Justin turned, set his bare feet in a solid scissor stance, and drove the heel of his hand up and into the hand Troy held just below his chin. Another slap of flesh sounded in the night, but Troy hammed it up. Performing the perfect stuntman’s impression of a real hit, Troy snapped his head back with a grunt, reeled backward, and fell to the ground, rolling away.
The melodrama started Ellie giggling.
“Oh God,” Lexi said with here-we-go lightheartedness. “Ellie’s giggling.”
“And after a couple of glasses of wine…” Rubi shook her head. “It’s going to last the rest of the night.”
“Come on, he’s funny,” she said in defense, and started laughing again as she pointed at him rolling around on the grass, holding his face and moaning. “Look at him.”
Jax chuckled and wrapped his arm around Lexi’s shoulders. “He’s an idiot.”
“Yeah,” Ellie admitted, “but he’s an adorable idiot.”
Troy went limp in the grass and looked at Ellie upside down. “Hey, you’re supposed to be on my side.”
“I am, babe. I said you were adorable and funny.”
“This is no time to mess around.” Keaton drew Justin’s attention from laughing at Troy. “You’ve still got a guy at your back.”
Before Justin could turn, Wes, who had to be ten times Justin’s size, closed a forearm around his throat with a cartoonish growl.
“What the hell?” Rubi, Wes’s girlfriend, made a face. “Was that supposed to be a pirate?”
Wes turned his head toward Rubi. “Baby, you don’t watch near enough movies. Remember we had a talk about unearthly beings in sci-fi—”
Justin crossed one foot behind Wes’s, ducked from under his arm, and used it to push him backward, tripping the Renegade. Wes landed on his ass. One second Wes was standing, the next he was on the ground. It happened so fast, Brooke’s mouth dropped open in shock.
Keaton howled with laughter. He doubled his arms over his stomach and stumbled back a step, then bent at the waist, barely able to hold himself up.
“Oh my—” Brooke started, sitting forward in her chair.
“You little…” Wes laughed the words, jackknifed into a sitting position, and reached for Justin.
Justin screamed and jumped away, but Wes got ahold of his T-shirt and hauled him back. Justin was already laughing when Wes grabbed his waist, but then the tickling began. Justin squealed and giggled and cried for mercy.
Everyone was laughing—the guys even harder than the women. But Brooke heard a little rasp in Justin’s cries that made alarms ring in her head, and she pushed from her chair. “I think that’s—”
A hand closed on her shoulder. “He’s fine.”
Her sister’s voice jerked her attention to the right. She was in a different pair of scrubs than she’d gone in to work wearing, and she looked tired. “Don’t you hear—?”
“That’s because he’s screaming,” Tammy said, her smile relaxed and happy. Which helped Brooke relax.
Until Justin’s “No, no, no!” shivered over her spine. And she turned to find all three giant Renegades carrying a tiny Justin toward the pool.
All of Brooke’s muscles tightened. She pulled in a breath to tell them to stop and took a step that direction, but again Tammy stopped her. “Brooke. He’s fine. You’ve been so overprotective lately.”
And just like that, her emotions went completely haywire and a push of irrational tears burned her eyes.
Shit.
The splash made her head swivel again, and Brooke piled her hands over her heart, caught between angst over the unknown happening in her body and more angst over Justin’s ability to breathe. After so many years of watching Justin struggle for every breath, she still had a hard time embracing the fact that he could now act like a normal kid.
But all three men stood at the pool’s edge, their humor now faded into intensity as their gazes homed in on the boy beneath the water, ready to pull him out on a second’s notice. And a wave of deep, moving emotion rolled beneath her hands, rocking her foundation.
These men, really nothing more than acquaintances to Brooke, Tammy, and Justin, had taken the three of them in as if they had always been part of this ever-growing Renegades family. Brooke had experienced a sliver of this, just one way they showed their all-encompassing loyalty to each other, when she’d lived briefly with Ellie and Troy after Ellie had quit the road. But the way they’d taken Justin in like their own nephew and treated Brooke and Tammy like sisters for no other reason than because they were important to Keaton humbled Brooke.
And she was pretty damn sure this emotional roller coaster was going to kill her long before she ever found the courage to tell Keaton…