Atonement (Angel's Halo MC 5)

“Colt Hannigan doesn’t pay my salary. He is, however, the brother-in-law of one of the men who do.”

“I was actually hoping we could work around telling him, or anyone else who I am,” I muttered.

Her brown eyes widened. “How do you plan on doing that? This is a small town and there are plenty of locals who come in here throughout the week. You probably know them all.”

I twisted my fingers together rougher. “I have a solution for that. Plenty of people know my face, but not one of them has seen me naked.”

With the exception of Raider, a voice tried to remind me, but I quickly squashed it before it could distract me from the business at hand.

I had tried to keep my mind off of him all day, yet it hadn’t worked very well. I was thankful that he was gone with Colt on this run. I needed time away from both of them so I could hopefully get my head on straight, as well as sort out my finances and get the hell out of Dodge—er, Creswell Springs.

“Okay, you have me intrigued.” She shifted in her chair, her eyes locked on me as she waited for me to tell her about this brilliant plan I had.

Blowing out a long breath, I dived in.

Before I was even finished, Topaz stopped me.

I snapped my mouth shut, waiting for her to turn me down because my brilliant plan was too stupid to even consider.

“I’m kind of in love with this idea,” she surprised me by saying as she started messing with the keyboard to the computer and began typing furiously. “The old guys are pretty easy to please. They just want to see a hot chick with no clothes on that isn’t their wife. The college boys, especially some of the frat houses who come in here, they get bored pretty quickly. I’ve been thinking of making a few changes to help alleviate their ADHD tendencies. This is actually something that could work.”

I sat there, my mouth slightly gaped open as I watched her continue to type something I couldn’t see from where I was sitting.

Abruptly, she paused and lifted her head, concern written on her face as she swiveled in her chair. “I need to know if you are going to be able to actually do this, Quinn. I really like the idea, and I can work with it. I won’t even discuss this with Spider and Bash, if you promise not to. If we work together, it might be possible to give you the anonymity you want. But none of that really matters if you freak out halfway through your first set.”

Now there was a million-dollar question if I had ever heard one.

Chapter 12

Kelli

I was still half-asleep when my alarm went off for me to get up for work.

I blindly reached out for it, but when I didn’t immediately feel it, I cracked open an eye, searching the nightstand.

It was gone from where I had put it that morning when I had gotten out of the shower, yet it was still going off. I grabbed my phone, knowing exactly who had moved my alarm.

With only one eye open, I pulled the phone close to my face. Without my contacts in, I couldn’t read anything past the end of my nose.

Pulling up Colt’s name, I was ready to blast him for daring to move my shit. However, seeing that I already had a message from him, my fingers froze over the keys as I read it.

Leaving for a run. Don’t know when I’ll be back. Be good. Watch out for Quinn for me.

There was no cutesy heart or anything else that would suggest he was doing anything more than letting me know he was going out of town. Yet, oddly enough, just getting a message at all from him was more than I would have expected from any other guy. He knew I would be just fine without him. Still, he had let me know he was going away.

The fact that he wanted me to watch over Quinn in his absence was even more telling. Quinn was his person, the one person he would take a bullet for, outside his blood family. That he was trusting me to watch out for her kind of warmed my cold, only half-alive heart.

The alarm was still going off, but I refrained from sending Colt a mean message for screwing around with my things. That he knew me well enough to know I would have just hit snooze a half a dozen times before rushing to get up and out the door for work was a telltale sign of its own. That he had moved the clock, knowing I would have to get out of bed and therefore would be awake enough not to easily fall back to sleep, told me he had spent more time than I realized he had sharing my bed.

Tossing back the covers, I jerked to my feet and crossed the room to the dresser where he had put it before leaving for wherever it was he had to be that morning. My fingers hovered over the alarm clock as guilt and dread churned in my stomach at all the caring things Colt did for me.

I wasn’t

used to having people do things for me, had fought it at the very beginning, but I wasn’t sure how I would feel if it all suddenly stopped. I didn’t want them to stop.

But they will.

Clenching my jaw, I finally hit the off button and returned to my bed. Instead of flopping back down and burrowing under the covers, I sat on the edge, putting my elbows on my knees and burying my face in my hands.