“You know, Uncle Jesse, I really would’ve never expected you to say that word with so much authority,” I replied.
There was a moment of complete and utter silence and then, “Oh, my god. Your new road name is that. There’s no way around it.”
Haggard’s words, and the wheeze in his voice, had me smiling.
“Thanks,” Easton said dryly. “I can’t wait to have everyone calling me that. Even my brother.”
“Who is your brother?” I asked curiously. “Is he famous, too?”
“I do not look like John Stamos,” he moaned.
“Actually, you kind of do,” Iris agreed as she turned around to survey Easton over her shoulder.
“Fuckin’ great,” Easton grumbled.
“Who is Uncle Jesse?” someone asked.
Bram, maybe.
“The uncle off of Full House that married Aunt Becky,” Haggard answered for me.
“Ohhh, yeah. She was hot. Holy shit,” Bram muttered.
At first, I wasn’t quite sure if the ‘holy shit’ was due to Aunt Becky’s hotness, or the sheer amount of leather and man that was in front of us.
Then, I was shaking my head in amazement.
“There’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to find a biker in all this,” I muttered to myself.
“We’ll figure it out,” Tide grumbled from my side. “With the description you were able to give us of his features, as well as what the cut looked like, we know enough people here to ask them and see if they’ve seen them.”
“I gave you a description?” I murmured. “I don’t remember that.”
“I hacked into your video feed at the shop,” Easton said. “I was able to get a good view of his cut, minus the actual names of the town of the MC, but it was enough to give a general idea.”
“What did it look like?” I wondered.
Vaguely I saw something big and yellow, but my memory was fuzzy.
“Yellow jacket,” he answered. “Guy’s big as fuck, too. He had to be at least seven feet tall to be outside of the camera range where he was standing. So there’s that.”
“Huh,” I said as I tried to remember what the guy looked like.
Seriously. The only thing I remembered was the color yellow.
I couldn’t even recall the way the jacket was formed.
But the guy’s face… I could point that out very easily. Mostly because I was looking at it when he punched me in the face, permanently branding it into my memory as the first person to ever hurt me in that way.
I guess I was lucky that he didn’t do other things while I was incapacitated.
Which I voiced aloud.
“You guys have it so good,” I grumbled. “You’ll never understand how hard it is to be a woman.”
Tide looked down at me in surprise. “What do you mean?”
I gestured at the sidewalk in front of us where all the men were crowded around a table, drinking beer.
“Take that for example,” I said. “Would you walk right past that? Or would you cross the street?”
Tide didn’t hesitate when he said, “We’re going to walk right past it.”
I nodded. “Us women? We have to question the cost/benefit ratios. Would it be easier to walk past them? Yes. But…”
“But who knows if they’ll take notice of you,” Sophia murmured as she walked, having already moved to the other side of Haggard on instinct. “Kind of why I moved to the other side. I don’t know them, and they could easily overpower me if they wanted to.”
“Those are the guys from The Brothers Keepers MC. Not a hurtful bone in any of their bodies. They’re a bunch of firefighters,” Haggard said.
“Sure,” Sabrina said. “But we don’t know that. It’s nothing against them. But even when you say they’re good, we’re probably still going to cross the street.”
I smirked.
“When y’all go out for a jog, do y’all pre-plan your route? Tell anyone where you’re going? Make sure you have a tracker on your phone in case anyone needs to find you? In case you go missing?” I asked. “Because I can guarantee you, if we left the house for a jog or a walk, we’d do all of those things and more. Have done all of those things and more. Y’all? Not so much. I just saw you running down the road in cutoff sweatpants. There’s no way you had anything on you.”
Mostly because those pants had been so tight that I’d seen every inch of his body underneath.
“Nope,” he said. “I’ve never done those things.”
“But your sister has,” I said. “And will be even more diligent now since that shit happened to her.”
A few years ago, Cannel Crow, the Crow princess, had gone missing in a parking lot of a grocery store. She hadn’t been seen for over a year. Not until she was rescued, worse for wear, from a man that’d ‘bought her’ and kept her for all of that time.
“True,” Jeremiah, who’d been rather quiet throughout our walk into the rally, said. “My ex-wife wouldn’t even go to the store by herself after Cannel was taken. She started doing all that grocery pickup thing.”