AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She looked up at him with her mama’s dark brown eyes and smiled. He grinned back at her. He nodded to Mark “Tex” Marsten who sat on the couch nursing a beer. Next to him, his girlfriend, Abby, had a martini. Caleb followed the squeals of what was certainly Daisy into the kitchen to snag a brew of his own. He wasn’t surprised to find Jimmy “Easy” Turnbull pressing the tiny, tattooed blonde against the counter and nuzzling her neck. Daisy gasped when she saw Caleb and tried to push her boyfriend away.
“At ease, Easy,” he said with a smirk and reached for the handle of the fridge. “What are you doing, anyway?”
Daisy giggled and Easy swung her around so that he faced the slightly older man.
“Body shots,” he replied.
Caleb snorted. “There’s no tequila.”
“Don’t need any,” Easy said and licked Daisy’s neck again. She squealed.
Caleb shook his head at the two of them and headed back to the living room. He flopped down into a chair—his chair—and waited for Slick to tell him to set the table. Thursday night was poker night. Slick fed them all first, and, if she was in the mood, beat them at cards afterward. She’d graciously taken to playing only occasionally these days so that everyone could pay their bills.
Shooter came down the stairs, fresh from a shower it appeared, while the front door opened. Caleb didn’t have to turn to know that Hawk and his wife, Tildy, had arrived. They’d taken the truck, for obvious reasons. Slick’s fluffy white attack cat bypassed the very pregnant Tildy and launched herself at the giant Sioux. Hawk scooped her up and cradled her to his chest. Tildy made her way to the loveseat, where she and Hawk always sat, while Abby and Sarah fussed over her. Sarah was something of a mother hen, and had been ever since she came to Rapid City. She’d had no name, no past, but was a hell of a cook and had started making dinner for the boys when she’d lived next door to Shooter. Now she was busy nurturing Tildy through her first pregnancy, not that Tildy really needed it. For a thin, wisp of a woman, she was holding up fairly well being married to a man more than twice her size.
Shooter sat in the other chair, across from Caleb. “They’re so busy with each other, they might leave us alone,” he remarked, glancing at the women.
Caleb took a sip of his beer and grinned. “Good. I could use the money.”
Shooter lifted an eyebrow at him. “Plan this weekend?” he asked casually.
Caleb nodded.
“One weekend a month,” Easy replied as he entered from the kitchen, referring to Caleb’s monthly excursion to Sioux Falls on the other side of the state. “Are you hiding something from us?”
Caleb schooled his features to appear passive. “Like what?”
“Are you in the reserves?” the younger man asked, taking a seat next to Tex.
Caleb snorted. “Hardly.”
Caleb had left the Army along with the rest of them, right after the bomb had taken out most of their unit. The man sitting across from him now had lost a leg in that ambush. Caleb had known from the moment he’d cut off Easy’s fatigues that he didn’t have the medical skill to save it. He had only been a combat medic, not a battlefield surgeon. He might have been a paramedic after his discharge, but he’d seen enough of that kind of trauma to last him a lifetime. He had another mission now that was just as satisfying.
Slick stopped her fussing over Tildy and turned to look at him. Caleb froze with his beer halfway to his lips. He knew that look. It was the same look she’d gotten when Tildy and Hawk found out they were having a boy. Sarah had already been scheming to pair up Hope and their son.
“Are you going to Sioux Falls?” she asked.
Caleb grimaced. “Might be,” he replied, because although it was really none of her business, he didn’t want to lie to her.
“Can’t she come here?”
In the years that Caleb had been living in Rapid City, Sioux Falls had merged with “Sioux Falls,” the person and the city becoming one and the same. The guys left it mostly alone. The women, however, were a different story. It seemed Slick had set her sights on him as the last bachelor in the group and she was determined to set her little makeshift family to rights. But Caleb didn’t do relationships.
“Shooter,” he grumbled. “Tell your woman to stand down.”
Shooter shrugged. “I can’t. She never listens to me.”
“Why can’t we meet her?” Sarah prodded.
“There’s no one to meet,” Caleb told her.
“You go there all the time!”
“Let it go, Slick.”
“But—”
“Sarah. That’s enough,” Caleb snapped. He regretted having to put his foot down with her. She really was an amazing woman and he couldn’t fault her that her quest for happiness had extended to everyone around her. “I’m not the marrying kind,” he told her more gently.
