Chapter 12 #3
Raven folds the wig carefully, more out of habit than affection, then stuffs it into the small tote at her feet. When she straightens again, she leaves the cap off too. Good. The difference it makes is almost offensive.
She runs her fingers through her hair once more, then glances back toward Lexi.
The kid hasn’t stirred. Bunny is still clutched to her chest like a tiny witness to the whole damn thing.
Raven’s expression softens when she looks at her daughter. Not all the way, because I’m not sure she remembers how to soften all the way anymore, but enough that I catch another glimpse of whatever life she had before all this.
“Her hair is like mine,” she says quietly, still turned a little toward the backseat. “Dark and impossible.”
I follow her glance in the mirror and see only Lexi’s sleeping face, fine strands, bunny ear, little body folded in on itself. “Impossible, huh?”
Raven looks forward again. “Tangles no matter what I do. She hates when I brush it after bath time.”
“That so?”
“She acts like I’m murdering her every single night.”
“Sounds dramatic.”
“She’s very committed to the performance.”
That gets another laugh out of me, low enough I barely hear it over the engine. “Guess she comes by it honest.”
Raven turns her head. “Are you calling me dramatic?”
“I don’t know you well enough yet.”
The second the words leave my mouth, something sharp shifts in the cab. Because I said yet. And I know I said it.
And she knows I said it.
I keep my eyes on the road and pretend I didn’t just hand over a piece of my own thinking by accident.
Raven is quiet for a beat. Then she says, almost carefully, “That implies you plan to.”
“Plan to what?”
“Know me well enough.”
I don’t answer right away. Could tell her it was a figure of speech. Could brush it off. Could do the smart thing and shut that line of conversation down before it goes somewhere I don’t need it to.
Instead I hear myself say, “I plan to get you where you’re going.”
Not an answer. Not exactly. But not a lie either.
She accepts it with a small nod, and for some reason that bothers me less than it should.
The truck rolls on. The night deepens.
Her hair stays loose over her shoulders, and I become painfully aware of it every damn time I glance her direction, which is far too often for a man who prides himself on control.
I start asking questions just to give my brain somewhere else to go.
Small ones. Safe ones. Whether Lexi likes cartoons or books better. Whether Raven grew up around bikes or just around the chapter. Whether she wants the radio louder or lower.
She answers more easily now, maybe because the wig is off, maybe because the road has stretched long enough that this weird limbo feels almost survivable.
Lexi likes both, but books win if there are animals in them.
Raven grew up around everything from dirt bikes to old Harleys and learned real early not to flinch at engine noise if she wanted the men around her to stop laughing.
The radio is fine where it is.
Each answer gives me another small piece of a picture I have no business putting together, and still I keep doing it.
Not because I need to know. Because I want to. That’s a bigger problem than the hair.
Eventually the conversation fades again, but this time it feels like a shared thing instead of a wall.
Raven leans back a little deeper into the seat.
Not fully relaxed, still not that, but the tension in her neck has eased a fraction.
One of her hands rests near the tote with the wig tucked away inside, the other curled in the sleeve of my sweatshirt.
Mine.
The word drops into my head ugly and possessive and wrong. I shove it aside hard enough to make my jaw tighten.
Not mine. Not anything close to mine.
She’s a woman I’m transporting for another chapter because Logan called in a debt and trusted me to do the job. That’s it. End of story.
Doesn’t matter that she looks like that with her real hair down. Doesn’t matter that she laughed at my dry bullshit twice now. Doesn’t matter that every instinct I’ve got has started filing her and that little girl in the backseat under some private heading labeled protect.
None of that changes what this is.
I know that. The problem is, my body doesn’t seem particularly interested in listening.
I catch myself looking over again when she tucks one side of her hair behind her ear. The move bares the clean line of her throat for a second before the dark strands slide forward again.
I look back at the road so fast it’s almost violent.
Internally, there’s no recovering from it. Because the truth is simple and extremely fucking inconvenient.
One look at her real face, with that bad disguise gone and all that dark hair loose over my sweatshirt, and something in me tips past curiosity into a territory I have no business entering.
I’m not sentimental enough to call it anything pretty. I’m not stupid enough to pretend it’s harmless.
So when I glance at her one more time and catch the reflection of those amber eyes in the windshield before dragging my attention back where it belongs, I know exactly one thing for sure.
I am absolutely, thoroughly fucked.