Page 385 of Romeo

The answer settled differently than I expected. There were a hundred questions waiting behind it now—questions about Kaylah, Angel, Steele, and everything that happened before I was born. I didn’t want those answers here. Not with Mac’s blood on the floor, a broken table between us, and the gunshot still trapped inside my head.

Angel looked back at me. “You don’t gotta do this now.”

I frowned. “Do what?”

“Figure out what I am to you.”

The words hit somewhere I hadn’t protected. He didn’t say father. He didn’t ask me to.

“I don’t know who you are to me,” I admitted.

“I know.”

“I already had a dad.”

Angel’s face didn’t change.

“He raised me. He loved me. I don’t remember everything about him anymore, and sometimes that scares me, but he was my dad.”

Angel nodded. “Okay.”

That was all. No jealousy. No claim. Nothing that made me feel as if loving the man who raised me was somehow taking something away from the man standing in front of me.

“And Granny adopted me.”

“I heard.”

“And Frank and Georgie are my brothers.”

Another nod.

“And Charlie—” I stopped.

Charlie was harder. Because explaining Charlie always made something inside me feel exposed. And now there were more people I had to explain it to. Had to justify my choices to.

Angel saved me from having to. “I know enough.”

I studied his face. “Does that bother you?”

“What?”

“That I had a baby.”

Something dangerous moved through his expression so quickly I almost stepped back. Then I realized it wasn’t aimed at me.

“No.”

I waited.

His gaze sharpened. “Does somebody make you think it should?”

“No.”

“Good.”

There were apparently several versions of Angel. The uncertain one. The man who killed Mac without hesitation. And this one, who looked prepared to hunt down anyone who had ever made me ashamed of being Charlie’s biological mother.

Jasper had known Angel for fourteen years, seven of them spent riding in the same Arkansas Chapter. I could see how some of Angel had rubbed off on him. They were disturbingly alike in some ways.