Free Steele: Into Your Heart (Carolina Bad Boys #3 by Rie Warren Page A

of shorts, I hauled the fur bundle onto my lap and flopped back on my bed.
    This was my boyhood bedroom, the same room I’d been in since we’d moved here when I was five years old.
    Maybe it was time to move on.
    I’d revamped my room. Gotten rid of the posters of busty babes waxing their tits on cars, painted over the Lego blue walls with a dark slate gray. Funny. That was the color of Ashe’s eyes I now realized. The only pictures hanging on the walls were black and whites of the Chrome and Steele storefront with Mom and Dad stood out front, Boomer with his President patch when he started the MC, one of the whole family on the front steps the summer before shit went sour, and me beside my first bike when I turned seventeen.
    Our folks had left the house to the three of us, along with their life insurance payout and the Chrome and Steele business. Cat hadn’t ever moved back in. Boomer and I hadn’t been able to sell the family homestead. Not yet. Not even five years later.
    Mom and Dad’s bedroom was down the hallway and around the corner. Clothes donated. Jewelry given to Cat, but she didn’t wear it. As far as I knew she’d stored the few special rings, earrings, necklaces in a safe deposit box at her bank. She still wore the mantle of guilt and blame for their deaths.
    I’d saved Dad’s watch. It was nothing but a stretchy banded Timex. Nothing fancy. But he’d worn it everyday. My folks were smart and frugal, and they’d brought us up to be the same no matter how flush the bank accounts were. Life could cut you down in an instant. And didn’t we know it?
    Boomer saved several pairs of our dad’s cufflinks, not that he ever wore a suit. That was all we kept. We didn’t need anything to remember them by. They were in our hearts every day.
    The front door banged open downstairs followed by Boomer’s heavy footfalls on the stairs. He crashed into my room and loomed for a second before crossing inside to plunk down on my bed. Twatson jumped into his lap. Fickle female feline.
    His close-cropped black hair hugged his head. The two scars on his face were silent reminders of the past. He squinted at me with eyes the same color we all shared—pale blue, Siberian blue. He looked like one helluva forbidding dude. No wonder the two of us together had made Nick Loveland shit his britches when he’d started dating our sis.
    Now it was my turn to evade the Great Inquisition of 2014.
    “So?” Boom asked.
    “Awesome week.”
    “Babes?” He furrowed his fingers into Watson’s fur right behind her ears.
    “A’plenty.” I propped up on my elbows. “You shoulda come with us.”
    “Not everyone can just take off for the week.”
    “Bullshit. You could do with taking the broom handle out of your ass for a change and lightening up some, Boomer.”
    “Business to run.” His expression shuttered closed as he concentrated on the pussycat in his lap.
    “You’re not the only one running it, and it wouldn’t be run into the ground if you let Lucy handle shit for a week.” Sure, our office manager smacked gum, texted all the damn time, and wore a hella lot of make-up, but she knew the ropes inside and out and probably in her sleep. She’d also gotten me hooked on friggin’ Candy Crush.
    Boomer stilled for a moment from the cat-scratching that had Twatson switching her tail back and forth before aiming his I’ll kill you dead grin at me. Funny when he did that shit to Nick, now not so much. “I think you’re deflecting. I might need to have a word with Tuck.”
    “Tuck don’t know fuck.”
    Such a liar.
    Tucker knew every damn thing about Boomer, Cat, the MC, and my family and me. Start to finish.
    “Something happen up there in Myrtle Beach I need to hear about?” Boomer scraped a hand across his dark-stubbled jaw as he arrowed me with another knowing stare.
    “Knocking boots and ridin’ hard, that’s all.”
    “No lady in particular?”
    “Not Leta, if that’s what you’re asking.”
    “Yeah. I