Wind Therapy - A.J. Downey Page 0,16

and Marisol’s hard look receded as though she hadn’t considered that.

Fen and Derry talked about maybe working something out while Derry looked for work doing what he usually did, which was plumbing or electrical or some shit. I don’t know, I stopped paying attention.

Deacon and Skeeter were working something out, and it looked like Goner was headed home with Squatch.

That meant everyone was sorted for the time being until they could get places of their own, which was pretty sweet. Meant I had less shit between me and my own home and bed with the sexy woman behind the bar.

“Breakfast or just home?” I asked the guys and apparently it had to be put to a vote. Breakfast won, goddamnit, but that might not have been such a bad thing. I mean, there was a distinct possibility I was so damn grumpy because it was an actual case of hangry. I wasn’t always the best at keeping my ridiculously high metabolism fed.

You would think, edging the line of thirty it would start to slow down some on me, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen.

We cleaned up, took out trash and closed up shop here at the Moses Lake clubhouse. Marisol actually did most of it, pointing out things that we didn’t honestly even think of when it came to closing up a building for any kind of extended period of time.

She was cool about it, too. Making it into innocuous suggestions or asking simple questions like ‘aren’t you going to do...?’ and when one of the guys stopped to ask why would they? She was always ready with an astute answer that never preached and was phrased in such a way to keep the boys from feeling dumb.

I didn’t know if it was a natural talent on her part or a learned behavior. Maybe it was a bit of both. In any case, she was a mystery to me in a lot of ways, a puzzle, and I think that was why she appealed to me even more than her earthly beauty.

She had on the same pair of jeans and boots from yesterday, but she’d changed her top to something a touch more modern. Simple, black, and fitted; it had long sleeves and a keyhole cutout at her chest above her breasts and at the back that gave tantalizing glimpses of her rich, golden sun-kissed skin. She’d undid her hair from its braid from yesterday, the long tresses falling down her back in kinked waves, and had only bothered pulling half of it up to keep it out of her face using a cheap, drugstore, plastic hair clip – the kind with the metal spring action hidden beneath the decorative part.

She’d washed her face and had redone her subtle makeup and she was beautiful. Natural, earthy, with an underlying edge of badass that if she were Norse? I would compare her to one of Fen’s Valkyries.

Truth was, there simply wasn’t any comparing her to anything. Marisol was just uniquely Marisol in my eyes. Quietly defiant is how I would have described her the first time I had met her. I could see the cool appraisal and intelligence in her eyes the moment she’d locked them on me the first time I’d rode into her little village of fruit growers.

Wise beyond her years was a close second that I would apply to her – and I couldn’t chalk it up to her simply living underneath Abuela’s roof. While that woman was somewhat clever, she wasn’t as smart as she thought she was. She simply made up for her lack of intelligence with cruelty.

Not so with Marisol, and I wanted to know, why? What made this beauty tick?

I certainly wasn’t going to find that out hanging around here.

I sighed and looked the place over, swinging my keys around my index finger and catching them in my palm, the metal teeth biting.

“Until next month,” I said and was the last one out, locking up the doors, effectively temporarily rendering this clubhouse inert. Whether it would be permanently mothballed remained to be seen, but I sincerely hoped it wouldn’t. If it was, it would be the end of an era – for sure.

Chapter Six

Marisol…

We stopped and ate breakfast at a Denny’s. Maverick, however, didn’t care to sit with his men. Instead, he had us seated, just me and him, at a two-person table some feet away from them. I hid behind the menu while I made my decision and then