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“I’ll set up a meeting with Granny. Maybe it would be good if both of you hung out first. My brothers can be a bit much.”
“Okay! What does she like to do?”
“Honestly, you’d be surprised.”
Ayana thinks for a moment. She pours herself another glass of water and sips it slowly. The little pink tip of her tongue pokes through her lips, and my god, now my dick is really trying to get out of his bad dick punishment time out. I send him an internal scolding, but what do you know? He doesn’t exactly shut down. My dick is apparently not a well-trained dog.
“Hmm, well, I’m not really much of one for shopping, and my dad hardly lets me go out alone, but there is one place he lets me go by myself where we could talk. Although, talking wouldn’t be much of what we’d be doing. I guess we could do that after. Have coffee or something. Dad wouldn’t put a tail on me for a few hours.”
I’m almost afraid to ask. Seriously. “I’m a little bit scared to think what that place might be.”
“The range. Shooting guns? I know it’s not something that one does with a grandmother or, uh, where one takes a senior citizen, but it’s really all I can come up with at the moment.”
“Actually, I think she’d love that.”
Ayana’s brow arches in surprise. “Really? For real?”
If you only knew my granny. Anddddd how she happens to be wicked deadly with a set of Glocks.
“Yeah,” I croak. Granny’s going to need a firm warning to dial it down and miss since she doesn’t do dialing it down. Or missing. “I guess this is phase one of the plan, then. Operation Tell Our Families And Get To Know Each Other. And also, Operation Let Me Keep My Balls.” I should also start by telling her that my name isn’t Smoke, but baby steps. She knows it’s just a name I chose for myself, so one thing at a time.
Starting with my gun-toting grandmother.
CHAPTER 5
Ayana
I can pretty much hear my dad’s voice echoing in my head as I shift my legs so that my stance is a little wider. The ear protection I’m wearing drowns everything out in my head except my own thoughts and the echo of his voice from a heck of a long time ago when he was first teaching me how to shoot the Ruger he’d bought me for my fourteenth birthday. Yeah, while other kids received shoes or clothes or a purse or a new phone, I got a gun.
Even now, I make sure my balance is perfect. I grasp the gun in both hands, my palms perfectly dry. Other people might find the pistol range to be a strange place to feel like it’s a second home, but I’ve spent so much time here over the years that all the guys who work here know me by name. They know my dad and all his brothers too. They might be the only people in this city who don’t get instantly uncomfortable at the sight of leather and faded denim and the big, burly men who fill them out.
I take a deep breath before I start shooting. The gun recoils in my hand, but I’m well used to the feel of it in my palms, and my stance more than absorbs the force. I can barely hear a thing as the gun fires and the bullet discharges, but my vision is excellent, and I’m so practiced with my own weapon that when I’m done and I take a step back, I don’t need the paper target to be brought forward to know that I hit just about every shot right where I was aiming.
I step back and watch the older woman in her own shooting area. She must be in her early to mid-eighties, but looking at her from behind, you’d never know that the woman, clad in a black cashmere sweater and black dress pants, wasn’t a younger, career woman. She looks like she’s heading to the office in that outfit. She’s even wearing heels. Yes, the stiletto kind. And her long white hair rivers down her back in a twisty mass of pretty curls.
Yeah, for a granny, she has a banging body. Anyone would think that her hair color came from one hell of a bleach job and not from age. When I met Smoke’s granny here at the range, I was blown away by how pretty she was, the way she dressed, the easy, confident way she carried herself, and of course, the fact that her body was so toned it could have belonged to a woman less than half her age. She was so beautiful that it was hard to believe she was a grandmother at all.
I still can’t hear a thing, but I watch as Smoke’s granny, who introduced herself as Mary—and my god, does she not look like a sweet, innocent Mary—looks behind her. There are a ton of people watching us, but no one stands behind us the way they do for the imbeciles who are going to blow their fingers off with their weapons. Mary holds her Glock steady in her left hand, raises a brow at me in a challenge, and, quick as lightning, whips out a second Glock from the back of her pants. Before anyone can get to her and tell her how going full-on wild west-style showdown in here isn’t appropriate, or probably even allowed, but what do I know, as I’ve never tried to fire two guns at once since that’s utterly insane, she fires both Glocks at the same time.
