Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 88736 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 444(@200wpm)___ 355(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88736 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 444(@200wpm)___ 355(@250wpm)___ 296(@300wpm)
“She’s mine,” I said finally, when I could force myself to speak evenly. “Doesn’t matter what her history is. Doesn’t matter what her connections are. Doesn’t matter if she lied or told the truth. Doesn’t matter what the fuck David Granger has to say. She’s mine, and no one touches her.”
“Curtis, think about this,” my dad warned. “You’ve known the woman less than a week.”
“Her kids are sleepin’ in my fuckin’ house,” I snapped, meeting his eyes. “Yesterday, I sat and watched some weird-ass show for hours with her eldest while they got their hair braided. This mornin’ before I came into work, I stopped to check that her youngest hadn’t fallen out of the loft bed we set up for him yesterday. When Dylan fucked up and brought his girlfriend with him to Oregon, that woman I’d known less than a day took a punch meant for your grandson from a man who weighs three hundred pounds. Then she somehow kept her feet and kneed him in the balls so hard that he was still curled up in a ball when I got there. She’s sleepin’ in my bed. She’s on the back of my bike. I don’t need to think about shit.”
The room was absolutely silent when I finished.
“Then she’s got the club’s protection,” Dragon announced.
“She had that when Harv called in his marker,” I replied, looking at him. “Now she’s got mine. There’s not a member of this club who would let you drag their old lady in and interrogate her, scaring the shit outta her in the process. I won’t either. You have questions in the future, you come to me.”
I got the fuck out of there and grabbed my phone off the bar as I passed it. Even though I hurried, Teddy’s truck was already gone when I got outside.
“Curt,” my brother called as I strode toward my bike. “What’s goin’ on? I just saw Teddy take off like her ass was on fire.”
“Bullshit,” I answered, climbing onto my bike. “Absolute fuckin’ garbage.”
I went straight home and let out a breath of relief when I found Teddy’s truck in the driveway. The front door wasn’t locked, and there was no one in the living room or kitchen, but I could hear the kids up in the bonus room as I took the stairs two at a time.
“Hey, Curt,” Finn greeted as I came to a stop in the doorway.
“Hey, bud,” I replied. Jesse was playing a video game, sitting on the back of the couch with their feet on the cushions, and Dylan was at the other end, doing something on his phone. “You seen your mom?”
“She said she was going in to take a shower,” Jesse said, glancing at me over their shower.
“Cool, thanks.”
I moved slower than I wanted to as I made my way down to the other end of the hall, hoping that the kids wouldn’t wonder why both of us were home in the middle of the day. Teddy didn’t have a job yet, but I usually wasn’t home until around four o’clock. I’d noticed that Finn was pretty oblivious to that kind of thing, but Jesse and Dylan would clock it.
When I opened our bedroom door, I could hear the shower running in the bathroom, but Teddy was seated on the edge of the bed. Something about how she was sitting with her back to the door, her shoulders curved forward and head tipped down, made my guts twist as I quietly closed the door behind me and crossed the room.
“Hey, baby,” I greeted as I sat down next to her. “You hauled ass out of there so fast, you were gone when I came out.”
“Didn’t feel like staying to hang out,” she said wryly, glancing over at me. She was holding a phone with a purple case, wiggling it a little from one hand to the other.
“Don’t blame you.” I nodded toward the phone. “You turned it on?”
“Yep.” She showed me the screen. “I had a voicemail from Jesse’s school asking us to return her books and five voicemails from David that I haven’t listened to yet.”
“Why not?”
“I was giving myself a pep talk,” she said with a self-deprecating huff. “The morning has already been shit.”
“Yeah.” I leaned forward and braced my elbows on my knees. “Listen, I didn’t know what that was about before we went in there. I wouldn’t have let them ambush you if I’d known.”
Teddy shot me a small smile. “It’s not like you could do anything if they did. I might not know a lot about your club, but I do know that all those guys are higher-ranking than you. Right? It’s not like you could tell the president to fuck off, even if he is your grandpa.”
“Funny,” I replied. “Because that’s pretty much what I did.”