Total pages in book: 188
Estimated words: 185811 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 929(@200wpm)___ 743(@250wpm)___ 619(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 185811 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 929(@200wpm)___ 743(@250wpm)___ 619(@300wpm)
He had a point to make but he took that too far and he knew it when her chin wobbled before she got control of it.
“Mac—”
“I want a baby,” she whispered.
He believed her.
She also wanted an Eddie.
“Give it time,” he whispered back.
She threw up both hands. “How much?”
“As much as it takes.”
“Sadly, I can’t Mick Jagger this sitch and make a baby when I’m seventy.”
Jagger shouldn’t even be doing that shit.
“Honey, you’re still in your thirties,” he reminded her.
“They’re all gone,” she declared.
Now he had no idea what the woman was talking about.
“Who?” he asked.
She bopped forward on her seat with agitation. “Them. The good ones. The Hot Bunch. The only ones left are Roam and Sniff and they’re too young for me. Not to mention, if Shirleen thought I’d even spoke their names in a conversation like this, she’d cut me.”
She was not wrong.
Shirleen was Roam and Sniff’s foster momma, though in her mind, there was no “foster” about it and it wouldn’t matter one bit that Roam and Sniff were both long since of age and men in their own right.
She would cut her.
Mac was also not wrong that the Rock Chicks had snagged all there was of the Hot Bunch.
Maybe Lee was hiring.
“Mac, darlin’, just give it time,” he urged. “And in the meantime, spoil your nephews. Because when you find a man and you start makin’ your own babies, you won’t have the time for them you have now, but you’ll love it that you had the time you have now. You dig?”
She gave it a beat before she puckered her lips and blew out a breath.
Then she said, “I’m still going natural.”
She dug.
Crisis averted (or at least this one, he corralled strippers, bouncers, bartenders and waitresses, they were all young and fit and prone to do stupid shit, so it seemed his entire life was averting disasters).
This one over (for now), Smithie rolled a hand at her, turning his eyes to his desk. “Do whatever you want with your tits. Just give me some notice. I gotta prepare the staff to adjust to half the amount of asses in seats, I don’t got my headliner.”
“Smithie,” she called.
He turned his eyes back to her.
She was now grinning.
And she had a new declaration.
“You’re the shit.”
“I know that seein’ as I put up with your crazy ass. Now get out. I’m not up here twiddling my thumbs. I got shit to do.”
She kept grinning as she rose from the chair and sashayed her tight ass to his door.
“Close that behind you,” he ordered.
She didn’t close it behind her.
She turned at it and looked to him.
“I’m giving it a year.”
Something else Mac was.
Decisive.
“I’ll take it,” he replied. “Now get out.”
She shot him a white smile that miraculously his retinas had built up a tolerance to so they weren’t burned out, then she moseyed out the door.
Thankfully, she shut it behind her.
Smithie stared hard at it while considering hefting his bulk over to lock it.
He wasn’t going to take the time.
Instead, he picked up the paper, turned it over and read it again.
It stated, plainly, he was fucked.
More alarmingly, it stated, chillingly, Mac was in danger.
This was a problem more than it was already a colossal motherfucking problem.
Any other one of his girls, he’d pick up the phone to Lee Nightingale, the man behind Nightingale Investigations, the commander of the baddest badass motherfuckers in Denver. He’d hand over this letter and he’d get this problem solved.
But Mac was Charlotte McAlister, Jet McAlister Chavez’s little sister. Jet was married to Eddie Chavez. Eddie was Lee’s best friend. And Jet worked for Indy, Lee’s wife, the Queen of the Rock Chicks, and thus Jet Chavez was a bona fide Rock Chick.
Mac might not be a card-carrying member of the Rock Chicks, mostly because she had a job where she worked nights, the time those crazy bitches instigated the most fucked-up of their varying antics. Though they weren’t averse to mornings and afternoons. It was just that the stun-gunnings, kidnappings and the like mostly took place at night, and Mac was busy then.
She was still a Rock Chick, or at least she was by association.
Considering the Rock Chick link and the blood ties to Jet, if Lee knew Mac was in danger, he’d tear the town apart to put a stop to it.
And Eddie…
Now Eddie, Smithie didn’t even want to think about it. The man was a cop. The shit Lee and his boys did with flair and a flagrant disregard to just about anything, Eddie could not do.
But Eddie wouldn’t blink at doing whatever he had to do to make his sister-in-law safe.
And the man had mouths to feed.
So yeah.
This was a problem even more than it already was a colossal motherfucking problem because Smithie couldn’t call Lee.
Which meant Smithie had to find a different set of badasses to deal with it.