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"You're all a bunch of assholes." He flipped off their grinning faces.
"Camacho." Taz stood in the middle of the scrum, looking every bit like the heavyweight championship boxer he'd been. "Let's chat."
Fuck. Now this he had been hoping to avoid. "Sure, man."
He ducked into Lexie's empty office. The whole place was covered in cats. Inspirational posters on the wall. Figurines. Stuffed animals. Even a life-sized cardboard cutout of a cat in mid-swipe with its claws extended, blood dripping from the edges. The woman had some crazy cat lady shit going on, no doubt about it. He made a mental note not to piss her off. Shit, that could be applied to everyone at the B-Squad.
Taz closed the door behind him and then leaned against it with his arms crossed and a grim look on his face.
Oh, this is going to be a good time.
"You're going out with Tamara?" Taz asked, his eyes narrowed.
Isaac sat down on the corner of Lexie's desk, careful to maintain an unconcerned air even as guilt seeped in. "Was I supposed to ask permission first?"
Okay, Tamara was Taz's ex-wife and the guy code was pretty clear on this, but the rules had never been something Isaac had overly concerned himself with. It was one of the many things that made him a shitty team player.
"No." Taz clenched his jaw tight, obviously as uncomfortable with this chick flick moment as he was. "She's a grown woman who can make her own decisions."
Isaac's shoulders relaxed a few millimeters. He wasn't a part of the B-Squad team. He didn't belong so much as he was B-Squad adjacent, just the way he liked it. But that didn't mean he was good with being persona non grata with Taz and the rest of the team. They'd started to grow on him.
"So what's the problem?"
Taz nailed him with a hard look. "Don't fuck with her."
"What do you mean?"
"You know exactly what I'm saying," Taz said, his voice quiet and deadly serious. "You chased her. Don't think just because she said yes that you caught her."
He picked up one of the small, red wooden cat figurines on Lexie's desk and rolled it in his hand, letting its sharp edges scratch his palm. "Are you warning me or warning me off of her?"
The other man shrugged. "Both."
This really had gone over to the weird touchy-feely side. Was he the bad guy in this situation? Was Tamara? Did it even fucking matter?
"What am I supposed to do with that?"
"Consider it carefully before you do anything stupid." Taz pushed off from the door, his gaze never leaving Isaac.
If they were going to be closed-door dick measuring, he might as well know exactly why. "Is it because she's your ex?"
"It's because she's skating the edge right now," Taz said, his voice harder than a pissed off steer's hooves.
"You don't think I know that?" He knew it. He saw it in the way Tamara was always eyeing the door, the way her body tensed any time someone new walked in a room, the way she'd kept her white-knuckled hands clasped tightly in the cab of his truck after he'd gotten her out of the Corsair Club.
"Yeah, well knowing and giving a shit about it are two different things," Taz shot back.
Heat flared in Isaac's belly. He'd knew every twist, turn and jagged rough patch on that motherfucking edge. With deliberate care, he placed the wood cat on the desk next to Lexie's keyboard and unfurled himself from his sitting position. He had maybe an inch on Taz, but they were well matched and he was done sitting down for a lecture.
"Is that what this is?" He stalked toward the door, infusing each step with snarl and attitude. "Are you giving me the dad talk before I take your darling daughter to prom? That's screwed up."
"Fuck you." Taz took a menacing step forward.
Isaac met him halfway, little jolts of testosterone-fueled adrenaline popping against every nerve. "Likewise, man."
And this was why he didn't do the whole team thing.
Teams had a way of swallowing a man up and leaving nothing behind. He'd been there. Experienced that. He was done sacrificing everything for some supposed greater good that turned out to be just another hill, just another check mark on another man's to-do list that never made a damn bit of difference to the people most affected. Independence wasn't just a word for him. It gave him the freedom to pick and choose his cases, walk away from the bullshit and change what he could for the better. It let him finally wipe some of the red off his ledger—and there was a lot.
