I frowned. “What kind of snag?”
“The kind of snag that pisses me off, and now I feel like I need to make sure I stay and take care of it,” he answered, without really answering my question.
I groaned. “Fine. I’ll see if Turner can take me.”
She was already shaking her head. “No can do. You need me here. I can’t be driving you there and be here at the same time.”
She had a point.
“Well,” I paused. “Brittany did say that she could call me a cab.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dad mumbled. “I’ll figure something out.”
And he did.
It just wasn’t something that I liked.Chapter 9Italians don’t measure seasonings. We just sprinkle and shake until the spirits of our ancestors say, ‘enough child.’
-Truth of Life
Zee
I couldn’t believe I’d agreed to this.
“I don’t see why I have to do this,” I muttered darkly, staring at my father and Pete like they’d grown a second head.
“You saw the state of her porch,” Pete said. “It’s a death trap. If we don’t fix it, it’s gonna fall straight off the back of the house.”
I had seen it, in fact. And I agreed. Even her landlord agreed after a little persuasion. What I didn’t agree to, however, was needing to take her all the way to Benton, Louisiana. Honestly, if it were my decision, she wouldn’t be going at all.
But, it wasn’t my decision. And despite the fact that I was a grown ass man, I still did what my father wanted me to do, and this time it was taking the little she-devil all the way to Benton—three hours away—on the back of my bike.
I’d have taken her in my truck, making sure that she didn’t have to be plastered up against me, but apparently my father and Pete needed my truck to haul the wood needed for Jubilee’s back porch. Meaning I had no other choice.
Just the thought of having her pressed up against me for hours on end was enough to send not only my dick into hyperdrive but also my mind.
I wasn’t sure that I could handle having to deal with her ass for that long.
Nor was I sure that I could stand to have her hands on me without making a move that I shouldn’t be making.
“I did,” I admitted. “Are you scrapping the entire thing?”
Pete nodded once. “Yeah. There’s no way to salvage it. It’s fucked.”
I agreed to that, too.
I’d been the one to nearly fall straight through it when I stepped out onto the piece of crap to see where it would be best to place a camera. When the entire thing had shifted underneath of me, I’d immediately stepped back into the house and had called my father and Pete to come around to see the damage from underneath.
Needless to say, I hadn’t been surprised to hear that the porch was only being held on by just a few boards.
“Shit,” I sighed. “What do you think that’ll take? Three? Four days?”
“Three.” Pete rubbed his face. “If you bring her home Sunday, that’ll give us enough time to get started on it, and by the time she gets back, it’ll be most of the way completed and she won’t have any other recourse but to allow us to finish.”
I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be that easy but chose to keep my truths to myself.
If Pete thought he could get Jubilee to get over it, then I was going to hope for the best.
I was going to plan for the worst, though. Just in case.
“Gotta call into the station and tell them I’ll probably need Monday off,” I muttered. “You do realize that this is my only weekend off for the entire month of October, correct?”
Dad grinned. “You do realize, correct, that I don’t give a flying fuck?”
I grunted out a ‘go fuck yourself’ and walked away from both of the grinning idiots.
The next five minutes I spent rescheduling appointments for tattoos—most of them for my club brothers—and calling into the sheriff’s department and explaining that I wouldn’t be there on Monday.
No matter what they said, I had no doubt in my mind that I’d be there at least an extra day.
One, because I knew how Jubilee worked. And two, because I knew how I worked.
Jubilee and I separately? We were fairly normal, well-adjusted human beings. Together? We turned into teenagers again that hated each other and couldn’t miss a chance to make the other one’s life a living hell.
“Do your best to get along, too,” Dad suddenly ordered.
“As long as you’re the one to tell her that she’s riding with me,” I suggested. “That way she can get all her bitching out before I get there.”
Rolling my eyes, I turned back around and hit ‘end call’ on my phone before shoving it into my pocket.
***
Turns out, her bitching wasn’t over by the time I got there…or by the time she got where I was at the diner.