Get Bucked (The Valentine Boys 4)

I took it, offered Kasey a smile, then turned around to walk out of the coffee store.

Kasey grumbled something under her breath as we left that sounded suspiciously like ‘fucking asshole,’ but I didn’t turn around to make sure.

“She’s sweet,” Waylynn said. “What did you do to her to piss her off?”

I grumbled something underneath my breath and took a left onto Main Street, the road that the bank was on, and started walking quickly.

It was a vain attempt at getting Waylynn to stop following me.

It didn’t work.

She just sped up.

“What was that?” she repeated, easily keeping pace at my side.

Thinking that it couldn’t hurt for her to know, I decided to tell her.

“We met when I first got back to Kilgore,” I said. “I was in a bad place. Did some bad shit. Fucked around. Kasey was with me for most of that time. When I finally got my ass back on the straight and narrow, Kasey had to go. I broke up with her, then left for college shortly after that.”

Waylynn hummed in understanding.

“So you pissed her off because she was in love with you and you broke up with her,” she guessed. “And now, you have to see her every day, and she’s still in love with you.”

I had no idea if that was the case or not.

I did know that she disliked me immensely, though.

“No idea,” I said as I made my way to the bank door. “But I don’t see her every day.”

When I opened it, I was unsurprised to find her still at my side.

She came to a stop beside me as I started to fill out a deposit receipt and then started counting the money that I would be depositing for Desi and Candy.

“That’s a lot of money,” Waylynn said. “I…”

“Hands in the air!”

I felt my heartbeat slow to an almost crawl and looked over my shoulder at the man that’d just entered through the bank’s front doors.

I felt like a fucking moron for not carrying today.

Normally I did.

I’d been doing it since I was old enough to hold a license to carry concealed.

And now, the one fucking time that I needed it, I didn’t have it on me.

I looked over at Waylynn as I raised my hands into the air, feeling helpless.

She didn’t have her hands in the air. She had one in her purse and the other one at the small of her back.

“Here,” she said, slapping a piece of cold metal onto the table I was standing in front of. “You can hold my purse gun.”

Then she pulled the biggest goddamn gun I’d ever seen right out of the waistband of her pants.

Knowing that she was about to engage the robber, I dropped my arms and picked up the ‘purse gun’ she’d handed me.

Then turned around just in time for the man to come stalking toward us.

“I said hands in the air!” the robber bellowed.

In answer, Waylynn flipped off the safety.

It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my life.

“Do you really want to see whose gun is bigger?” she asked. “Because mine is a 500 Win Mag. It’ll blow a hole in your chest the size of a watermelon.”

The man was stunned to stillness.

He gaped at Waylynn.

As did everyone else, me included.

“I’ll give you to the count of ten to get onto the floor before I shoot,” she said. “One. Two. Three…”

The robber threw his gun at Waylynn, which was when I realized that it was plastic.

It hit Waylynn in the face, then clattered to the floor and shattered into a million, tiny plastic pieces.

Waylynn didn’t bother shooting the moron, though.

Before anybody, even me, could react, she was tackling the man before he could make his escape.

She took him down in one well-placed tackle, doing better than eighty percent of the professional linemen for the Dallas Cowboys could’ve done.

“Holy shit,” I breathed, watching it all go down in a sort of distant surprise.

I bent down and picked up her gun that’d fallen to the floor, stuffed it in the back of my pants, then stepped on the man’s arm that he was about to use to nail a blow to the side of Waylynn’s head.

When he went to hit her with the other arm, I stepped down hard, feeling the audible crack of the man’s arm breaking.

He screamed bloody murder and Waylynn scrambled off of him.

I offered her my hand, which she promptly pushed away.

Standing on her own two feet, she smoothed her hands down her pants and stared at the now-crying robber.

A scattered and winded teller made her way over with a phone to her ear.

“The police are on their way,” she said breathlessly.

I nodded once and handed Waylynn back her hand cannon.

She took it, replaced it in the holster against her right kidney, then threw her shirt back over it.