Moxie (Rock-Hard Beautiful Book 3)

by C. M. Stunich

  “Maybe you'd like it better if I came inside of you?” Ransom says, and I think it's supposed to be a joke. Only … it doesn't quite come out like one.

  “Hah. If you think that's how it'll go down, then you're as mad as a box of frogs. You're not topping me, mate. Not on my life.”

  “Whatever,” Ransom says, crawling into the bed in … nothing at all.

  I sense a sexual charge in the air as he curls himself up between me and Pax.

  I thoroughly expect them to put their theories to the test, to finally give into the temptation they've both been fighting for so long … and then I fall asleep.

  The guys excuse themselves one by one to go home and take care of shit the next morning, leaving me alone with Lilith.

  Like the total weirdo that I am, I stand in my bedroom door brushing my teeth, just watching her sleep in my bed in a set of emerald green lingerie that's basically the same shade as those magnificent eyes of hers. I know I'm being a creeper, but I can't stop staring. It's been so fucking long since I had a girl in my bed that I actually liked.

  Seeing her here, amongst all my shit, it only emphasizes how much I really do love her. I don't want her to go home to her own place; I want her to stay here with me. And not just because she soothes my nightmares away, but because she brightens my goddamn days, too.

  I head into the bathroom and rinse my mouth out, dressing myself in those sweats with the skeleton leg print on them and nothing else. I'm at home now, just me and my honey. Don't really need my hood here.

  “Morning Mom,” I say to the picture on my wall, that smiling portrait of her at her wedding. She looks so fucking beautiful standing next to my dad, so goddamn happy. I never really understood it before, that glow in her face. I think I'm starting to understand it now. “I hope you and Dad are doing okay, wherever you are.”

  I pad into the kitchen to make pancakes. Luckily, Muse was smart enough to stop by here after he took a cab home to get his car; he dropped off plenty of groceries for me to make Lil a nice breakfast.

  As I stir the batter, I stare into the bowl and hope that my parents are together somehow, like maybe they were reborn into a new life as neighbors, childhood friends destined to be together … or some other corny shit like that. I'm not a hundred percent sure that I believe in like, a final heaven or whatever.

  “Hey,” Lilith says, surprising me a little. I glance over my shoulder with a smile and notice that she's got the laptop with the digital drawing pad stacked on top of it. “Is it okay if I sketch you while you cook?”

  “Of course,” I tell her, listening to the sound of the front door. We both pause as Pax appears in jeans and a t-shirt again, a totally weird look for him. I almost don't recognize him when he pulls that switch on me. But … he's fucking hot dressed like that. I think. Or hell, I don't know. I stir the pancakes vigorously and try to stop lying to myself.

  I like him.

  I just do.

  And shit if I wasn't jealous when he had sex with Muse.

  God, my life is weird, I think as I grab a pan and start some bacon frying.

  “Are you eating with us?” I ask him as he slouches against the wall of my yellow kitchen and puts a boot on the wall behind him. He's got something behind his back that I can't quite see.

  “Why the bloody hell not?” he asks, clearly in a superior sort of mood today. That grin that splits his face, that's genuine joy and gloating right there. I'd recognize that look anywhere. I'm just glad that smug arrogant expression isn't being tossed as an insult in my direction anymore. “I've got news to share anyway.”

  He stands up and then reveals whatever it is that he was hiding behind his back.

  It's a bouquet of paintbrushes.

  That son of a bitch …

  I narrow my eyes at him as Lilith's mouth drops open and tiny crystalline tears sparkle at the edges of her eyes.

  “I can't believe you did this,” she whispers as she stands up and puts her arms around his neck. Paxton hugs her tight and then flips me off with a tattooed finger behind her back. But as soon as he lets Lil go, he steps over to me and slides something into my pants pocket.

  Reaching inside, I see that it's a condom and we exchange a long look.

  “Once you hear this shit, you'll be begging for me to top you,” he whispers, taking a step back and crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Only in your dreams, honey,” I tell him as he leans against the counter and digs a finger into the raw pancake batter. Paxton sucks it off the tip of his finger and grins as I make a face.

  “Dreams is right, Mr. Riggs. Guess who just got off the phone with those fucking arrogant, self-serving parents of his?”

  “Considering you're the only person in this group who has two parents left, I'm going to guess … you?”

  “Bingo,” Pax says, snapping his fingers at me. “After they found out that Amelia was pregnant …”

  “She's pregnant?” Lilith asks, lifting her head up from her sketch pad to stare at him. “Seriously?”

  “Yep. Up the stick and off to marry that new beau of hers.” Paxton grabs one of the apples that Muse brought over and lifts the shiny red flesh to his lips. “Anyhow, they've finally realized they've only got one goddamn son left. If they don't want the prestigious Blackwell family legacy to end with me, something's got to give.”

  “You're getting your inheritance back?” Lil asks, blinking up at him with wide eyes. I stand there frozen in near-shock until a bit of bacon grease pops and burns my arm.

  “Fuck,” I curse, flipping the pieces over with a spatula and staring up another pan for the 'cakes. “Are you?”

  “Only if I get married and produce an heir,” Paxton says, biting the apple and then spinning it around in his fingers. His grin, when he gives it to Lilith, is wicked hot. “It's not as if they want me back there for family dinner anytime soon, but when those arseholes kick the bucket, they've promised to leave the Blackwell Estate to me.” He pauses. “So, no rush or anything, Miss Lily, but …”

  Pax reaches out and takes her hand, running his thumb across the ring.

  “One day …?”

  She smiles at him, her cheeks flushing red.

  “As long as everyone else is okay with it …” she starts, looking over at me.

  “With God only knows how much money on the line?” I ask with a sloppy half-smile. “Uh, yeah. I think they'll understand. I'm okay with it as long as that asshole over there remembers who his boyfriend is.”

  “Oh? So we're dating now?” Pax asks casually, taking a seat next to Lilith. But he's smiling sinfully when he says it. “How do I know you're not just in it for the money?”

  “Because I took your abuse for years with barely a word—after your parents cut you off financially and left you to rot.”

  “Ah, you make a fine point,” Paxton says, watching Lilith sketch on her pad. “I have some canvases in my SUV. I thought we could unload them here until closing.”

  “Closing?” she asks as I dribble batter into the pan. It takes us both a second to puzzle that one out. “No? We got the house?”

  “They accepted our offer. The place is vacant, and we're paying in cash, so as soon as it closes, you can move in.”

  “Holy shit!” Lilith says, putting her tablet aside and covering her mouth with her hands. “We got the house?! We got the fucking house?”

  She stands up just in time to hear the front door open, pausing to peer through the archway at whoever else it is that's just walked into my house. Doesn't anybody knock anymore? But I find myself smiling anyway.

  “Michael, we got the house!” she says, and I laugh as he grabs her and gives her a massive hug, picking her up off the floor and walking her backward into kitchen.

  “I heard from Muse this morning,” he says as he sets her down and brushes red hair back from her forehead. “Congratulations, baby.” He kisses her on the mouth, sliding his hands around her waist. “Did you want to make that security deposit now? If you're short on cas
h, we could come up with another arrangement.”

  “You're fucking disgusting,” Lilith says, but she's laughing as she says it.

  “Yeah, I sort of am, aren't I?” he says, glancing over at the stove. “I hope there's enough there for everyone. Muse and Cope are on the way. They said we should celebrate, but since, uh, all we've been doing for weeks is going out and doing shit, I think we should celebrate here.”

  “Are you suggesting an orgy, Mr. Luxe?” Lilith asks, pretending to be mortified.

  “Basically, yeah,” he says, sitting down and pulling her into his lap.

  “Did you talk to your brother?” she asks after a moment and I notice them exchanging a silly look. “Come on, you did, right? It's partially because of him that we got the house.”

  “So I called him and told him,” Michael says on the end of a long sigh. “Big deal? I'm still pissed, and I still think he deserves another right hook to the face.”

  “Didn't you say you might set him up on a blind date with Olivia?” Paxton asks. “Isn't that punishment enough?”

  Michael grabs a paintbrush from Lilith's bouquet and throws it at him.

  I'm just about to serve breakfast when the other two boys show up, joining us in my sun soaked yellow kitchen for a little food, a lot of kissing, and an atmosphere that feels like family.

  And it's been a long, long time since I had a family. Since any of us has had a family, really.

  By getting with Lilith, we each gained a hell of a lot more than just a girlfriend. She brought us together in a way I never expected, brought us closer to each other at the same time we were getting to know her.

  Picking that sad, soggy, lonely girl up in Phoenix was the best thing any of us ever did.

  The little yellow house is perfect for me, just big enough to fit me and my boys, my art stuff … and my cat.

  I managed to get ahold of my ex-coworker from Phoenix, the one I left the little tabby with, and convinced her to put the poor kitty on a plane to Seattle. Not in cargo, no way, too many pets die getting shipped like that. Instead, I used some of the money from the sale of the Matador to buy an actual plane ticket so her kennel could sit in front of an actual seat. I had to make arrangements with the airline staff since I wasn't actually going to be on the flight, but I guess since I bought a first class ticket they were nice enough about accommodating me.

  I set up a studio in the bonus room at the back of the house and started to transfer my digital paintings to oil and canvas, filling the space with color and texture and life. One of the first pieces I did was a portrait of Copeland's mother.

  I met her a few days after we got into Seattle, and her eyes … they just caught me and wouldn't let go. I had to paint them. Yes, it's obvious that she has problems, but that doesn't matter to me. Everyone has problems; some people just have issues that are more apparent to the world. But seeing her, there's a gentle nature there that I can tell she transferred to her son.

  I don't know if I'll ever be able to convince Copeland that his genes aren't tainted by his past, but I sure as hell am going to try. Now that I've thought about having a kid with each one of the guys, I can't shake the idea.

  My hand clutches a paintbrush as I step back and glance at the piece I'm working on with my head tilted to the side.

  “This is my favorite one,” Michael says, standing on my right and staring at the self-portrait of my 'strength pose'. I've got it situated between the painting of Cope's mom, and one of Michael and Tim sitting across from each other at a bistro table, their violet eyes locked, their hair blue-black in the sunshine. I think he secretly hates that one, but I don't care. It's going in the collection anyway. Next week I'm presenting my work to a gallery owner to see if I can get a spot in her local artist showcase. It's not a very big show, and I doubt I'll sell a single painting, but I've still got enough money left to make things work for a while.

  And … you know, five fucking boyfriends that refuse to let me pay rent on the house. I'm keeping a tally of all the money I 'owe' them, so I can pay it back later, but I doubt that'll ever happen. Not because I don't think I can make my own living, but because they're all stubborn in their own ways. They'd probably just stuff it in the pockets of my purse when I wasn't looking, like they did when were back on the bus.

  “I like this one,” Muse says, digging through the smaller canvases on the floor and pulling out a tiny portrait of my dad. I painted it completely from memory, just to see if I could. “I think it'd make a pretty powerful statement if you put this tiny piece in with all the big ones.”

  The cat—whose name just happens to be Rose—twines herself around his legs as he holds the painting up to the light and examines it carefully.

  “How many do you get to present?” Ransom asks in that syrupy voice of his, sitting on the couch on the corner next to Paxton. I like the way they lean together, Ransom draped lazily over Paxton's lap, like they're at least starting to get comfortable with their new relationship. As for who's topped who … I've seen it both ways. Sometimes, Muse joins in, but mostly they're all still focused on me.

  Their queen. Their princess.

  Sometimes I feel like I'm ruling over them, keeping them safe … and sometimes it feels like the other way around.

  Either way, I like it.

  I love it.

  I love them.

  “You said ten, right?” Cope asks me as he walks along the line of canvases, trying to make sense of my madness.

  “Yep, ten,” I tell him, leaning into Michael and feeling his breath feather against my hair. “I wish I could show her a hundred.”

  “Don't worry—you'll sell out and become the hottest thing in Seattle since Starbucks,” Muse tells me with confidence, pushing his glasses up his nose and looking through the rest of my canvases, flipping past concert scenes and museums, pausing at a lonely little boy curled up at the base of a tree.

  Copeland reaches past him and takes that one from his hand, putting it up against the other three pieces I'm working on.

  “This one,” he says, and we all wait in a sort of strained silence for Muse to say something about it.

  “Definitely this one,” he agrees, a slight smile on his face as he touches the textured silver of the boy's hair.

  “Once my parents kick it, I'll just buy you a gallery and we'll show all your pieces at the same time.”

  I roll my eyes at the same time Michael makes a derisive snort in my ear.

  “God, you're stupid,” he says to Pax as I put my brush aside for the moment. I'm sure I'll sneak out of the loft later, untangle myself from the naked limbs of my boys and walk through moonlight to paint until the early hours of the morning. I've been doing that pretty much everyday for months. Well, everyday that I'm here anyway. I've been hopping between the guys' houses and my own place like we're on rotation. Sometimes, I'm alone with one, two, three … And sometimes it's all of us.

  That's my favorite, when we're all together like that.

  But no matter who I'm with or where I am, all I have to do is touch the charms at my wrist and I know that everything will be okay. I survived the worst the universe could throw at me, stripping me of my family and leaving me alone and soggy and shoeless in a wet parking lot in Arizona.

  That grief, it's still there, hiding under all the happy memories I make. It won't ever go away, but the further I move from it, the less it hurts, the easier I can look at it and remember the best parts of all the people I've lost without remembering the awful things.

  “Will you take a walk with me?” Michael asks as I drop my brush in a jar of water and glance over at him, his face looks tight, like there's something hiding underneath his skin.

  “Sure,” I say, rubbing the paint off my hands and all over my Beauty in Lies t-shirt. I have about a thousand of them now, so it's not big loss.

  Michael takes my hand and leads me outside, into the easy brightness of the afternoon sunshine, like a knight guiding his lady across the castle grounds. But this lady, she's g
ot her own sword hidden under those full skirts. The sword might occasionally double as paintbrush in her hand, but that's okay. There are a million ways to make a way in the world, and I've got mine right here.

  My art. My heart. My boys.

  All five of them.

  “Where are we going?” I ask as Michael leads me across the yard and through the gate.

  “Just walk with me a sec,” he says, starting us uphill on the sidewalk outside. It's tempting to go downhill first, but we both know that if you tackle the harder half of the journey first, it leaves a much more pleasant downhill coast afterward. “There's been something I've wanted to tell you for months now, but … I was too fucking scared to say it.”

  I raise my eyebrows at him as we walk, studying his handsome face, his shoulder-length hair.

  I can't even begin to guess what it is that he's trying to tell me.

  “Why?”

  “Because I knew that once I said it,” he starts, twirling a finger in the air, “that we'd come full circle, close some kind of door and finish what we started in Phoenix. I didn't want it to be the end.”

  I feel my lips curving into a smile.

  “There's no such thing as the end when we're together.”

  Michael gives me a sideways smile.

  “Lilith,” he tells me and I close my eyes for a moment, pausing in the cool shadow of a tree, sunshine lighting up the world all around us. “I love you.”

  Finally.

  Like Michael said, I do feel the end of something in his words, but not like the end of a book, just the end of a chapter. It's like a caterpillar in a cocoon, cracking open its cage and spreading its wings in the world as a butterfly. Yes, something is over, but so something new begins.

  The happily ever after … is just the once upon of a time to a different book.

  “I love you, too,” I tell him as he takes me in his arms and presses the slightest of kisses against my head, sighing in relief, his breath swirling the red hair on the top of my head. “And thank you.”