“Because she laughed in your face?” Collins asks him.
I swear, I can see his face changing hue in front of me.
“What’d she say?” I ask him, not being able to hide the shitty smirk from my face, this time.
“That I have equivalent odds of fucking her or her brother.”
“I mean, that’s not a no,” Collins quips, forcing me to laugh louder.
I can’t help myself this time. “She’s just saying if the situation were dire enough…”
“Fuck you guys.”
“I warned you.” I look at him, shrugging, trying to control myself.
“How’d you know anyway?”
“Cause her personality is Caroline’s, but Ash was her dad.” I feel like that explains it enough. Am I trying to scare them away from her, maybe? Glancing back at her, she’s still dancing, only several men are now circling her as if she were prey… if only they had any idea. “And that should scare all of you.” When I look at all of them, they’re just staring at me now. “What? Shebroke my nose when I was 16.”
“What?” Matthews stares, stunned.
“Punched me in the face so hard she broke my damn nose.”
“How old was she?”
“12, maybe.” I laugh, remembering the situation. “Then told me to stop being a fucking pussy when I got upset about it.”
Collins laughs louder now. “I may be a little in love with her.”
His joke shouldn’t bother me, but it does. When he looks at me, he tilts his head, still laughing, but curiosity lines his face as he looks back at me.
Great.
“It’s so fucking weird that you know them like that,” Matthews says, looking at me, questioning me, and it should worry me, but fuck it, it doesn’t.
“Why? We were kids.”
“Yeah, but you grew up with them; you seem to have been over there a lot. You just think there’d be some sort of loyalty there.”
It’s true; I was. I spent more time at their house than I did at my own. Ash and Caroline always treated me as if I were one of theirs… the good and the bad, they were more like parents to me than my own were. But Matthews isn’t the first one to question me about it. To be curious about how, if that was my childhood, how I ended up as a cop.
“Again, we were kids. I know more about what goes on in the MC now than I did before.” I smile, thinking back to thosetimes. “They were all better parents than most I’ve seen. They shielded their kids from all the bad that went down.” I’m only slightly lying, but in all honesty, we never saw a single thing until we were 15, and even that was an accident. Before that, we knew what Ash did, but only because we had eavesdropped.
“You’ve seen his rap sheet, right?” Matthews rolls his eyes.
“Now I have.”
“And the shit we know he did, but could never prove it.”
“Again, now I do.”
“Okay, if you say so.” He rolls his eyes before storming over to the bar..
“Don’t worry, bro. He’s just pissed cause she turned him down.” Collins tells me.
I laugh, nodding my head. “Oh, I know.”
“But I can’t even imagine what being in that house would be like.”
