Sugar (The Henchmen MC 12)

"Nice shirt."

She made that growl again as she moved past me. "It's too early for you to say things," she grumbled at me as she pushed the door fully open, and invited herself inside.

"There's coffee in the kitchen," I called as I moved inside, realizing when Virgin shot me a raised brow that I was smiling at her back.

"Not yet," she said, cradling her cup in front of her mouth as I moved into the kitchen with her. "Still not yet," she said after drinking one full mug, then pouring another. Once she finished that, she took a deep breath, and reached up to pull off her sunglasses. She'd done a fair bit of makeup, but it didn't exactly escape me that she had left out the contacts. "Okay. You may speak," she declared, giving me a nod.

"Sure you're awake enough to trust with a loaded gun?" I asked, brows drawing low as she went to pour yet another cup.

"I took the last of it," she informed Roderick as he moved into the space with us, waving around the coffee pot. "Sorry."

"It's cool, mami. I'm not a huge coffee fan."

"Burn the witch!" she declared dramatically, pointing at Roderick in a full-on Salem-witch-trial-accusers impersonation.

"Think that's about enough coffee," I declared, shaking my head at her.

"You say this as though such a thing as enough coffee exists. Don't worry," she said, following me out of the kitchen. "I normally have shots in my morning coffee too. I'm not going to get an eager trigger finger and shoot you or anything."

"What?" Laz asked, stopping short, looking back at us.

"She wants to learn how to shoot," I explained.

"You gonna shoot up the building like Summer did when Reign tried to teach her?" Cash asked, coming out of nowhere.

"Taking her to the woods," I explained. "We don't need the heat from the NBPD if someone complains."

He nodded at that, giving Peyton a smile. "Let her pick out her own gun," he told me, giving me the permission I sort of needed to bring her down into the vault. "Let her get a feel for them. What works for you might not work for her."

"Thanks," I said, nodding. "Come on. Let's pick you something out."

"Something big and mean-looking," she demanded.

"They're guns, baby. They're all mean-looking."

With that, I led her down the stairs to the basement, the temperature dropping a good ten degrees, and I watched as a small shiver moved through her. "Want a sweatshirt?" I asked, gesturing over toward the laundry section in the corner.

"If it's yours. And just so you know, the second I put it on, it is no longer yours."

"Fucking chicks. Taking all our hoodies," I said, shaking my head as I moved to snag a bright red New York sweatshirt, handing it to her, watching as she balanced her cup on the edge of the washer so she could shrug it on.

"Where's the hood?" she asked, reaching up to run her hand around the frayed edge of the neck.

"Feel like I'm fuckin' strangling with them on. Cut it off."

"Interesting. Alright. I'm warm. Show me to the guns!"

With that, I did.

And, morbid curiosity aside, she managed to make herself turn around when I went to punch the code without me having to ask her.

"Oh, this is so very dramatic," she declared when the whoosh of air sound filled the quiet space as the door slid open. "Holy crap," was her next comment as we moved inside.

And, well, that was an appropriate response.

The vault was huge, big enough to fit all the brothers in at once, the walls lined with either shelves or hangers for the bigger guns.

"What the hell is this?" she asked, putting her cup on a shelf, and moving over toward the hanging guns. "It looks like something a nineteen-fifties suit-clad mobster would he holding out of the suicide doors of his car."

I smiled at that because it was cute as fuck. But also accurate.

Moving beside her, I reached up to put my hand on it.

"It's a Streetsweeper."

"It's a what?" she asked, looking over at me with drawn-together brows, seeming to think she misheard me.

"A Streetsweeper," I repeated.

"No way!" she hissed, whacking me in the chest.

"What?"

"That Nelly song! You know when he goes down your road in a Range Rover... with a Streetsweeper. It was about doing a drive-by!"

"Ah... yeah," I said, shaking my head at her. "What the fuck else would you think? An actual street sweeper?"

"Well, sorry I am not an outlaw biker who knows about these kinds of things."

"He says it is cocked and ready to go," I reasoned.

"My childhood has been corrupted," she said, holding her heart.

"Out of curiosity," I said, lips quirking up, "did you think "Ridin' Dirty" was about having a car in need of a wash?"

"I had no idea that "Butterfly" by Crazy Town was about sex for like years."