Still Waters (Greenstone Security 1)

It wasn’t just my geriatric cul-de-sac that dozed at early evening on a Wednesday night; small towns did it too. The air was too hot, and the town was too quiet for much else.

Unless you were in any way connected to the Sons of Templar. Then you knew that though most of the town was sleeping, bikers rarely slumbered, and if they did, either they’d passed out from too much Jack or had too many Janes in their beds.

Though, these days there was less sluttiness from the men. Though Lucky picked up the slack that Cade and Bull, and now Hansen from New Mexico, had left.

“Why do I always fall for this?” I asked myself. I still had the phone to my ear but Rosie wasn’t listening to me, too busy shouting at some “asshole who wouldn’t know a turn signal from a G-spot.”

The glint of glass against the disappearing sun had me push up to standing.

“Okay, that’s not as bad as usual. I was totally thinking you’d only just left the house,” I said into the phone, squinting at the shape of the car that wasn’t a telltale VW Beetle.

It was something much more masculine. And wasn’t driving erratically, so the warning signs went on.

“I haven’t just left,” Rosie protested in my ear. “I’m passing Laura Maye’s bar right now.”

The warning signs flickered with her words—Laura Maye’s bar was still ten minutes away, maybe six with Rosie’s driving. Or more if she crashed. Again.

The black SUV pulled up on the curb, and I did little more than stare as the engine cut off and a large and arguably delicious figure rounded the hood.

I watched his journey, staring from his Ray Ban-covered eyes, to the black tee, to the faded jeans and signature boots.

His sunglasses were locked on me. As were the eyes behind them, I imagined.

His jaw was hard.

“Oh shit,” I muttered into the phone.

Then I realized he had no reason at all to be angry. I was the one who’d been left standing in the middle of a bathroom after being shot at and then having mind-blowing sex with him.

“Chill out, dude,” Rosie said, mistaking my tone. “I’m sure everyone is expecting us, as we are the life of the party, but everyone knows I’m almost always at least an hour late.”

“It’s not that—”

My words were cut off because the phone was taken from my ear.

I watched him coolly but not without rage as he pressed the big red button on it and then slipped it into the back pocket of his jeans.

“We need to talk,” he said by way of greeting, voice rough and firm.

I stared at his sunglasses, my reflection glinting off them. To the observer, I would have looked as I always did, with my signature makeup of winged black eyeliner and red lip, slightly turned down in what most would call a “resting bitch face.” I called it the face that saved me from the world.

Or saved the world from me.

It was almost always blank, bordering on disinterest by default. It turned into a smile with friends, a wonky grin after a lot of cocktails, but mostly it stayed like this. That didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling. It didn’t mean I didn’t observe the slightest twitch to my eye in Keltan’s shades.

“Babe?” he probed.

I’d been silent, fury brewing like the stew my dad made that packed a punch.

“You just pulled my phone from my ear while I was speaking into it,” I said calmly.

He pushed his glasses to the top of his head, sighing as he did so. “I said we needed to talk. I need to explain about last time.” He glanced at my door, then back to me, his eyes going down the entirety of the tight skirt and equally tight off-the-shoulder shirt Mrs. Hesten had been judging not moments before. Though he didn’t judge. The heat in his eyes was unmistakable as he met my cool gaze, which thawed only slightly with the heat.

“Okay,” I said, my voice still calm.

Perhaps if he knew me better, and had, like Rosie for example, known this tone like the time my hairdresser cut bangs I didn’t want, he’d know what the tone meant.

But because he wasn’t Rosie, or the hairdresser who now worked two towns over, he didn’t know. His attractive and downright distracting face stayed the same as he folded his arms.

“You needing to talk, I’m guessing it’s about some sort of life-threatening, urgent situation like a bomb threat that only I can save the world from in the next ten minutes?” I continued, crossing my own arms. “Not the day, three weeks ago, when you fucked me in a bathroom and then left without a word. Because we don’t need to talk about that now. We should have talked about that three weeks ago. So now, I’m assuming it’s something far less urgent.”