“Fuck,” Preacher grunts under his breath. “This ain’t no good.”
I can’t disagree with that assessment, not as the older club whore eyes me like a piece of candy. “I call dibs on the big one with the serious expression.” She lets out a loud, cackling laugh that finally breaks me out of the weird fucking haze I’m stuck in.
I take a few steps forward and smile. “Any idea where the Iron Kings are?” I don’t expect an answer, but a goddamn clue would be nice.
The older whore shrugs. “Sorry. Hector said he was sending us something special, and I guess you’re it.”
Her words come through the fog clearly this time, and I bite back a million different curses.
“We need to get the fuck out of here. Now.”
It’s a setup, and we walked right through doors like a bunch of fucking fools.
We’re out the door without so much as a thank you, ma’am. Jump on our bikes and ride about five miles from the Iron Kings place and stop in a dark, vacant parking lot.
“That was a fucking setup.”
“If it was,” Shades adds, “where was the ambush? Without an ambush, what the fuck is the point of setting this elaborate shit up?”
It’s a good question, one I don’t have an immediate answer for, but it comes to me quickly.
“Shit. I have to go.” My heart is racing like crazy inside my chest as I start my bike back up and fly.
I rev around a curve and accelerate onto the freeway.
I’m coming, McKenna.
Chapter Twenty-Five
McKenna
Waking from a long nap, I stretch and amble over to the window to watch the sun going down, splashing color over the horizon. After the light show, I realize I’m hungry.
“Damn, I needed that nap. These late nights are killing me. Kels, you hungry? I think we have pizza.”
“Mmm, sounds good,” she says from the sofa and sits up.
“So, I was thinking, how do you plan to have a baby and work the crazy schedule of a med student?”
I pour two tall glasses of lemonade, adding a splash of vodka to mine to take the edge off of thoughts I can’t seem to stop, and turn the oven on.
Kelsey takes a long sip from hers and laughs. “Very carefully?”
She laughs again. “I plan to use the whole it takes a village thing as much as I can, using my sister and Ruby, and possibly a nanny, though I doubt Coop will go for that.”
“Why wouldn’t he? I mean, it’s not like he has time to be a stay-at-home dad, right?”
It’s just another way our lives grow more distant by the day. Kelsey is trying to figure out how to juggle motherhood and medical school while I’m still working at Slice of Life and single.
Painfully, pathetically single.
“Because Coop, all of them really, are very wary of outsiders. Even if I do all of my due diligence to vet a proper nanny, who’s to say the cops won’t lean on her to figure out what the MC is up to? Or worse, that the Iron Kings might threaten her family just to get info on the Reckless Souls. It’s a lot to think about, but I’m going to have a plan in place when I tell him about the baby.”
“Which will be when, exactly?”
I let out a bark of laughter and slide the pizza into the oven. “I’m only asking so I can make a big bowl of buttery popcorn and watch. I’d love to see his face when you tell him.”
Kelsey rolls her eyes. “He’s going to be over the moon about the baby, but about five seconds after that, he’s going to wrap me in cotton and put me in a glass cage.”
Despite those alarming words, she seems affectionately resigned to Coop’s behavior.
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“No,” she sighs and sends me a knowing smile. “It’s nice having a man who wants to protect me, to keep me safe. Is he a little heavy-handed and misguided about how he chooses to protect me at times? Hell yeah.”
She shrugs like it’s no big deal. “It’s no different from the way Daddy thinks he’s protecting us by trying to set us up with his country club friends’ kids. Trying to pick where we go to school, who we hang out with, and what we do for a living. Except, when I tell Coop to back off, he does. Sort of.”
“You’ve really given this a lot of thought.” It shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.
“That’s not offensive at all,” she snort-laughs sarcastically, smiling at my unintended insult.
“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that when I’m around Mark, I can hardly think straight. I just act, either with smart-ass comments or pure, unadulterated lust. It’s only when there’s some distance between us that I remind myself that we are a terrible idea.”