Free On the Edge of Love (Mama's Brood Book 1) by Shay Rucker Page A

had been born alive seven years ago and was a thriving child, that her mother was clean and dancing in the kitchen of their old apartment with a cigarette hanging out the side of her mouth like she did when Sabrina and her sister, Sam, were girls.
    Tears welled behind her closed eyelids. Her mother was dead, her sister was dead, her niece had never taken her first breath, and she was alone. She exhaled as the feeling of peace slipped away. It was a weak emotion that always retreated too soon, too fragile to stand against bitter memories and a lifetime of soul-numbing experiences.
    She shifted, pressing her cheek against the cushion of warmth beneath her, letting her legs splay open. She wasn’t able to hold on to peace, but she would hold on to this warmth just a little longer.
    A band of steel hardness settled across her lower back, locking her body against the cushion beneath her.
    “Don’t worry; not letting you go.” The words rumbled through her, pushing her completely from the nebula of semisleep to alarmed wakefulness.
    She lifted her head and opened her eyes to eerie gray ones. “Zeus.” Oh, hell. He was the last person she wanted to wake up in bed with. Flattening her hands against the muscles of his chest, she straightened her arms until their upper bodies were no longer touching.
    He frowned up at her. “Lie back down.”
    “Why are you lying beneath me, Zeus?”
    He shrugged, closing those molten gray eyes. “I wanted to be in you. I’m in your bed because it’s where I need to be to get what I want. Plus, you’re the one that crawled on top of me in the middle of the night.”
    Her behavior while asleep wasn’t the issue; his being in bed with her was. “It’s so simple, huh? You have a need, and you just do whatever you want to satisfy it.”
    “Yep.”
    She lowered her upper body and rested her chin against his chest, the warmth of him more compelling than her concern over having him beneath her. “Sometimes other people have needs too. You can’t just disregard that.”
    “Yes, I really can. Not responsible for what other people need or don’t need. That’s their job. I take care of me. That’s my job.”
    Well, she couldn’t really fault his reasoning. She’d lived most of her life thinking the same way. When she’d left Ernesto’s abuse and run to her sister in Louisiana, Sabrina had begun to shift, to realize life was better with someone you loved in it, but then Sam committed suicide and Sabrina had vowed she’d never allow another person to hurt her just by loving them.
    Life, in the form of her neighbor Randy, had made a mockery of that vow once she’d moved to Oakland. Randy had determined she would come to love him, and despite his habitually sorry choice in boyfriends, eventually, she had. Then she’d found a job where she actually liked the people she worked with, and she’d accepted that she couldn’t disregard others as she’d learned to do growing up. Zeus obviously hadn’t learned those same lessons.
    “Where am I?” she asked, settling her head back on his shoulder and closing her eyes, too lazy and uninterested to look through the shadows and make out the details of the room they were in. Warmth had the potential to be a destructive addiction, she determined. It made you not care for much more than basking in it. Even when it radiated from an obviously unstable man.
    “We’re on the residential level of Mama’s House. Second level down. About nine bedrooms down here.”
    “This place is huge. Is this your room? ”
    “Ours.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    “Yours. There’s a connecting door. My room’s on the other side.”
    “Huh.” She breathed out, drifting off again. He was so damned warm. The peace that had scuttled out of reach before crept back like an abused animal that didn’t know if it would trust her again.
    Zeus’s hand moved along her spine, fingers stroking the expanse of her back and shoulders. This was perfection. She had gone a lifetime