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Chloe discretely checked her phone. She’d give it a few more minutes before she’d beg off and head home to prepare her meal for Logan. Placing the phone down, she tuned back into the conversation at hand.
“Please don’t make me tell the story,” Shell begged, face buried in her hands.
“Oh, you’re telling it,” Izzy replied as she took a bite of a giant chocolate chip cookie. The woman was in fact pregnant, though you could barely tell, a fact Shell seemed to hate her for. “If you don’t tell it, I’m telling it and you don’t want me to do that. I’ll probably throw in some extra stuff I make up for shits and giggles.”
Chloe snorted. Izzy was a trip and it’d be hilarious to witness her raising a baby. Hilarious for these women. She sure wouldn’t be around them after this coffee break. This hanging with the bikers’ women was a one-shot deal. It’s not like she had plans to go to Townsend in the next ten years and one of the women mentioned they didn’t make it out this way often. Just came to check out this newish coffee shop.
“Okay, fine.” Shell dropped her hands and stuck her tongue out at Izzy, which had the table giggling yet again.
Chloe sipped her frothy drink that tasted more like a warm chocolate milk shake than coffee, but it was delicious.
“So,” Shell began, “Beth, my four-year-old daughter,” she said to Chloe. “Beth keeps coming in our room in the middle of the night. Ever since Copper moved in, she’s totally fascinated with him being in the house and sleeping in the bed with me.” She rolled her eyes and turned to Chloe again. “We’re getting ready to move out of my itty-bitty house into something bigger. If you knew Copper, you’d know nothing about him was small.”
The other women snickered.
“Hey,” Shell said with a shrug. “What can I say? I’m blessed.”
“Will you get on with the story already?” Toni said, tossing a crumpled napkin at Shell.
“Sorry, sorry. So we’ve had to start locking the door when we”—she waved her hand around—“you know.”
“Fuck. When you fuck.” Izzy said.
“Seriously?” Shell fired back.
“I don’t know, it’s your story.” Izzy was doing a terrible job hiding her laughter which had the rest of them starting up again.
Man, Chloe would love to be part of this group. Too bad they were involved with a bunch of criminals who may or may not have something to do with her kidnapping. She frowned. Something didn’t quite sit right. These women were strong, independent, not any kind of beaten down or degraded possession like she’d heard of ol’ ladies. Hard to imagine any of them being with men who abused women. But Lefty clearly told her the Handlers were to thank for what he did to her. Could men treat their women okay but order the kidnapping and rape of others? If she didn’t have the horrifying memories as proof, she might not believe it possible.
“Okay shut up and let me finish. So the other night we were—”
“Fucking,” Izzy said.
Everyone glared at her.
“What? I’m not saying making love. That shit’s not happening.”
“Okay, fine, we were fucking,” Shell said way too loud, drawing the attention of a stern-faced older woman reading at the table next to them. With a grimace Shell lowered her voice. “We were fucking and there was a pounding on the door. It was Beth and she was mad. I mean hopping angry at us. She just kept screeching about how it was unfair, and how we didn’t like her, and how we were mean.”
The table had quieted as they all waited for the outcome of the story.
“She pretty much killed the mood, at least for the moment, so I tossed on some clothes and unlocked the door. She marched her sassy little four-year-old self in the room, looked at the television then at us, and said, ‘What did you do with it?’. Neither of us had any idea what she was talking about. Then she said, ‘I know what you were doing in here.’ By now, Copper was laughing his ass off, and I thought I was about to have to call a therapist for my scarred child. When I asked her what she thought we were doing, she said we were watching the Lion King without her and she was very angry at us.”
Toni’s forehead drew down as she blew on the black coffee in her oversized mug. She made up for the low-calorie drink with that plate sized chocolate chip cookie. “The Lion King?”
“Yep,” Shell replied, popping the p. “She said could hear all the wild animals from her room. There was a lion growling, a hyena laughing, and a monkey going ‘ooo ooo, ahh ahh.’ She then crossed her arms and demanded to know why we turned off the TV.”
