nothing else to do.

I’d floated the idea of doing some upgrades around the clubhouse. Fallon had agreed. Well, he’d said, “Whatever blows up your skirt,” which I’d taken for approval.

As a whole, the clubhouse was in pretty good shape. There’d been an update to the common areas not too long back. But the kitchen had been painfully overlooked. Likely because no one spent more than a few minutes inside—grabbing coffee or leftover cold pizza.

What it really needed was an expansion. When the place had originally been turned from a garage into a clubhouse, they’d allocated a lot more room to the bedrooms and the common space, leaving just a nook for the kitchen.

But thanks to Sully’s dogged campaign to get an in-ground pool and a hot tub in the backyard, there was no way to blow it out. The best I could do was update the floors, cabinets, appliances, countertops, and backsplash to modernize it and maybe make it feel roomier, even though it wasn’t.

“Any idea when—” he started, only to be cut off by the door bursting open and a chorus of female voices rushing in.

“Club girls?” I asked, glancing at the clock.

“Not that I know of. Everyone’s still sleeping. It’s probably the girls’ club.”

The girls’ club?

Weren’t they mostly shacked up and building lives with their partners now?

“Not that girls’ club,” Carver said, reading my thoughts. “The next wave of them.”

“Christ. We have more of them to keep an eye on now?”

Carver’s smile was slow and a little devious. “And I think this group is worse than the last.”

“Fuck, don’t say that.”

I hadn’t needed to do much princess-wrangling in my day, but the guys had stories about their antics.

It seemed like they had their time as wranglers. Now, it was going to be mostly up to me and Spike, since I doubted the younger guys were going to be the bad guys. And Croft, while their senior technically, had been away in Puerto Rico for so many years that he probably felt a certain amount of discomfort at trying to tell them no.

“Which one is the ringleader?” I asked as high, feminine laughter filled the common room.