I swallowed my laugh because Ares was only nine, but he did not like to be laughed at. “Thanks, babe. It was fun while it lasted, but I got King out of it, and I’d make that trade any day.”
“Yeah, he’s the shit too,” he muttered, and I couldn’t help laughing because he was right, and his admiration was adorable.
“Agreed. Besides, it’s books that I love most and opening Paradise Found excites me a lot more than teaching ever did.”
I’d grown up with the kind of parents who raised me like a marionette instead of a person. They puppeteered me through the entire first twenty-six years of my life, and it took meeting King to make me realize just how weak I’d been. Now, four years after I’d broken my mold and started an affair with my high school student, I was finally woman enough, me enough, to pursue my real goals.
Currently, I had two.
Open a bookstore in Entrance and fill it with gorgeous books, comfy chairs, and youth programs and book clubs.
Marry the love of my life.
My gaze cut back to the clubhouse where I knew King was having a chat with Zeus about club business, and I wondered for the hundredth time when King might propose.
It wasn’t that I was in a hurry, but I’d been divorced from my scumbag ex for four years, and King and I had been living together all that time.
I was ready, and more, I didn’t get why he wasn’t.
This was the same man who had spotted me across a crowded bar and demanded to take me out on a date that very moment. The same man who basically moved in with me the minute we started sleeping together, and the same man who wrote me love poems every week since that first week we went out.
He was the kind of man who took what he wanted and did what he needed without hesitation.
I stared down at my bare hand and brushed the skin over my left ringer finger.
Ares’s hand slid over mine, and when I looked over at him, his face was soft with understanding. “Wasn’t it you who told me family is in the heart, not in the blood or papers that make it so in the eyes of the fuckin’ law?”
I rolled my eyes at his curse word because he was too young to curse, but then again, he was too young for most of the trauma his young self had endured, so I didn’t chastise him for it.
“That’s smart. It does sound like me,” I agreed, just to see his small smile.
“Fuck off!” A shout suddenly tore across the asphalt.
Ares went rigid, and I was on my feet in an instant, stepping in front to obscure the view of him from the street. We didn’t know exactly what had brought Ares to Zeus’s cabin outside of Whistler last year, but we did know whatever he had run away from was the kind of bad even outlaw bikers considered bad, so we were all protective of him.
There was no need for it, though. The woman, still shouting, who had startled us was a short thing in a brief skirt with a strip of fabric across her straining breasts. Her masses of strawberry blond hair went flying as she whipped around to snarl at the man following her slowly in an old Buick.
“Fuck you, Cisco,” she screamed at him, swinging her big, slouchy purse and hitting the car. “You want me to call the fucking cops? Because I will!”
“What’re you going to tell them, slut?” he demanded coarsely. “You want to make peace with Rina, you get your ass in this car and come with me.”
“Make me,” she bit out.
But I had seen enough.
“Stay here. Things get hairy, call for the men,” I told Ares as I moved quickly across the lot to the chain-link fence.
I was through the gate and behind the girl by the time the man named Cisco reached through the open window to grab at her.
I intercepted his hand and twisted it into a fierce lock that Bat, our veteran brother, had spent years trying to teach me to master
It seemed, based on Cisco’s choked cry, that I’d finally mastered it.
“I think this girl has told you to leave one too many times,” I said with false cheer, my smile more like a sneer on my face. “It’s time you listened to her.”
“You fucking bitch,” he groaned, his surprisingly handsome face crumpled with pain and hatred. “You don’t know who the fuck you’re dealing with here.”
“No,” I disagreed politely and leaned close so he could see the resolve in my eyes. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with. This is Fallen territory, and you want to harass some girl right outside our gates, it is our problem.”
There was a flash of recognition chased hard on the heels by fear. “Fuck.”