Not a single bit.
A throat cleared behind us, but I didn’t turn around.
Not until I was physically released from Booth’s arms and placed to the side.
“Uh, hi,” I heard.
I turned to see a gorgeous blonde woman standing in the mouth of the fire station.
She looked to be my age, maybe a little younger, and she had a young girl on her hip. A daughter, maybe.
“Hey hubby,” the woman said cheekily, looking back and forth between me and Booth.
My head turned, and the words she’d just said filtered through my head.
Hey, hubby.
My world dimmed, my vision thinning out until all I could see was grey.
The world went on around me as I walked away from the two of them standing next to each other and put one foot in front of the other. I managed to get across the room to the box of cookies I’d set down.
I could do this.
I could do this.
“You should’ve seen him qualify as he ran the obstacle course,” I heard Tai, my best friend’s man, say. “Downy taped him running it. It was like watching Captain America run it. He had the fucking t-shirt on and everything.”
I rolled my eyes.
It probably wasn’t that impressive.
But it was. I watched the video.
I didn’t want to.
But they’d put it on the big screen, and I’d watched the video instead of torturing myself watching Booth and his wife.
Anything was better than that.
***
Hours later, home and miserable, I was trying not to get too drunk.
I had to work tomorrow.
But my head didn’t care.
It was doing what my heart wanted.
Which was to forget.
My eyes caught on the young girl directly in front of me.
She was sitting at a bar height table with both of her parents, and who I guessed to be her boyfriend.
I didn’t know. The guy was weird. He hadn’t taken his eyes off of me all night, either.
“What do you think she’s staring at me for?” I asked my best friend, Mia.
Mia turned to stare at the seventeen-year-old cheerleader across the room from us, then shrugged.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Why don’t you go ask her?”
I ignored her, and tried my best to ignore the glares I was receiving from the peanut gallery.
I also tried to ignore the man that was across the bar from me staring at me. Not that I’d actually caught him looking. Every time I looked at him his eyes were on his wife.
It was safe to say that I was in a bad mood.
Today I’d seen Booth for the first time since I was twenty years old.
Which meant it’d been eight and a half long years.
And he hadn’t changed one freaking bit.
Well, the beard was new.
Before he hadn’t been allowed to have a beard. Now, though, he had a good one.
One that made me want to sit on his face.
“What are you looking at?” I snapped at a woman that was glaring at me.
Okay, I was taking a long time in front of the mirror and sink, but there was no time limit. And there was another freakin’ sink beside me.
“Bitch, I will fuck your dad and make you my stepdaughter. Back the fuck off!” I hissed at the girl.
The girl’s eyes widened in shock that I would use such crass language in front of her and her parents.
Her mom didn’t look too happy, either. Her dad, on the other hand, looked calculating as he thought about the possibilities.
I wasn’t saying that I wouldn’t do him, because holy shit the man was hot for an old man. However, I didn’t do married men. Ever. Period. End of fucking sentence.
Which was why knowing Booth was married really gutted me.
I’d always harbored a secret hope that one day he would come back and let me explain. Let me try to grovel my way back into his life.
But now, with him married, that was never going to happen.
Never.
Ever.
I closed my eyes and walked to the bathroom, slamming into a stall and shutting it forcefully.
The door banged shit with a rattle and I locked it before taking a seat on the toilet fully clothed.
The alcohol wasn’t cutting it.
Neither was the ignoring him.
I had to get out of here.
I looked at my watch.
It was thirty minutes past eight, and our dinner hadn’t come yet.
I’d promised Mia a girl’s day out, but there was no way I could make it through the rest of dinner with that man in the same room.
What were the chances that he’d pick the same exact restaurant that we were in?
My stomach felt queasy as I got up and slid the lock to unlock the door.
I whizzed through the process of washing and drying my hands before I slowly opened the door and surveyed the room.
I could just barely make out the top of Booth’s red hat he’d been wearing declaring him the newest member of KFD.
Mia sat at the bar with a plate of food in front of her, and I started to feel a wave of guilt.
I roughly pushed it back, though, instead pulling out my phone and texting Mia.
She’d understand.
If there was anyone in this world that would, it was her.
Then, without another word, I slipped out the delivery door and hurried across the parking lot to my Jeep.
It wasn’t much to look at.
In fact, it was pretty boring.
I’d gotten her when I turned sixteen, and hadn’t looked back since.
I didn’t spend much time in my car, and, when I did, all I needed it for was to drive me less than two miles to work and or the grocery store.
I was a homebody.
I read.
I wrote the occasional review for a blog, and I worked.
That was the extent of my life.
I was as boring as boring could be.
And my Jeep proved it.
Opening the Jeep door without bothering to unlock it since it didn’t lock anyway, I started it up and backed out of the parking spot, unaware of the eyes that watched me the entire way.
My eyes stayed looking ahead as I ignored the motorcycle that I knew was his.
He’d had it for a long time, now.
It’d been in my parent’s drive enough, and I’d ridden on it so many times, that I knew that bike inside and out.
I’d done things on that bike that were inappropriate, and there would never come a time that I didn’t look at that bike with the infinite possibilities that Booth had shown me were possible on it.
My drive home was short, thankfully, because by the time I arrived in my driveway I was crying so hard that I couldn’t see.
Sobs wracked my frame as I opened the door of my Jeep, then promptly busted my ass on the concrete due to the slickness of it.
And so I sat there, in my driveway, with rain pouring down on me, and cried.
Keys To My Heart
A companion novel to Keys To My Cuffs
Book 4 in The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC series.
“What are you doing?” I asked the man I was following.
He was sexy.
Very, very sexy.
So sexy, in fact, that I wanted to pull the car over and invite the beast into my car.
Then I was reminded why I couldn’t do that when a squeal from the backseat had me turning around.
“I told you not to touch your sister with that goddamn jock strap, Justice!” I yelled at my son. “How many times do I have to tell you this? Do it again, and I’ll pull this car over and let your sister beat the shit out of you.”
Justice stared at me like I’d grown a second head.
“I didn’t mean to, Ma.” Justice said.
His voice sq
ueaked, and I nearly laughed.
Justice was sixteen going on forty, and he had the cutest squeaky voice that made me want to pinch his cheeks.
“Yeah,” I said sarcastically. “I’m pretty fucking sure that you accidentally pulled that jock out of your gym bag and hit her with it. Just like I accidentally fell on your father’s di…”
“Mom!” Glory yelled as she threw her hands over her ears. “We don’t want to hear about you and dad doing it.”
I grinned at my daughter.
“You don’t?” I asked. “Do you need me to give you the sex talk again, because I so totally will!”
Both of my teenagers silenced, and I grinned inwardly as I turned my eyes back to the sexy man.
The sexy man that wasn’t waiting for me to finish fighting with my kids.
In fact, he was all the way up the street, his t-shirt tucked into the back of his shorts.
A fine sheen of sweat covered his entire body, and damn but what a fine body he had.
He was running pretty fast, meaning I had to speed up to catch him.
The motor roared to life, and the man looked back at me with a challenge in his eyes.
I grinned as he started to run faster, and pressed the gas pedal down just a little bit more.
The vehicle my husband bought me just last month jolted forward, and I felt the power of the truck surrounding me.
The man in front of me took off, cutting across Mrs. Johnson’s yard, over Mr. Grace’s azalea bushes, and disappeared into the back yard of Mr. Calloway.
I sped through the empty streets, going further and further down the long road and hooked a left on the street that my house was on.
I’d just turned on my blinker to pull into the driveway when the man burst out of the bushes and headed for the back of the house.
I hit the garage door opener and smiled when it started to go up.
Letting the kids fend for themselves, I bolted out of the vehicle, knowing for certain my kids would lock it up and shut off the engine for me, and slid on my knees under the garage door that got stuck halfway like it’d been known to do lately.
My husband was a lazy bastard and was supposed to fix it this afternoon, but obviously running was more important than me getting inside the house without scraping my knees up.
I pushed into the utility room door and sprinted through the kitchen.
Vaulting over Range, our German Shepherd who’d sat up when he heard the utility room door open, I hurried down the hallway to my room.
The moment I hit our bedroom I started stripping off my clothes.
The moment my bra was off, the sweaty man I’d been chasing grabbed me from behind and slammed me down onto the bed.
My pants were the first thing to go, followed shortly by my panties.
Then suddenly he was gone.
I tried to turn over, and had every intention of doing so, but the moment I tried to flip a resounding smack filled the room, followed shortly by the explosion of pain on my backside.
“Don’t move,” he said.
I got up on my knees, completely ignoring the fool man, and was about to come up to my hands when another smack filled the room.
“You mother fucker.” I growled, rolling over.
The man backed up and slammed my bedroom door closed, then locked it for good measure.
“The kids’ll hear us.” I said. “They’ll hate it.”
“Those fuckers can wear their headphones,” he said, dropping down onto the bed between my splayed thighs.
I licked my lips as I let my eyes travel down the lovely man’s body.
“Didn’t I see you running this morning?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, dropping a kiss to my navel.
I gasped as his tongue darted out and licked a line up my belly to my breast.
He teased his lips around my nipple, then roughly sucked the entire bud into his mouth.
I gasped and grabbed onto his hair, my fingers digging into his wet locks.
“Oh, God.” I growled. “I need you to hurry up and get inside of me.”
Those dark eyes of his ate me up as he crawled between my legs, letting his huge cock rest at the entrance to my sex.
“What would your police officer husband think, Channing?” He asked.
I roughly yanked his hair and growled at him.
“Hurry up and fuck me already, Officer.”
His hard cock slammed into me, and I closed my eyes as the feeling of rightness burst through my veins.
“Yes, ma’am.”
***
The hot steam of the shower poured over my back as I washed the scent of our combined releases off my skin.
“You’re a little hard on the kids, you know.” Loki said long minutes later as his still hard cock pressed into my backside.
I looked at the love of my life over my shoulder.
“They need to stop fighting.” I growled. “And they need to know where sex gets you.”
Loki’s white smile flashed before he pressed his lips to the back of my neck.
“Satisfied.” Loki said as he turned the shower off and reached behind him to grab my bath towel.
Once it was wrapped around my shoulders, he grabbed his own and pushed out of the shower.
Close on his heels, I watched as he put his underwear on, still wet, as he had for the last seventeen years of our marriage.
“I’m not mean.” I told my husband as I dropped the towel and reached for my camisole. “I’m upset that they both think it’s alright to get in fights at school.”
The next thing to go on was my pajama pants right before I opened the door to our bedroom and made my way to the laundry room with my arms full of clothes I’d picked up off the floor on my way out of the room.
Loki followed at my heels, still complaining about my harsh punishment.
“They don’t need to be grounded for getting into a fight about two dumbasses thinking it’s alright to stomp on the American flag.” Loki persisted as he followed closely at my heels.
I dropped the clothes on the floor and reached for the nearest empty basket, bending over and yanking the dryer door open before pulling out all of the clothes that’d been dry for a day and a half.
There was no point in turning them back on. I wouldn’t remember they were done until it was time to turn them on again, so I did what I always did. Pulled them out, and left them in the basket for Glory to fold when I was upset with her.
Switching over to the washer, I got all the clothes out and tossed them into the dryer.
“No,” I agreed. “Those kids shouldn’t have stomped on the flag. However, my kids were raised not to fight at school. They’re punishment is staying.”
Loki crossed his arms over his chest as he glared.
I bent into the washer and got the bullets out of the bottom of the washing machine, and added them into a basket for Loki to take when it got too full to add anymore.
I’d been doing the bullet in the washing machine routine for a long time as well. It came as second nature to take them out now instead of waiting for them to click and clink in the dryer.
I normally tried to check his pockets for any strays, but they always got past me. It was as if all of Loki’s pockets had hidden places for bullets to hide, and they only fell out in the washing machine after you’d already run the load.
“The kids were shitting on the flag.” Loki said. “I didn’t fight for their right to do that. I fought for their right to…”
I held up my hand.
“I realize that you feel strongly about this,” I said. “But I’m not budging. I had to talk two coaches out of kicking both of them off their prospective teams today, had to speak to the kids’ mothers, and had my face nearly slapped.”
Loki’s back went straight.
“Mom.”
I turned to find Glory and Justice at the laundry room door, staring at me with varying degre
es of concern on their faces.
“What?” Loki snapped.
Glory grimaced before continuing.
“We’re sorry.”
My lips thinned.
“We won’t fight again.” Justice promised.
I sighed.
“Y’all could’ve gotten hurt. You both know better than to act like that.” I chided them again. Because I fucking could.
Justice looked contrite. Glory, however, looked as if she’d only been re-riled.
“What?” I asked.
“The girl, Toya, she said that dad was a cracker pig and deserved to be shot in the back of the head.” Glory spat.
My back went straight this time.
“She what?”
***
“Ma’am.” The principal said that afternoon. “This is out of line.”
“No.” I snarled. “What’s out of line is you allowing kids to persist in thinking that it’s okay to kill cops. One of your students said some pretty disgusting things yesterday about my husband, and I will not sit by while they continue to go to school as if they weren’t assholes yesterday while my kids get detention. Yesterday I wasn’t aware of all the facts, but now that I am, we’ll be fixing this situation immediately or I’ll be raising so much hell you’ll never know what hit you.”
The principal looked at me, an offended expression on her face.
“Ma’am.” The principal tried.
I shook my head and held up one finger. “I want them out now. Or the next time you hear from me it’ll be by way of my lawyer.”
The principal looked pissed, but I could tell she was serious.
“And I know damn well you can pull up the camera feed,” I said as I gathered my purse. “Don’t pull this anymore, or I’ll have to involve more people than you know how to deal with.”
With that parting comment, I marched straight out the door and to my new truck, driving it straight to the police station.
The moment my feet touched down in the bullpen, my eyes automatically started scanning for Loki.
I spotted him at the water cooler with Trance.
His eyes came up, and they seemed to light with an inner fire that was only for me.
I marched toward him, my eyes on fire for him as well.
But not for the same reason.
Jack & Coke (The Uncertain Saints Book 2) Page 22
