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nine
It took three years,but Bree had officially had a night in Vegas, the kind her friends joked about having, minus the limo. She’d fucked a practical stranger—correction, she’d been fucked by a practical stranger. The experience was almost good enough to have her downloading hookup apps. Only she was at least 97 percent sure Ice was the exception and not the rule. What was out there were mostly “three pumps and dump” men, not men willing to tease and play with her body as if checking for flaws in a marble sculpture. His hands touched places on her she’d forgotten were there, with a tenderness that had her dumb ass thinking about love. He’d fucked her into love. Or had that been creeping in at the edges of the last day or two?
This was insane. She should heed Misty’s warnings about his empty heart and singular purpose in life. But watching the man with his kids, how he played with them, and then there was the way he looked at her, his eyes probing as if he could scan her and see beyond the surface. Misty had convinced her the man was as deep as a puddle, but the woman had never seen the backroads of Georgia after a hurricane, where a pothole could swallow your car. Ice showed a depth to who he was beyond the surface.
In three years, Bree hadn’t taken one sick day or vacation from work. Her manager probably thought she’d lost her mind or a limb to not be coming in. Allergies nearly blinding her with itchy eyes, she came in doped up and praying the fog would clear in her brain. A throat coated in razor blades that bit every time she coughed, she brought a bag of lozenges and kept pushing.
But Ice needing her, the world a bit sideways, she hadn’t even thought about the fact she wasn’t behind her desk or in the lab making sure the techs were putting her designs together. She’d allowed herself a moment to breathe even in the craziest of worlds. In the eye of a hurricane, it was silent, still, and while in the distance she could see the swirling winds and destruction on the horizon, she wasn’t fearful. With Ice she couldn’t help the iron shield being around her. When he took off, was she chasing after him for the kids or herself?
Pulling on sneakers, she stretched her neck, then headed into the kids’ room, only to come face-to-face with a stranger. Not a fearful one, he stood the moment she came into the room. He had dark hair, longer than Ice’s, and wore a leather coat with a patch naming him Shadow with the wordEnforcerunderneath. There was a thing with these men, threatening, and yet she couldn’t help feeling as if she’d been marked by Ice.
“Hello, ma’am,” he said. “Ice should be back soon.”
“Auntie Bree,” Janie said as she skipped her way over to her and wrapped her arms around her waist. “I was scared yous was never gonna wake up.”
“I’m sorry, I usually don’t sleep this late,” she said, petting the girl’s snarl of hair. “Hey, why don’t you go get that brush we used last night? I swear you’re nothing but static cling this morning.”
“I know.” Janie beamed, holding her hand out on the side of her head, causing the hair to rise.
“Why do I think you’ve been making it worse than it needed to be?” Bree teased and wiggled the little girl’s nose.
“Will you fix my hair too, Auntie Bree?” Aiden asked, his hair stuck to the side like a cartoon character.
“What have you monsters been up to this morning?”
“Eatin’ French toast and watchin’ cartoons with Bullet and now Shadow, but he doesn’t sing the songs,” Jane admonished and disappeared into the bathroom to retrieve the brush.
“Hi, sorry, I’m Shadow,” the man said, extending his hand to shake. “Ice said to keep the door closed and let you sleep, which was hard because these two thought you should have been up by now.”
“Long night,” she said, a lingering headache from the whiskey sours pressed behind her eyes, “that anyone’s water?”
Shadow shook his head and then cracked the bottle before handing it to her.
“I saw the Glenlivet bottle,” he said. “Ice spends a bit too much time behind the bar having fun.”
“And here he said it was required learning in kindergarten.”
“For him, maybe,” Shadow said with a quirk to his head, and she wondered if undressing a woman with their eyes was a baseline for the men in the MC. Maybe what she was feeling for Ice wasn’t real.“The last thing I think when I see your body is behaving.”Ice’s voice carried through her mind as phantom touches threatened to send her over the edge.
“I better help Jane in there. I’m going to need water to calm down her static,” Bree said, finding the little girl standing on the closed toilet so she was tall enough to see clearly in the mirror, the little scientist testing the laws of electricity.
“Bree, this is so fun,” she giggled.
Bree thought back to those years she would put a metal barrette on the end of her finger and slide her feet across the carpeting all day just to make the spark hit when she touched the doorknob or radiator. Sure, she was a little crazy, but you had to be if you liked to explore and discover the answer why. She snagged the brush from the counter, ran the bristles under the water, and then shook it out before taming half of Jane’s hair with a single swipe through.
“Aw man, I was thinking I could walk around with that.”
“You’d start sticking to people walking by,” Bree mused as she continued her way around the child’s head before smoothing it back into a loose braid. The hair was so thin it kept slipping from her fingers, and she wondered if it was genetic or from the diet she finally saw as standard for the kiddos.
Aiden was easier. Water would have to be the gel substitute because she hadn’t been able to focus when packing. The fact she wasn’t wearing plaid, polka dots, and stripes at the same time was a minor miracle. Who packs for a getaway with no end in sight? It was hitting her, the reality that it was nearly noon and she was holed up in a hotel room twenty stories up. Not that others weren’t also just coming back to life after the night before, but this was different.
She had a home less than twenty minutes away, a job she was supposed to be at, and now two pseudo wards in her care. She went in search of her phone and noticed five unanswered calls from Mrs. Parker. Bree dialed her, and the woman immediately answered.
“Ms. Stanton, you swore to me—”
“I know. I’m with the kids right now, haven’t been out of eyeshot unless they were asleep,” she said. “I forgot to call the school. I honestly thought you were going to, and either way, a voicemail saying a parent had been murdered would have been inappropriate, but I’ll do that now.”
“No need, they reached out to me thanks to a phone call from their father,” she said with a huff.
