“Do you think we’ll find anything, Daddy?” I asked softly.
Dre, my best friend, my very-taken gay best friend, dropped his hand on my head and squeezed lightly.
See, a year ago, Dre and Tray had been living normal lives. Tray had been attending UCLA and had been a year away from graduating in the top ten percent of his class. Dre had been living with his partner, Craig. Working and starting a business with him.
Then, a weekend that Tray was down visiting Dre, all hell had broken loose.
While Dre was away picking up take-out for dinner, a masked gunman had entered their residence and attempted to shoot Craig. Tray, seeing this, had picked up his own concealed carry weapon and had shot back at the gunman. Unfortunately for everyone involved, Tray had hit his brother’s lover, Craig instead of the gunman. The gunman, being wise and seeing that he might not win this battle, had left, but not before managing to knock Tray out cold. Unfortunately, at the time of the incident, Tray and Craig had been arguing quite heatedly about something—something in which neither man remembers. Something that the neighbors did remember and had relayed to the cops.
And since all evidence had pointed at Tray and Tray only, things had deteriorated from there.
Tray had no memory up until about four hours before arriving back home. Craig had none of the last year of his life—all of which including Tray and Dre combined.
Dre, who’d arrived on the heels of it all happening, had known damn well and good that his brother wouldn’t have shot his fiancé. Unfortunately, nobody had believed him but me.
And the man that did it was never to be found again to corroborate Tray’s telling of the tale.
Tray went to prison because he seriously believed himself guilty. Craig moved out of Dre’s house and into one in Bear Bottom, Texas about fifteen minutes away—refusing to talk to anybody about it. And everybody was extremely unhappy.
Hence where I came in.
Tray’s good name was smeared, and though Tray wasn’t my best friend, Dre was.
And since Tray refused to allow Dre to visit him while he was in prison, I did it for him.
Which led us to now, trying to use Trey to get insider information for something my father was investigating for his work, while my father worked with his partners to help exonerate Tray of any wrongdoing.
When I’d brought up the question to Tray about helping my father, he’d jumped on the chance to do something.
The problem with Tray was that he was a highly intelligent individual, and when I say highly intelligent, I mean genius level intelligent. But he had the little problem of getting himself in trouble if he got bored.
And we didn’t want him to get bored in prison. Getting bored led to him doing stuff like getting into fights—like he did when he was in high school and decided that going to illegal fights and kicking people’s asses was the best way to make him no longer bored.
Needless to say, Tray had an extensive rap sheet, and nobody had really batted an eye at Tray ‘shooting’ Craig.
Nobody but Dre, who knew his baby brother like nobody else ever would.
“We’ll find something, baby. It may take a while, but we’ll find something,” promised my dad.
Chapter 1
Just tell me where and when, and I’ll be there thirteen minutes late.
-T-shirt
Slate
I slowly packed a bag, knowing in my heart that I was making the right decision.
“Are you sure?” Izzy begged. “I mean, I swear that we don’t mind you being here.”
I looked down at my baby sister and grinned. “I know you don’t, honey. But I’m ready to be on my own again. Need to be on my own. And since they gave me a little more leeway in my new ankle bracelet, I feel like it’s time that I do that.”
We both looked down at said ‘ankle bracelet.’ Her grinning and me grimacing.
I’d been out of prison for three months yesterday, and today at my scheduled meeting with my parole officer, he’d told me that I officially had free range once again—of the town that I lived in, anyway.
I could go anywhere within fifty square miles of my home. That meant that I could go to the grocery store. I could go to the library and the bank. I could also go to the neighboring city, Kilgore, Texas.
What I could not do, however, was live another night under my sister’s roof and live with myself afterward.
There was only so much I could take, after all.
“This sucks,” she muttered. “I was really loving having you here.”
“You mean you were loving having a live-in babysitter that could watch your kids any time you and your husband wanted to go do a round of ‘I’m not having sex. We’re folding laundry?’” I asked.
Izzy’s face flamed. Rome, who was leaning in the doorway, started to laugh.
“It would’ve happened whether you were watching them or not,” Rome said, sounding amused as hell. “The youngest is tiny. She’s more than capable of sitting in her bouncer for a few minutes.”
I gagged. “But y’all are loud, and this house really doesn’t hide all those sounds like you think they do.”
Izzy opened her mouth and closed it like a fish, then her face flamed some more.
“Then why didn’t you say something?” she managed to choke out.
I looked at her. “And be pushed into having this awkward conversation while I was still being forced to live here?”
Izzy’s mouth snapped shut.
“You need help moving anything to the new place?” Rome asked, done with the conversation.
I turned to face my brother-in-law.
It was weird being able to almost look someone in the eye.
Rome was a massive man. One that was almost my size. He was an inch shorter than me, but he could easily hold his own in the bulk department.
I walked to him and offered him my hand. “I’m good.”
He shook my hand and then dropped it, lifting his arm so that he could tug Izzy to him and wrap his arm around her shoulder.
“I’ll see you at the club meeting tonight?” he asked.
I looked down at my sister, then at my friend, and nodded.
“Yeah. I’ll be there,” I muttered.
With that, I walked out and didn’t look back.
***
It was as I was parking the bike in my driveway, staring up at the house that I’d once shared with my fiancée, that I finally realized that maybe this wasn’t the best idea as of yet.
Not because the house brought back bad memories, but because it brought back good memories.
Times when Vanessa and I were planning out our lives.
We’d bought this house about three months before her death. It’d been a big deal seeing as we were both living on cops’ salaries. Neither one of us had ever lived in our own places before, making it an even bigger deal.
Hell, Vanessa hadn’t lived in the house at all.
After buying it, we’d had it renovated. New flooring put in throughout the whole house. Hardwood floors in the living room and kitchen, tile in the bathrooms, and carpet in the bedrooms.
The bathrooms had also gotten complete overhauls, as well as the kitchen.
Though Vanessa hadn’t had much desire to be involved in the renovations—I had. I’d chosen the paint colors and the tile. The carpet color and the pull knobs on all the cabinetry. Hell, I’d even chosen the color of our front door.
A front door that was painted a bright red and looked just as fresh now as it had all those years ago when I’d first done it.
Though, likely, that had a lot to do with my sister and her extensive upkeep on the premises.
When I’d gone to prison, I’d asked my sister to sell the Harley I was currently sitting on to pay the house payments for me.
Instead, she’d kept the bike and had gotten a second job all so she could have it for me when I got out.
Which she did.
And now I was looking at a house that I still had to p
ay for without a job to pay for it with.
Getting off the bike, I stood up and stretched my arms above my head, feeling my shirt ride up and not caring.
Absently, I dropped my hands back down to my sides, not bothering to tuck my shirt back down as I did and stared at the front door.
The first step was the hardest.
I remembered the exact conversation I’d had with Vanessa about the color.
“What do you think about blue?” I asked.
“I think that you should just paint it a color. If I had to choose, it’d be a brown or something that wouldn’t draw attention. Something that wouldn’t show dirt well.” Vanessa laughed.
My partner in both life and work was a minimalist. She liked order and functionality. What she didn’t like was pomp and flare.
And a blue door was exactly that.
“What about red?” I asked, ignoring her.
She sighed. “I don’t care, Slate.”
I grinned and looked over at her sitting in the squad car next to me.
“Why not?” I asked. “This is our place we’re talking about. You should care that the color of the front door is nice.”
She rolled her eyes. “I care that the door works. I care that the door holds out intruders. What I do not care about is the color.”
My stomach rolled at the memory.
It rolled again as my eyes caught on the stupid nameplate that I’d carved out of wood, stained, and then hung up beside the door that she repeatedly said she didn’t like the color of.
“Babe, when I said that I didn’t care what color, I didn’t mean paint the damn door fire engine red,” she murmured as she stared at the door in horror. “What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that you said you didn’t care what color the door was, and I liked the color red,” I muttered darkly. “How was I supposed to know that you actually cared?”
Jesus Christ, how the hell was I supposed to navigate that minefield?
Vanessa was the worst of the worst.
At one point, you would think that you could treat her like a normal woman. As if she actually knew what she was thinking and spoke exactly what she thought.
Then there were the times like then when she went back on her word and actually acted like a girl.
“I can paint it a different color,” I sighed. “What do you think of the nameplate by the door?”
“I think that you’ll have to put my last name under it,” she snickered. “I’m not a Solis.”
I looked at her like she was dense. “You will be. Remember? That’s what that little ring on your left ring finger is for.”
She scoffed. “I won’t be changing my name though, silly.”
I viciously shut those memories down.
Those memories led to nowhere that I wanted to be. No sir.
Forcing myself to take the first step forward, I put one foot in front of the other, then cursed when I realized that I forgot my bag.
It was as I was turning on my heel that I saw her.
She was lying on the hammock.
The one that I’d put up before I’d left all those years ago.
Honestly, I was surprised that it wasn’t disintegrated.
I was also pissed.
All of a sudden…so pissed.
I crossed my arms over my chest and contemplated what to do.
It wasn’t that she was in my yard and using the hammock that was mine that pissed me off. At least, not all of it, anyway.
What pissed me off is that she used it and it annoyed me.
Which had to be why I did what I did next.
Walking up to the blonde, whose hair was so long, thick and curly that it was snaking through the gaps of the rope material that was supporting her, nearly going all the way to the ground as she slowly rocked back and forth, I stared.
It was then that I realized who the blonde was.
It was her.
The girl, Harleigh, that visited Tray.
The woman that I hadn’t seen in well over three months since I’d left the penitentiary.
Elation and exultation barreled through me, and I nearly turned around and walked away.
But I had a thing about people touching my things.
It’d developed in my first year of being in the pen.
Your things were not your own.
It didn’t matter if they were actually yours or not. The guards—at least a few of them—and the other inmates didn’t give a shit.
They wanted your goddamn book? Well, if it was a guard? You were just screwed. If it was another inmate? You better be willing to fight for it if you actually wanted it.
And so a deep-seated feeling of needing my shit to be mine and only mine had developed.
It also hadn’t abated.
Hell, just last week Astrid had walked up to my plate and started eating off of it.
I’d had to seriously control my knee-jerk reaction in yelling at her.
It wasn’t that I minded sharing…I just felt like it was something that needed to be asked first.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I looked down at the woman and studied her, wondering how long it would take her to realize I was there.
The answer?
Never.
“Ahem,” I cleared my throat.
She sighed and squirmed, drawing attention to her tight black tank top. It rode up slightly over her belly, and I had to fight the urge to trace my finger along the line of exposed skin between her shirt and her high-waisted pants.
Pants that were seriously high. Like, I’m talking, almost up to the bottom of her ribs high.
She must’ve been sleeping hard if her shirt had that much time to ride up that far.
I cleared my throat again, this time causing her to shift all over again, bringing her pink-socked foot up and out, causing her pants to ride up slightly, making the fabric at the apex of her thighs rise slightly. Meaning the fabric pushed between her pussy lips, giving me a very real indication that she probably wasn’t wearing any underwear.
I felt myself harden.
In order to hide that fact, I cleared my throat even louder and then said, “Ma’am?”
She blinked her eyes open, and once again I was hit with those light sea foam green eyes.
She frowned in confusion but didn’t freak out when she saw a six-foot-five-inch man standing over her. Nor did she really show any reaction to me at all—other than annoyance that I woke her from her nap.
“What?” she snapped, bringing her arm up to glance at her watch. “Ugh, I still have an hour!”
My lips twitched. “Still have an hour?” I asked.
“Yes!” she said. “To make my nap goal.”
“Your nap goal,” I found myself saying. “Who has a nap goal?”
She pursed her lips. “I do.”
I didn’t know what to say to that other than, “Well, I’m sorry to bother you. You know, since you’re outside and in the yard, and I’m probably not the only one that will wake you up today.”
She curled her lip. “You are. Everybody else knows to leave me alone.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it.
“I just literally had my bike five feet away from your head,” I said. “How was I supposed to know that you were sleeping toward your goal? Not to mention you’re in the middle of a neighborhood where anyone or anything could make noise. Hell, I could’ve gotten out my lawn mower and done that without even knowing that you were there.”
She closed her eyes again.
“Those things don’t bother me,” she said. “What bothers me are men waking me up with their loud mouths.”
“You’re telling me the pipes on my bike didn’t wake you up?” I said. “My mouth did?”
She nodded. “Glad you could get that through your thick skull.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it.
“How?”
She sighed and blinked one eye open to glare at me.
“I grew up arou
nd motorcycles. I get my best sleep when one’s humming in the background,” she said. “My house is too quiet, which is why I’m out here at all. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to the rest of my nap.”
I crossed my arms over my chest.
“Well, now that we’re on that subject, I do mind,” I said stiffly.
That was about the time that the screen door of her house creaked open then slammed shut.
My eyes lit on the large man. He was tall, about six-foot-two or so, with dirty blonde hair that was perfectly styled and a complexion that screamed ‘I have a nighttime skincare routine.’
He was wearing a nice pair of khaki slacks, a button-down shirt, and a brown leather belt.
I couldn’t see his feet, but I could almost guarantee he was wearing a pair of loafers.
“You okay, Harleigh?” he called.
Harleigh gave a thumbs-up without opening her eyes.
“This man was just about to leave me alone,” she called out.
Actually, I wasn’t.
And my next words said so.
“You’re in my hammock,” I said softly.
She opened her eyes and stared. “No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are,” I said. “Those trees that that hammock are attached to are my trees as well. You’re in my yard.”
She glanced around, causing her hair to pull up from its near-precarious position of scraping the ground.
“Bullshit. This is Dre’s property line.” She gestured to where my driveway started.
“Ummm, no,” I disagreed immediately. “If you were going by that, then at least a quarter of the brick on the side of my house would belong to y’all.”
Dre.
The made-up man on the porch must be her man.
The one she spoke about all the time during her visits with Tray.
I felt my stomach sour.
“Well,” she paused. “I’ve been napping in this hammock for a year now. Every day for an hour and a half—when I’m off. Even if it was on your property—which it isn’t—you can let me use it.”
I could have had she not been such a little shit about it.
Oh, and asked.
“I might have had I not put it in for me,” I said. “And this had not been my property.”
F-Bomb (The Bear Bottom Guardians MC Book 9) Page 2
