Lock You Down (Rivers Brothers 2)

God, his voice.

It was the sort that was smooth and full-bodied at the same time. A voice that held weight, but somehow still managed to shiver over your skin, sink down in, curl its cool fingers around interesting parts of you. Throat, chest, stomach, lower.

Yes, lower.

Yep.

That was just like me.

Get the warm and tinglies for the guy who was probably going to murder me then inventively hide my body.

Sounded about right.THREENixonMy fucking hip hurt.

And it pissed me off not only to be in pain but to be in pain in my hip like some crotchety old man.

"What'd you do to your leg?" Atlas asked, having blown back into town sometime early that morning. Which likely meant that something had gone south with whatever woman he'd been away with. His life story. But he had a fresh tan and absolutely no stress.

Being back in town meant he would likely take on jobs for a couple weeks before he would take off again without warning. Atlas, you could say, was not someone to carefully sock his money away, build up a healthy retirement fund. He was too afflicted with wanderlust, too restless to stay put for any length of time. He managed to keep his place year-round--a townhouse that he was out of more than he was in--but the rest of his income seemed to go toward traveling.

Me, well, I got plenty of moving around to last my lifetime back when my family and I ran our own little criminal empire. Retired from that, I was genuinely happy to have roots, a home base. Sure, a vacation would likely be good, but I could never live half my life on planes and boats, in hotel rooms. For a family raised so close, we all turned out vastly different.

King with his dogged ambition. Me with my uncertainty. Atlas with his wanderlust. Rush with his phone sex business. Scotti with her family life and florist shop.

"It's my hip," I admitted, voice a growl.

"Yeah?" Atlas asked, lips twitching. "What happened? You sneeze too hard, old man?"

"Fuck off," I grumbled, slapping the file I had been adding pages to onto a pile with all the others. "I got hit by a car."

"What?" he asked, a hair more serious. Which, for the normal person, would be nothing. But for Atlas, it was practically grave.

"I was on a case. Trying to talk to this stalker chick. She peeled out, and hit me with her back quarter panel."

"You've always had such a way with the ladies," he told me, lips curved upward.

"I wasn't trying to fuck her, At, I was trying to tell her to fuck off."

"But she told you to fuck off instead."

That she did, actually.

And in as many words.

Repeatedly.

Then with action.

With more than sufficient force.

I was half pissed and half impressed.

It wasn't often someone was willing to hit you with their car.

Sure, it wasn't on purpose. She seemed to be a complete shit driver, to be honest. And, to her credit, she had paused to make sure she hadn't done any serious damage, before she disappeared.

Though, what she thought she was accomplishing by racing off was beyond me. Her plate was on her car, traceable.

One could go ahead and assume she wasn't a pro. Unless the plates were fake. But judging by her reaction to me, I thought not. She was some normal, garden variety stalker.

Usually, with women, it wasn't that big of a deal to handle. They tended to be pissed about some cheating or a lack of child support or some other domestic issue. You went ahead and had a talk with them--with King, or Atlas, or Rush, likely a talk about how they deserved better, that they shouldn't waste their time with such a piece of shit, etc. etc. etc., while I told them to fuck off and move on with their lives already, always being the more blunt out of all my siblings--and they let it go.

Not like the guys who couldn't accept that some woman didn't belong to them just because she once dated him or simply smiled at him at the grocery store.

So I figured that as soon as King's contact at the DMV got back to us with a name, it would likely just be another day, then I could close the case, move on. Maybe catch a couple easy cases that just involved updating security systems or something like that.

"Can't imagine why she'd be stalking the prick she has been staking out. He hardly seems like someone a woman would feel attached to."

"Oh, women. Such mysterious creatures," Atlas agreed.

"Speaking of mysterious creatures," Kingston said, walking in, glancing at Atlas lounged on the couch in my office. "What brings you back so early? Did you hit on some cartel guy's woman again?"

The fact that he had to add on 'again' told you a lot about Atlas and his tendency toward getting himself into interesting sorts of trouble when womenfolk were involved.