Dream Keeper (Dream Team 4)

“This picture is coming clearer,” Cisco muttered.

“Yeah,” Auggie said shortly. “And, man, I have intimate knowledge of more than one woman who fucks with men’s heads for whatever reason they do it. They don’t know what they want. Or they get off on it. Or they’re stringing him along because they want company and orgasms, but they think they eventually might find someone better. Whatever. And I do not need that shit. She knows I’m into her. She knows I want to give us a shot. She’s cold. Then she’s nice. She turns reserved. She switches to funny. She’s friendly. Then she avoids me. Then she lets me fuck her against the wall in her foyer, not even allowing me all the way into her house, and she instigated that, before she kicks me out. And the next time she sees me, she’s acting like that didn’t happen. What the fuck?”

“You do know you can ask me this, but I can’t answer primarily because,” Cisco leaned toward him, “I’m not her.”

“Pepper does not get into anything deep.”

“She let you get deep, Auggie, and you’re the only man since her breakup with Juno’s father she let do that, so I have to say, I disagree.”

Auggie did a slow blink before he asked, “How do you know that?”

Cisco shrugged, took another sip of his vodka and said low, “Axl was working late, Hattie asked me if I wanted to go to dinner, I said yes. Joe drove, she drank, and she gets talkative when she drinks.”

Mag, Mo and Hawk did not understand why the women, all of them, dug Cisco as much as they did. As mentioned, the man was a felon, a very successful one, and you didn’t get to his level in that world being a good guy.

But the women liked him so much, they hung out with the guy on the regular.

Though, Boone had a clue.

Axl flat-out liked him.

Auggie had been with Mag, Mo and Hawk in not wanting anything to do with the guy.

But now Auggie was getting it.

Cisco’s voice was back to normal when he said, “So, you can take that as you have a lot of people in your corner on this because Hattie was sharing because she too is frustrated that Pepper isn’t letting you in. And she didn’t hesitate to add that she isn’t the only one in your crew having these feelings.”

“I can want it, they can want it, Juno can want it, but it’s Pepper who has to want it.”

“Her family is in a cult, did you know that?”

Shit.

He knew they were religious, but…

“A cult?”

Cisco nodded, drank more vodka, and then said, “It’s not big. The head pastor, who’s also the leader, is a nutjob. Not the kind of personality that attracts a lot of followers, say like a Koresh. But there are followers and Pepper’s family has been a part of the group for a long time. Her father especially believes, to the point he’s a deacon. Hattie told me that before they found this guy’s god, her mom and dad were hippies, that’s probably why Pepper is named Pepper. But something shifted and free love and eating special brownies and going to Dead concerts became an infatuation with something that was the exact opposite. Since Juno contacted me, I’ve been trying to find out about them, but the lid on that is closed tight. And I think we both get that is not good.”

No, it was not.

Cisco kept going.

“Pepper felt stifled by that. She hated it. She was already her own woman when she was a girl and she escaped as soon as she could. Left that life. Got her license to do hair. Met her ex. Fell in love. Made a baby. And he’s a man on the move. He was selling cars when they met. Started selling real estate. Opened his own brokerage when he was only twenty-seven. Now, he has eight agents working for him, does retail, commercial and residential, rentals and sales. And he’s someone to watch.”

Auggie was not feeling this, mostly because, if some miracle occurred and he could sort things out with Pepper, she should be telling him this.

He was also not feeling it because the guy sounded like a catch and he wanted her back.

“Cisco—”

“He also never quit fucking his high school sweetheart.”

That hit him like a gut punch.

“You’re joking,” Auggie growled.

Cisco shook his head. “Not when he and Pepper were dating. Not when they moved in together when she was nineteen. Not when he got Pepper pregnant when she was still nineteen, but nearing twenty. And not when she had the baby, they nested, she stopped working, and only went part-time when Juno hit kindergarten. Now she’s in a nineteen-hundred-square-foot townhome in a decent mid-income development. And he has a thirty-two-hundred-square-foot modern build four blocks from Cherry Cricket in north Cherry Creek.”