“It’s a long story.”
“If it ends with you hiring Bellamy for something, babe, I have the time to hear it.”
So I launched into it, giving a somewhat condensed version of events, ending with coming back to Kai’s for a few days without explaining about my apartment.
“Stay there,” Quin barked.
“What? No. Quin, you don’t need to come here.”
“Stay there,” he demanded again, hanging up on my objections.
“You might want to get dressed,” Kai suggested. “We are about to be invaded.”
Not half an hour later, we were.
Not just by Quin.
Oh, no.
Following behind him into Kai’s place was Miller, Smith, Lincoln, Finn, and – believe this or not – Gunner.
And, even more amazingly, it was Gunner who broke away from the pack, charging at me, hand raising, grabbing my chin, yanking it up a little roughly.
“Mother fucker,” he growled, eyes on my neck.
“It’s fine,” I insisted, shaking my head.
“Fine. Some bastard puts his hands around your neck, it’s not fucking fine, Jules.”
There was a warm, blooming sensation in my belly. At Gunner’s reaction. At everyone else’s. These people who dropped everything to come see me after a traumatic event.
I took a deep breath, meeting Gunner’s hard gaze. “Well, the way I hear it, he won’t be a problem anymore.”
To that, the tightening in his jaw loosened, his lips curved up slightly. “Got that straight. If Bellamy didn’t handle it, I’d have done it myself.”
“We’d have all needed to get in line,” Smith affirmed, coming up to angle my head down, reaching to part my hair. “Not too bad.”
Quin moved in next, shaking his head at me. “You should have come to me, Jules. This is what I do, remember? Fix things.”
“It’s embarrassing,” I admitted.
“Embarrassing? This is what conmen do. And they’re good at it. There was no reason to feel embarrassed that you got taken by a pro. And he was a pro. Got a hold of Bellamy before I left. He got a real name. Looked into him on the way. Got a rap sheet dating back to when he was ten years old. Violent shit at times too.”
“What was it?”
“Hm?”
“His name,” I clarified. “What was his name?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters,” I told him, dropping my voice so no one else could overhear. “I lived with that man. I slept with him. It’d be nice to know his actual name instead of the one he gave me.”
“Jameson Decker,” he explained. “Bound to be a criminal when you’re named after alcohol.”
With that, he moved away to join the others making cups of coffees. It was such a foreign site that I stood there and watched it for a moment.
“So, you all do know how to make your own coffee,” I told them with a sneer.
“Don’t get any ideas. Soon as you’re ready to come back, you’re making it again.” That was Quin.
“You know,” Miller started, coming up toward me and Kai, but looking only at him. “On the one hand, I’m pissed that you lied to me. On the other, you were helping Jules, so I don’t know if I have a right to be mad.”
“If it’s any consolation, I felt guilty about it,” Kai offered.
“That helps. You,” she declared, pointing then crooking her finger at me. “We need to talk.”
With that, she headed down the hall like she’d done so many times before. Maybe she had. Maybe she knew this place better than I did.
With nothing else to do, I followed, watching as Finn caught my eye on his way out the door.
“He’s on his way to clean your apartment,” Miller informed me with the kind of authority that said she was speaking from knowledge, not conjecture.
“What?”
“He’s not so great with the words thing, but he wants to show his care. So he cleans your place. I woke up after that trip to Turkey, remember that one? I got my ass handed to me. Could barely get around. But yeah, I woke up to find he had broken into my place, and scrubbed it spotless. He was in the process of separating my laundry to do the wash when I caught him.”
“What’d you do?”
“Let him finish, of course. I hate doing fucking laundry. And he loves it. So it was a win/win for us. I did get a lecture about my mediocre cleaning supply options. I woke up the next day to a giant delivery of gallon jugs of cleaning shit and rags and scrub brushes. I have gone through exactly a third of one of those jugs. I have seven more stashed in my basement. So, yeah, your place is going to be clean. It will be like Jameson never touched anything in there.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I admitted as we ended up upstairs, heading toward my bedroom. Like she somehow knew that was where I was staying, despite there being another guest room.