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“What?”
“Be selfish with her. You deserve some happiness. She deserves it too. We’re juggling a lot right now. However we’ve got clear targets for a change. And sooner or later, we’re going to kill that son of a bitch, which will clear many of our problems out of the way. Then we’re going to be here with our lives. That doesn’t mean everything stops.”
“But, the go out and be normal date can wait…”
“So do a simpler date. A picnic in the dance studio, a private movie in your room. The point of a date is to spend time together. Everything else is noise.”
I turned that over in my head. “Thanks, Kel.”
“No problem.” The door to the clubhouse opened and Kellan glanced at his watch. “That’s Doc. Go call everyone else down for dinner. Clean up if you need to.”
“I want one of the corner pieces,” I said and made a shape. “About this big.”
He chuckled and waved me off. “You’ll get what you get.” Then his phone rang and, I caught his, “Traschel,” as he answered it. I left him to deal with that, passing Doc on my way to the stairs.
Movies or a picnic.
Would a dance lesson be a date?
Yeah, we needed to find the fuckbucket and off him. I wanted her life back so we could figure out this dating thing. It would be way more fun with that asshole dead.
Way more.
CHAPTER30
KELLAN
Guilt was a living, breathing monster slithering through my veins. The shop burning down was one thing. Had I intended to buy it outright? Yes. While I could afford to wait and get the money together, the insurance wasn’t going to cover all of Terry’s losses. I didn’t think it would be enough to do more than pay down his debt.
The loan would let me buy him out. Then I could work on putting together the resources to rebuild it. The guys would help. Liam had already offered to finance the shop, yet we were already a drain on his resources. We might become more of one before this was over.
War was expensive.
Scrubbing a hand over my face, I tabbed through the screens on the laptop until I reached the expense and budget sheet. The trucking company was barely turning a profit, but it was there. Increased security, upgrades, and doubling up on the teams to provide backup was sucking up a lot of funding.
We had maybe three months before the bleeding took us into the red. Flipping to the next income chart, I frowned. Vaughn would need to replace his equipment and set up a new studio, or at least get space in a new one. That would also need to wait until we’d eliminated current threats.
The loan, if I got it, would only grant me about six weeks before we had to start paying on it. That would add more burden. Constructionmightbe finished in that time, unless I skipped the location entirely and bought somewhere else.
That wouldn’t be fair to Terry.
Fuck.
Depending on the funds and the construction time, trucking would be in the red in a matter of two months rather than three. A soft padding of feet brought my head up and I tracked the sound from the darkened hallway.
The sleepy, rumpled beauty appearing in the doorway tugged a smile from me, even if she should be in bed. It was—I glanced at the clock on the wall—after one in the morning.
“Hey,” she murmured, pushing off the doorframe to walk over to me. The t-shirt she had on was one of Vaughn’s and it hit her at mid-thigh. From her disheveled hair to her painted toenails, she was adorable.
“Hey,” I said, holding out a hand to her. She padded over the tile floor, and rather than pull out a chair for her, I tugged her into sitting on my lap. Turning sideways, she ground that sweet ass against my thigh and curled up to tuck her head on my shoulder. “What are you doing up?”
“Bad dreams,” she murmured.
“Why didn’t you wake up Liam or Jasper?” They were the last two I’d seen her with, but she gave a little shrug.
“Mickey was sleeping with me, although he got up at some point and left.” She rubbed a slow circle against my chest.
I sighed, then brushed a kiss to her forehead. He hadn’t come down, but there were other rooms upstairs. Doc’s issues weren’t ones he often let us help with. “He probably didn’t want to wake you up.”
