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"I'm here to see Reeve," I said, giving him a small smile, trying not to let on how odd it felt to be standing here at the compound talking to an outlaw biker.
"Reeve?" he asked, pushing off the fence, then running a hand down his beard seeming to try to hide the smirk on his face.
"Yes, Reeve."
"And you are, honey?"
"Rey."
"And you know Reeve."
"He helped me out last night," I hedged, not sure exactly how much information you were supposed to give a stranger. I sucked at that. I had been told many times by clients or people in service industry, or, well, even my own mother. I opened my mouth, and I just said anything that came to mind. I once had an hour-long conversation with the girls at She's Bean Around about G-spot orgasms. Right there as customers kept coming and going. I wasn't great with the filter thing.
But the threat of dangerous bikers seemed to be enough to allow me to mind what words came to my lips.
"Last night?" he repeated, seeming not to believe me.
"Yes, last night. Around two in the morning. That's his truck," I added, waving a hand toward it.
"Christ, you're shaking," he said, and I looked to see my arm was trembling with the cold. "Alright, come in and get warm. I'll grab my brother for you," he said, reaching to unlock the gates.
This was when the bright, flashing warning lights should have been going off.
But, well, they simply didn't.
This man - apparently Reeve's brother just as I had mused a moment before - seemed no more threatening than Reeve himself had.
So I fell into step with him as he led me over toward the door, moving in before me, and holding the door open.
The warm air hit me nose to toes, making everything in between tingle uncomfortably as my skin thawed out.
The inside of the compound looked like, well, a man cave. There was an actual bar set up, a pool table, a sitting space across from a giant TV, and a sound system that looked like it could rattle the windows of all the shops in town.
Maybe due to the early hour, there was no one in the main space, though I did hear rustling in what appeared to be the kitchen area.
"Just one minute, hon," the man who led me in said, moving off down a hallway, leaving me completely alone in a place that, apparently, my mother had been back in her wild child days, back before she decided that meaningless sex wasn't what she was after in life, back before money and power became her driving force. "Oh, Reeve!" his voice called, boyishly teasing. "You have a lady caller!" he added, his fist whacking against a door.
"Cy, why the fuck do you think I would fall for that?" Reeve's voice asked, sounding bored, the way any older brother with a somewhat annoying younger sibling might.
Oddly, just hearing his voice seemed to send a strange shiver through me, something I tried to brush off as a thawing tremor.
Because that made more sense.
"Nah, man. I'm not pulling your leg on this one. Come see. Pretty thing too."
"I swear to shit," Reeve's voice said as they came closer, but still out of sight, "if you brought some goddamn clubwhore in here at ten in the morning, I am going to..." His voice trailed off as he moved into the doorway, head jerking back a little like my presence made no sense. "Rey? What are you doing here?" he asked, brows drawn together.
"Oh, well, you left your jacket," I said, showing it to him, wiping a bit of snow off that had accumulated on top from blowing off the roofs of cars or falling down from trees. "I washed and dried it," I added as he moved closer, reaching to take it from me.
"You didn't need to bring it back," he said, then took a look at me, eyes moving up and down me in a way that was almost clinical. "Are you trying to catch pneumonia?" he asked. "Why didn't you put it on if you were cold?"
"I don't get sick," I insisted. That was true enough. Babcia made this special tea that beat off any big bad bug you might have felt coming on. Granted, it tasted like gargling with garbage pail tea, but it worked. Though I had gone through the last of it the last time I felt a head cold coming on. I hadn't been able to figure out the exact ingredients, but I was pretty sure I was getting close.
It was one of the things about Babcia; she never wrote anything down. She remembered hundreds of baking recipes, healing teas, poultices, and soups by heart. And it never occurred to her to impart that wisdom unless I asked for it. I had, apparently, forgotten to ask far too many things, something I didn't realize until she was gone, and I no longer could.
