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She pulled away too soon and picked up the putty. “Come on. The sun is coming up, and we’ve still got a club to fix.”
She could have told me to do anything from cleaning toilets to disposing of a body. And in that moment, completely under her spell, I would have done anything Eve Hawkins asked me to.
19
EVE
By the time I called everybody in, I’d found some of Augie’s sweats in the locker room and pulled them over the top of my lingerie. I could have done it earlier, but there would have been no fun in that. I’d seen the way Boston had been staring at me. And I knew that every time I reached for something, he caught a glimpse of my bare ass. I’d wanted him to see me. I was so fucking attracted to him, I could barely think straight. And sure, he drove me insane, and half the time I wanted to kill him, but the other half of the time I wanted to straddle his waist, sink down on his erection, and ride him until I screamed for an entirely different reason.
It was such a good-looking erection, too. The video hadn’t done him justice. The real thing, pulsing deep in my mouth, was the biggest turn-on. I’d had to make him come so we didn’t get carried away and end up fucking on the furniture like rabbits. I had to get my club together in time for the show tonight. There’d be time later to do all sorts of things with Boston. Right now, we’d just needed to take the edge off.
The others all arrived not long after I sent the SOS message out, Phoenix with his truck full of handyman equipment. I thanked him as he walked in with a ladder, and in his quiet way, he nodded and got right to work. Augie was the complete opposite. When he arrived, everybody knew about it. Especially Boston.
He stopped and stared at the two of us talking quietly in the corner. “Is this a thing now? We’re friends with the cop?”
I lifted one shoulder, knowing full well I was more than friends with the cop. But Augie didn’t need to know that. Augie had the world’s biggest mouth, and the second you told him anything, the entire neighborhood would know. Whatever Boston and I were doing wasn’t anybody else’s business. But I did need Augie to get off Boston’s back. “The cop is helping us fix the club. So for today, he’s on our team. Got it?”
Augie frowned, but he knew who was boss around here. “You got it. Play nicely with the policeman.”
“At least until further notice,” I said. “I reserve the right to change my mind.”
Boston frowned at me, but Augie seemed pleased by it. “You got it.” He wandered off to the back of the club, with me calling after him to sort out the glass repair.
Lyric turned up after dropping Amelia at daycare, and Fawn trailed in moments later. Her eyes went wide as she took in the damage and the work crew I’d already assembled. Her bottom lip trembled, her big eyes filling with tears.
I dropped what I was doing and rushed over. “Hey. What happened?”
She laughed around a teary sob. “Your club got shot up, and you’re asking me what happened?”
I let out a sigh of relief. “I thought something happen to you.” I waved a hand at the disheveled mess around us. “All of this can be fixed. No one was hurt. That’s all that matters.”
“How can you be so calm about this?”
I shrugged. Things like this were the story of my life. It wasn’t the first shooting I’d been involved in. Growing up in Saint View, you didn’t get to eighteen without experiencing gunshots in the middle of the night. Sure, it wasn’t normally directed at me personally, and maybe I should have been a little bit more worried than I was, but I was also a believer in karma. And what goes around, comes around. William would get his, eventually. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of scaring me. If he thought filling my club with bullets was going to get me to run or back down, he had another think coming.
I was stronger than that. Stronger than him. I’d prove it if I had to.
But Fawn’s fingers shook, and a tear dripped down her cheek. She had such a baby face, it was almost like wiping away the tears of my own child. I engulfed her in a hug, holding her tight. “Hey. It’s okay. It’s nothing a day of elbow grease won’t fix, right?”
Her lip trembled, then turned into a full body shake and a complete inability to talk as she broke down in my arms. From the corner of my eye I caught Boston watching us, a worried expression on his face.
“You okay?” he mouthed.
I nodded and held Fawn a little tighter, guiding her toward my office. We found Augie in the hallway, and he took one look at Fawn’s tears and lost his shit. “What the hell happened? Was it the cop?” He gripped Fawn by the chin and tilted it up to face him. “Hey. Talk to me.”
Fawn just shook her head.
Augie turned to me, true worry making his movements frantic. It hit me then that the big man who almost everybody hated, actually cared deeply for Fawn. I wasn’t yet sure if it was in the same way I cared about her, or if his affection was based in something more than friendship.
Either way, he trailed us to the office, shutting the three of us inside.
“I’m so sorry, this is all my fault,” Fawn sobbed, sinking into the chair opposite my desk.
Augie knelt on the floor beside her chair and took her hand, squeezing her small fingers between his larger ones. I let him comfort her, taking my regular seat behind my desk. This side of Augie was something I’d never seen before, and it was both startling and tender. If not a little bizarre.
But Augie’s words of reassurance did little to dry Fawn’s tears. She clutched his fingers tighter, but they just kept coming, as did the blame. “I’ll quit,” she babbled. “Do you need my resignation in writing? If you just give me a pen, I’ll do it now.”
I squinted at her. “Slow down. What are you talking about? Why on earth would you quit?”
