Chapter 05

Trembling, I did what he asked and laid back on the couch. Pushing my legs open wider, he pressed the barrel of the gun to my slick opening—”

“I’m sorry, he did what now?” I exclaimed as I reached over to pause the audiobook we were listening to.

“Gunplay is a thing some people are interested in,” Nolan replied. His gaze flicked from the rearview to my face only briefly.

“No,” I said with as much conviction as I could. Just the thought of a gun going anywhere near my lady parts was horrifying. I shuddered. “No, Nolan. Just no! Have you looked at a gun recently?”

“Admittedly, I’ve never seen a gun in real life.”

“They have ridges and grooves and all the little things! Oh, God! That’d hurt, Nolan! Her poor vagina!” I ranted. God, how many times had Killian drilled gun safety into my head? “And what about gun-related accidents? If a gun is stuck up your vagina and goes off, you aren’t surviving that! You’re dying all in the name of an orgasm!”

“What if it’s like a really good orgasm?” he asked. “Would a woman be willing to die for a really good orgasm?”

“Nolan!”

“I’m asking for research purposes!”

“Nolan Callahan Byrne,” I scolded, “if you ever write a scene like that, I know where you live.”

“Sometimes, you have to write to market.” He shrugged, and I laughed. Silly little smut-writing wolf. “Did Raven get to this scene yet?”

“I don’t know, but I can ask.” Without waiting for his reply, I called Raven and put the call through the Bluetooth. Raven and Declan drove separately because they had Holly with them, which meant every once in a while I got to wave at the cutest little flannel-bandana-wearing puppy on the planet when she stuck her head out the window.

“Oh. My. God.” Raven practically shrieked when she answered the phone. My smile widened. Yeah, they got to the part. We’d decided to start the same audiobook as we drove away from Cedar Harbor—which meant Declan was stuck listening to dark romance smut. “He put the gun where?”

“I know!” I replied with equal enthusiasm. “Her poor vagina!”

“Her poor vagina? Please. What about my poor fucking ears,” Declan commented. “She signed up for that shit. The girl didn’t use her fucking safeword. She just opened her fucking legs and let him use the barrel of a gun to fuck her.”

“Did they implement a safeword?” Nolan asked while Raven giggled. “I don’t remember hearing a safeword.”

“They should’ve used a fucking safeword,” he said. “Good God, what do you have me listening to? This shit is as bad as the fucking tentacles she could feel in the back of her head.”

I wanted to say something, but I was laughing too hard to do so. Listening to and reading smut had always been a Nolan and me thing, but then we pulled Raven into it. Except, Raven decided Declan should be involved. At first, I wasn’t sure how I felt, but honestly, Declan had the best commentary ever. Recording his rants was on my social media to-do list for Nolan’s fans because he’d be a riot.

“The gun is obviously power play and risk-taking,” I said.

“His dick is risk-taking,” Raven told us. “The sheer size of him… shit, that’d scare me.”

“She couldn’t wrap her hand around it and have her fingers touch! Grab the fucking water bottle, honey!” Declan ordered. Despite it being something for Raven, Nolan grabbed one of our water bottles and did it. He cracked up as his fingers touched. “Her hands have to be unreasonably small, or his dick is bigger than a fucking water bottle! No wonder he’s using a gun. He’s not fucking her with a dick. He’s fucking her with a goddamn water bottle. The gun is prep work.”

“Why didn’t we get him in on this sooner?” I wheezed, holding a hand over my chest. My face hurt. Declans smut rants were top-tier entertainment. Sure, he and his brothers helped Nolan write his smut scenes, but they’d never read anything other than Nolan’s books. Mostly they just gave him one of their experiences to use or recapped some shit they saw in porn.

“Shit.” Declan blew out a breath of air. “Screw monster smut and all that shit. You need to write the story of the man with the monster-sized dick that no girl will let him fuck her with. Call it the Sad Tales of Johnny’s Monstrous D.”

“Baby!”

“What? Make it a fucking parody! Every time he takes his monstrous, water bottle-sized dick out, women run the other way! It’s the non-smut story of a man’s dick.”

“I can’t…” I managed to get out. I folded over, laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. It didn’t help that Nolan was still holding the water bottle and staring at it with the utmost seriousness. His brows furrowed together as he rotated it atop the steering wheel. He was actually considering it.

“I mean… it wouldn’t be the worst idea,” Nolan said finally. “I mean, he’d have to get laid somehow.”

“Johnny the Monstrous D meets Wendy with the Loose Cunt,” Declan replied, chuckling. “Wasn’t there a book about a girl with a haunted cunt?”

“I draw my line at ghosts coming out of vaginas,” Nolan cut in. Oh, that was the line he drew in the sand.

“I think your line starts before that, Nolan,” I told him.

“Look, I have to branch out and add new ideas into the mix,” he said. That was true. “I can only write the same things so many times. It’s why I have the Dirty Talk Declan notebook.”

“I want that fucking notebook, Nolan,” Declan interjected. There was no way he’d get Nolan to give up the notebook. I’d done a test run with Nolan’s forever reader, and Declan’s mouth was a gold mine—though, I wanted to scrub my eyes with holy water after every post because of the mouth on that man. I didn’t need to know that the man I called brother said those things to the woman who’d become my sister. I also pretended I didn’t see the bite marks he left on her either—all things Nolan was casually just writing into his books.

“I’m not giving you the notebook.”

“If I have to—” His words were cut off by Holly’s barking.

“Oh, does my pretty girl need to go potty?” Raven crooned. I bit back a laugh. For a woman afraid of dogs, she was absolutely taken by Holly. “Pull over, baby. I think she needs to pee.”

Their truck eased to the side of the road, and we pulled up behind them, ending the call. I watched as Declan carried a frantically wiggling Holly away from the road. Raven was right behind him with treats in hand.

“And you say I’m owned by my cats,” Nolan teased.

“Nolan, you are owned by your cats,” I said. Resting my chin on my fist, I batted my lashes at him playfully. “Why were we fifty minutes late getting on the road?”

“Because… things happened.”

“What things happened, Nolan?” I pressed, smiling wider.

“Look,” he began in a stern voice, “it’s not my fault that Barry and Sir Reginald were having troubles this morning. I’m not leaving my boys when they’re having trouble. Don’t… don’t look at me like that. I know how I sound, Ginny!”

I didn’t have to say a word. I only teased him, sure, but it was adorable. The man had the biggest heart out of anyone I knew. I just loved that about him. More people needed hearts like Nolan’s.

“You can’t make me feel guilty for loving my cats,” he told me. “They need someone to love them, Ginny.”

“And you do a wonderful job,” I said. “But you have no room to tease Raven about Holly. Declan and Buttercup on the other hand… that’s funny.”

Raven had renamed the kitten Buttercup, but that kitten lasted being Raven’s for a single night. It took one night of being around Declan before Buttercup abandoned her ship and became Declan’s shadow. Watching him pretend it wasn’t a thing was even funnier.

“Stick to teasing Declan, got it.” Nolan nodded. “We have another few hours before we hit the motel. Do you want to drive, or would you mind if I dictated to you for a while? I need to work on Kat and Miles’ story.”

“Can I offer insight?”

“Always,”

“Dictate it is.” I bent over the middle console to dig out my tablet.

“You know I appreciate you, right?” he said as I flopped back in my seat, ready to help him write another book. Those midnight eyes were intense as he watched me.

“I know, Nolan. I appreciate you too,” I replied.

“I’m serious, Ginny,” he insisted. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

“Yes, you could,” I scoffed. Heck, he’d built most of it without me around.

“Okay, well, I wouldn’t want to,” Nolan told me. He glanced out the front window to watch as Declan and Raven got ready to leave again. “I love our friendship. I hope you know that.”

“You’re being weird, Nolan.” Sweet but weird. Nolan wasn’t exactly a words-of-affirmation guy.

“I’m just making sure you know I’m here for you if you need anything. And that I love you.”

Why was he talking like this? It was odd for him. An uncomfortable feeling ebbed its way into the pit of my stomach.

“Are you dying?” I demanded.

“What?” Nolan scoffed. “No! I’m not dying. I’m just making sure you know those things, okay?”

“Okay!”

“Okay, good!” He laughed as if it was nothing, but my gut told me it wasn’t. I didn’t like it. But as he started prattling on about Kat and Miles with their whirlwind billionaire, reverse age gap, wolf shifter romance, I got lost in his world. That was much easier than worrying about something I didn’t know about.