“Yeah, but how did the class go?” She pouted and I laughed, but lifted my arms and beckoned her toward me. She came, as she always did, and huddled into me. For a woman who wasn’t affectionate, she was with the guys and me. I wasn’t about to complain about that either. Not when her hands squeezed my ass through my jeans.
“It went well,” she mumbled. “Just been a long time since I worked on the forge.”
This morning was the first time we’d gotten the forge working properly. She’d been setting shit up over the past ten days as stuff had started to arrive from all over the world—we’d imported shit in to get things here faster—and today was her first lesson.
Watching her get ready in all the protective shit was bizarrely hot. Knowing she knew what to do was even hotter. I’d watched some of the class before a call had taken me away from the factory we’d set up on a patch of land that neighbored the clubhouse. Lucie’s money had bought that, and we were going to build a house on there as well so that we could be close to the clubhouse, but Amaryllis wouldn’t be so exposed to club life.
That was down the line though. Getting the pre-fab building up in the Texas summer hadn’t been fun, and the heat didn’t make forging guns an ideal chore, but she’d been insistent about getting the ball rolling. Now that I saw how exhausted she was, I figured out why—the minute the brothers knew what to do, she could leave it to them.
No one could say my woman wasn’t smart.
“Why’d you leave the class?”
So she’d noticed that?
Fuck.
“Jodie-May went missing today.”
She tensed in my arms. “You found her?”
“No.”
“She take Aaron?”
“Yeah.”
That had her peering into my face. “Fuck. You think she’s going to tell someone?”
“I doubt it. It’s all hearsay anyway. There are no bodies, no evidence, no motive, and she’s not the most reliable witness, is she?”
“Of course there’s motive.”
I shook my head. “If the feds asked around for any grudges Rodriguez had with us, they would be old. Ancient for his organization. With the shit he’s dealing with, his issues are in the north, not down here.”
She pondered that for a second. “True.”
My lips twitched. “Nice to know you have faith in my reasoning skills.”
Her eyes twinkled. “I have faith in something,” she retorted, bumping her hips into mine.
Laughing, I hefted her into my arms, loving how her knees clung to my hips. On the brink of walking her toward the staircase, I froze when I heard the cat’s claws scrabbling against the floor like the kitten was on the run.
Fuck.
I knew what that meant.
“Momma! Jezebel ruined my dress!”
Lucie cursed under her breath. “That damn cat. What the hell possessed Flame anyway?”
My shoulders shook with laughter. “She loves her,” I managed to get out.
She huffed. “Until she wrecks her dresses.”
Amaryllis was a surprisingly fussy little thing. I hadn’t realized that until I’d found Lucie ironing every single one of our daughter’s dresses. Even her socks received that treatment because Amaryllis felt ‘dirty’ unless everything was starched.
I swear, I didn’t know where she’d come from. Half of Lucie’s clothes had holes in them. Some of them strategically placed, others made by design. But still, Ryan had been like the rest of us—wife beaters, cut, jeans, and boots all the way.
Amaryllis liked patterns, flowers, and girly shit that had Lucie cursing because she struggled with the tasks—turned out Ryan had been the one to French braid Amaryllis’s hair, not Lucie.
Swear, I’d have paid to see the fucker do that.
Fuck you. You’ll learn too. She’ll bat those big eyes at you until you learn.
My heart almost stopped in my chest as Lucie jumped down from my hold and stalked off to go and threaten a cat who had taken a fancy to digging her claws into Amaryllis’s dresses.
You gonna die on me, big man?
“Seriously hope I’m not going to,” I rasped, unsure of who the fuck I was talking to exactly.
Anyway, wanted to warn you against fucking up. Just because I’m going for a while doesn’t mean I won’t be watching.
“Going? Going where?”
Lucie’s safe. That’s all I ever wanted for her. You keep that up and I won’t be back.
Was I being threatened by a voice in my head?
Christ, this was how schizophrenia started, right?
You’re not schizophrenic, dumbass. I’m dead. You think that protecting that woman was going to stop just because I died? Think again.