Little Jack (Hell's Handlers MC 6)

“Hey, Z, Toni around? I had something to run by her.”

The laugh that came from Zach was slightly evil. “Damn, must have been quite a night if you won’t even talk about it. But yeah, Toni is here, helping out at the front desk. Everything all right?”

Protective didn’t come close to describing Zach. Of course, he wouldn’t let LJ talk to his woman before ensuring the topic of conversation wouldn’t upset her in any way. “You bet. Just had an idea for her.”

“You got it, brother. Hang on a sec.”

Brother. Damn, that word sounded so good. LJ had been a prospect for way longer than the usual timeframe. One emergency after another with the club had kept him from being patched in when he should have. But as of last night, that was all in the past. He was officially a fully-patched member of the Hell’s Handlers Motorcycle Club.

“Hey, LJ, what can I do for you?” Toni came on the line.

“Hey, hon. Listen, I have this new neighbor…”

CHAPTER TWO

“YOU MEET YOUR next-door neighbor?”

“Huh?” Holly faced her dad. “What did you say?” She dropped the box she’d been hauling on the floor of her bedroom.

“Need me to talk to him? Check him out?” Her father rested his arm on a stack of boxes all marked Clothes.

“Dad, what are you talking about?”

“Here, sweetie,” Holly’s mom, Cynthia, handed her a tall glass of ice water. She had some residual back problems from an old injury, so she’d been relegated to opening kitchen boxes and washing the dusty dishes.

“Thanks, mom,” Holly said as she grabbed the glass from her gray-haired mother. Cynthia had recently decided to stop dying her hair and embrace all that fifty-seven was doing to her head. Looked good on her. Elegant.

Her dad, on the other hand, still had a full head of light hair in the exact same neatly parted style she could always remember him wearing it. “I saw a big guy jogging down from the apartment next to you as we pulled in this morning. And you keep looking at the door every time we go up or down the stairs. Figured you were nervous about living next to him.”

With a sigh, Holly rolled her eyes. She wasn’t sure if she was more annoyed with her Dad for assuming every male in the universe was out to harm her or disappointed that LJ had left without so much as a hello.

Geez, listen to her. It’s not like they were actually friends. They’d only been in each other’s presence an hour or so. Much more of this thinking and she’d be creeping up on psycho territory.

“Dad, don’t you dare ‘check him out,” she said, crooking her fingers air-quote style. “Please. I do not want to be known as the girl in the apartment complex with the meddling cop father. I met my neighbor yesterday. He’s a very nice guy who helped me carry a bunch of heavy boxes. End of story.”

Her dad frowned, and her mother looked seconds from crying as she worried her bottom lip and ran the dishtowel over one plate again and again.

Shoulda kept my big mouth shut.

“Honey,” her mom whispered, clutching the dish to her chest like a life preserver. “You can’t be letting strange boys into your apartment. It’s so dangerous. You know what could happen.”

“I’m checking him out,” her dad said. He pulled the notepad he always carried out of his back pocket. Habit of a former detective. Now, as sheriff of a small town, he could probably lose the pad, but Holly didn’t see that happening anytime soon. “What’d you say his name was?”

“I didn’t.” She folded her arms across her chest. Here they went with the same conversation they’d been having for years. Twelve years to be exact. It was as though in her parents’ eyes, her development had frozen solid the day her sister disappeared. She was forever an immature pre-teen in their minds. Doomed to need mom and dad to save her from herself and all the poor choices she was one step away from making. “And he’s not a boy, Mom. He’s a twenty-five-year-old man like I’m a twenty-four-year-old woman.”

Just as she was working up a real mad, a tear spilled from the corner of her mother’s eye and rolled down her wrinkling face. And like every time before it, Holly’s resolve wavered. How could she begrudge the woman her overprotective nature when her child had been kidnapped and murdered?

She couldn’t. End of story.

Holly was their last link to the daughter they’d lost. An exact replica and a daily reminder of their pain and devastation. For years, that knowledge had messed with her head. Okay, it still messed with her head despite all the protests of being a grown woman. Her parents treated her as though she might be snatched out from under them at any point. And it never changed no matter how old she got. There was a time when Holly had considered moving across the country to break the cycle, but she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t leave them to worry themselves sick over her wellbeing.