made Baby happy after everything she’d been through.
Kendrick was telling the big man some sort of animated story—most of Kenrick’s stories were animated—that had Gabe laughing.
The guys ordered beers and Kendrick walked over to Baby.
“Hey, I’m really sorry if I stuck my foot in my mouth the other day about Dr. Harri— Quinn. Those rumors about what happened on campus a few months ago might not be true.”
“Or at the very least, there’s two sides to the story, I’m sure.”
“Quinn was a great professor. She talked me through my ideas about global cyber culture. It changed a lot of how I was thinking. I’m not sure many instructors would’ve taken the time, especially when there wasn’t much in it for her.”
Baby smiled softly, his gaze flicking toward the door. “Yeah, she’s pretty amazing.”
“Well, I should’ve kept my big mouth shut the other night at New Brothers.”
“It’s fine. Evidently word had gotten out anyway. Gavin knew.”
Kendrick shook his head. “That’s a shame. I hope no one judges her based on that. I’ve spent enough time at Ivy League schools to know that the rumor mill there is as bad as small-town Wyoming.”
Baby chuckled. “I don’t think any of us are too concerned about it. Except Quinn. She didn’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m surprised Gavin heard about it.”
That still nagged at Baby. “Hey, do you think you could trace where an anonymous email came from?”
Kendrick glanced over his shoulder, probably to make sure Gavin wasn’t listening. Gavin preferred to keep everything on the up and up.
But Gavin was too busy watching Lexi behind the bar. And he wasn’t being subtle about it either. She kept shooting him annoyed glances, but he stared her down anyway, like he didn’t trust her.
“For me, not for Gavin,” Baby responded.
“Yeah, usually, unless someone is pretty damned good at hiding themselves, which most people aren’t. Why?”
Baby decided to leave it alone for now. Like Gavin had said, it was probably someone poking their nose someplace it didn’t belong.
But if someone had decided they were going to stir up unnecessary trouble for Quinn here, Baby wasn’t above using Kendrick’s computer superpowers to find out who it was and have a talk with them.
“I might need you to dig into something for me. I’ll let you know.”
Kendrick nodded. “You know I’m always up for getting into trouble.”
He faded off. Trouble had just walked through the door.
Chapter Nineteen
They all met up at Anne’s place, a small but gorgeous studio apartment that ran along the top level of an old barn on Linear Tactical’s property.
“Welcome to pre-gaming, Quinn,” Riley said as she handed Quinn a glass of white wine. “It’s kind of a local tradition where we help each other get gussied up to go out drinking by, well, drinking.”
“Somebody has to help me with this eyeshadow,” Anne, the local emergency room doctor, called out from the bathroom.
“I’m on it,” a woman said then threw back her glass of wine and swallowed it down. Quinn recognized her as Wavy, Baby’s sister. “Wine is a better idea then those damned Electric Smurfs. I swore off those things last time.”
“We all swear those things off every time,” Charlie, Ethan’s mom, said.
“Anne,” Riley yelled, winking at Quinn. “Are you going to wear your red cowboy boots, even though you know it means Zac is going to drag you back here as soon as humanly possible?”
The doctor laughed from the bathroom. “Yes. But I’m going to make him suffer a little first.”
All the women chuckled at that.
“Gabe is already over at the Eagle’s Nest,” a woman said. She’d been mostly quiet, sipping on her wine from a stool near the kitchen counter. If Quinn wasn’t mistaken, her name was Jordan. “He said the guys were already there en masse.”
“They’re worried because of what happened to me last week.” Riley rolled her eyes. “As if there’s another terrorist wandering around the streets of Oak Creek waiting to pick one of us off.”
Quinn had listened, wide-eyed, as Riley had shared some of the details of her ordeal, beyond thankful that Riley had escaped with little more than a few stitches from the knife wound on her arm.
“We have to let our big alpha men be alpha men,” Anne said from the bathroom. “Protectiveness literally runs in the blood. I’ve studied it under an actual microscope.”
Jordan grinned. “You know how they are. They can face torture and death without blinking but put one of us in harm’s way, and they lose all composure.”