In a Badger Way (Honey Badger Chronicles #2) - Shelly Laurenston Page 0,65
Just give me a little—”
“How about,” she said, putting her arm around Stevie’s shoulders and pulling her close, “we come up with another option.”
Stevie glanced at the hand gripping her shoulder and back at the wild dog. “Is this a weird sexual request? Because I don’t do that.”
She stared at Stevie for a long time before asking, “The MacKilligan gals are a . . . unique group, aren’t they?”
Finally, Stevie had to laugh. “You have no idea.”
* * *
Shen waited on the stairs leading to the Pack house, his back against the railing, his legs stretched out in front of him.
“So when’s your next match?” Shen asked Coop, who was opposite him and a step lower.
“Friday. I’m hoping Stevie will play.”
“She probably will. She said she had a good time.”
“Great.” Coop glanced off, then said, “By the way, you have the night off. My mom wants Kyle home. Toni’s coming over with Ricky Lee, which means his brothers and sister are going to be with them. And where there is Ronnie Lee Reed, there’s Sissy Mae Smith and a good chunk of the Smith Pack.”
Shen chuckled. “Sure you don’t want me to take Kyle back with us?”
“If I have to suffer, so does that little shit. Besides, it’s what my mom insists on calling ‘Family Night.’ No matter how many times we ask her not to call it that.”
“Too pedestrian?”
“Basically.” He smiled. “I’ll drop him off tomorrow.”
“Great.”
The front door opened and the rest of their group walked out. Before Kyle could say anything, Coop grabbed him by his T-shirt and dragged him down the stairs and toward the house across the street.
“Oh, come on! Family Night again? Can’t you talk Mom out of it?”
Oriana sighed. “I hate Family Night.”
“What do you guys do on a family holiday like Thanksgiving?” Shen asked.
“When Cherise started describing Thanksgiving as a celebration of the massacre of an entire race of people and Kyle described Christmas as a ritual honoring a mass delusion . . . the family found other things to do during the holidays.”
Shen nodded. “That sounds like a very good idea.”
“But there’s no fighting on Family Night.” Oriana sighed again and started down the stairs. But she abruptly stopped, stood there for a moment, then turned around and came back up. She smiled at Stevie.
“I just wanted to say . . . I had a really nice time today.”
“Yeah, me too. Are you as surprised as I am?”
“Yeah! I just didn’t see that coming. Maybe we could do it again sometime?”
Stevie’s grin was wide. “I’d like that.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
Max’s lip curled. “Are you two going to start dating now?”
Stevie’s fist came back so fast, Max didn’t have time to duck, and her nose was slammed farther into her head.
“Owww! You evil bitch!”
Ignoring her sister, Stevie took Oriana’s phone, which seemed to be surgically attached to the ballerina’s hand, and quickly typed in what Shen assumed was her phone number.
“Talk to you later,” Stevie said, handing the phone back. “And sorry about getting Max’s blood on the screen.”
“No problem.”
Oriana waved and made her way across the street.
Shen looked at the MacKilligan sisters. “You guys ready to—”
Before he could even finish his sentence, the pair began barking at each other.
“How could you commit to something so stupid?” Max demanded.
“Keep your voice down,” Stevie snapped, quickly moving down the stairs. “And it’s not like I had much choice. Did you want her to call the FBI on me? Besides, we need to keep her as sweet as possible here. Six figures to fix that house? Six figures?”
“What did you expect? It’s New York. You’re lucky it wasn’t seven.”
Shen followed the pair, remotely unlocking the SUV doors.
“Six or seven, we can’t pay right now. But this gets us out of it.”
“She will never agree to you doing this, you know.”
Shen expected one of them to get in the front passenger seat, but they both got into the back. He was a little insulted. He wasn’t their driver.
But he realized he had nothing to do with the decision once he got in the driver’s side and saw that Stevie had pinned her sister to the seat and was screaming in her face, “One word to Charlie about that goddamn violin and I will bury you!”
Deciding he wasn’t going to get into the middle of any of this, Shen started the SUV, turned on the radio to a rock station, and headed back to Queens.
chapter THIRTEEN
The arguing stopped once they were on the road and Shen had the