Renny (The Henchmen MC 6)

She was going to flip.

"And, fuck, when Janie hears about this..." Mitch added, shaking his head.

You didn't fuck with Lo because she was smart, capable, and had control over an entire lawless army.

You didn't fuck with Janie because she would, quite literally, blow your shit up.

And while she was hurting, while she was genuinely making herself sick living at the bedside of her unconscious husband, she was still Janie. She was still the most headstrong, resilient, badass woman I had ever met. She would not handle the news well that while the man she loved more than she loved the air in her lungs was laid up recovering from multiple gunshot wounds and head trauma, someone was coming after her. Even if it was inadvertently.

I wouldn't exactly put it past her to start building a bomb in the private bath in Wolf's room.

She was that level of insane when she was pissed.

"We aren't telling Janie," Reign surprised me by saying, breaking the silence in the car.

"Why the fuck not?" Mitch asked, clearly insulted that Reign thought he in any way had the right to make a decision for Hailstorm.

"Right now, Janie needs to worry about Wolf and her son. She doesn't need any more stress on top of that. In case you haven't noticed, she's not handling this fucking well. She's losing weight and she was a fucking rail to start with. Every time I see her, her eyes are red-rimmed from crying. This is fucking Jstorm we're talking about here, baddest bitch in the state and she's crying all the time. She doesn't need this. And we aren't going to burden her with it."

"You do realize," Renny cut in, brow raised, "that when all this blows over and Wolf wakes up and she gets briefed on this shit, that she is going to lose her ever-loving mind for being left out of the loop."

"And I'll be a fucking happy man to see her back to her normal self," Reign agreed, pulling into the garage at the compound and cutting the engine. "Because that means I have my best fucking friend back and it means that Malcolm has his father back and Janie has her protector back. So everyone is going to keep their goddamn lips shut if they see Janie, got it?" he asked, giving us all a hard look before climbing out of the car, slamming the door, and heading inside.

"You and me," Renny started when Mitch went out to follow Reign.

"There is no you and me," I cut him off, defensive, stupidly thrown-off by the whole hand-holding thing.

"Oh, there's a you and me alright," he said, smirking. "But I wasn't talking about that. Though, if you want to talk about that..." he said, jerking his head to the seat we were sitting on, "this row of seats lays down and we have the whole cargo area to prove just how much of a you and me there actually is."

An unexpected jolt of desire shot down to my core and my thighs pressed together instinctively to ease the ache as I swallowed hard before speaking. "What were you talking about then?" I asked, deciding it was safest to side-step the entire other comment. If there was one thing I had learned over the past couple of weeks, it was that Renny was capable of doing something that not many were able to- he could throw me off, surprise me, keep me on my toes. And when I was on my toes, I found that I stumbled. I lost ground. I gave ground to Renny.

I couldn't keep letting that happen.

Before I knew it, my back would be against a wall and there would be no escape.

"What I was going to say, sweetheart, is that we have a date with that guy you would normally be drooling all over if you weren't currently in the midst of a somewhat embarrassing attraction to a certain hot as fuck, charming as the devil, redheaded biker," he said, big grin in place.

"That ego," I said, reaching for my door handle, "something to do with your abusive upbringing?" I asked and watched as his eyes went guarded, as his smile fell and his jaw tightened. I was sure most people didn't know anything about his past and I was equally sure that those that did were not as cruel as to use it against him. I wasn't cruel by nature. And, unlike Renny, I didn't get my kicks by pushing buttons to see what they did. But I was apparently capable of being nasty when on the defensive and trying desperately to not lose the game.

I found I really didn't care for that side of me as I exited the car and made my way inside, followed the whole way by a silent, looming, angry Renny.