Keep It Classy (Bear Bottom Guardians MC 7)

Jubilee sighed. “I really don’t think this is the way to do it, though,” she pointed out.

It may not be, but I didn’t have any better ideas.

***

So we didn’t get taken away in cop cars.

However, there were a couple of cops there when we arrived back at our cars, and neither one of them looked happy.

Zee walked straight over to Jubilee and started laying into her.

Castiel, on the other hand, looked resigned.

“You did what you wanted to do?” he asked me.

I nodded.

“You think it’ll help?” he wondered.

I sure the fuck hoped so.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I’m crossing my fingers.”

He snorted and walked over to me, curling his arms around my back and pulling me to him.

A bulge that shouldn’t be there poked into my thigh, and I looked down at the square-shaped object in his pocket.

“What’s that?” I nudged him with my thigh.

His face went a little white.

“Um, nothing.”

I frowned and looked at him like he was crazy.

“What’s nothing?” I pushed.

“Uhh,” he hedged.

That was when I laid my head on his chest and acted like I wasn’t worried about what the object was.

When I had him in a false sense of comfortableness, I reached slowly down and jammed my hand into his pocket. When I came back up with whatever it was, I pulled away from him and ran, putting his cruiser and Zee and Jubilee in between us before he could so much as blink.

“Give it back,” he demanded, looking demented.

I popped the box open and then froze.

Because what was inside was a massive diamond ring.

“Goddammit, Turner!” Castiel barked. “Do you have to ruin everything? Seriously, I just wanted to ask you to goddamn marry me at home, with no fucking witnesses.”

He jerked his thumb pointedly at Zee and Jubilee who were looking on with laughing eyes.

“Ummm,” I murmured.

“I just got in when I got the call from Zee that y’all were doing a little breaking and entering today. Seriously, I swear to God, I can’t keep a single secret from you.”

I bit my lip and pulled the ring out of the box, slipping it onto my finger.

“You can ask me now, it’s okay.” I held out my hand. “It fits!”

“Of course, it fucking fits,” he muttered. “I used the ring you made out of your mother’s ashes to size it.”

I felt my heart swell.

God, this man loved me.

Not only had he helped me with my mother’s funeral, her death, and everything in between, he’d also gone out of his way to make me a memento that I could carry around with me forever that contained my mother’s ashes in an opal ring.

It was beautiful, and I wore it all the time.

I had no idea when he would’ve found a time where it was off my finger.

But I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“I love it,” I said. “Now, do your thing.” I pointed to the ground.

Castiel rounded the car, growling at me in frustration.

Then did his thing.

He dropped down onto one knee, right there outside of his ex-wife’s house, and said four words.

“Will you marry me?”

***

Easton arrived hours after the party had started.

Bayou, Zee, Wade, Linc, Liner—who looked haggard as fuck—Rome and even Slate, our newest member to the Bear Bottom Guardians MC, all looked at the newcomer with quite a bit of happiness at seeing him.

Easton had been gone since the day he’d killed Craig Minns.

Craig Minns, who we’d come to find out, had not only killed a few of the girls he’d been chatting up on the porn site’s private messaging boards, but also quite a few in his hometown before he’d branched out.

Craig Minns had an extensive operation, one that he funded with his porn’s success. One that he did completely alone, thank God.

“Glad to see you finally made it back,” Bayou said as he offered the man his hand.

I watched Easton take it, then let it go.

“I’m finally off assignment,” he muttered. “The moment I finished with that, I was asked to take over another agent’s assignment undercover. And as you can see” —he gestured to his burly beard and his haggard appearance— “I was a little out of my element.”

Which was true. We were used to seeing him shaved and in suits. Not dressed as a lumberjack biker with a chip on his shoulder.

“And I was driving through town when I saw the ‘Bear Bottom Hot Cop’ got engaged.” He grinned. “So I had to stop by.”

I growled low in my throat.

“Goddammit, Zee!”

***

Four years later

“Daddy, turn the lights on!”

I did as I was asked, turning the lights on in the cruiser as we pulled up to the house.

My only daughter, a ball of energy at three years old, squealed in glee.

My wife, who was asleep in the passenger seat, groaned.

I grinned as I pulled up to the garage of the house we’d built a half a year into our marriage, and turned the cruiser off.