“We talked about it.”
“Yet here you are, and bringing them in on it, no less.”
Zeus’s blade-less hand began to dance at his side.
“She’s ours, though,” Zeus said calmly. “Our responsibility, ours to keep, ours to protect?”
The question took a little air out of Sabrina’s impassioned sails.
“She’s absolutely ours,” she said, as she closed her eyes and massaged her temple. “For better or worse.”
Zeus approached Sabrina, stopping so close that he had to be sucking all the breathable air out of her lungs. That uneasy gnawing churned through Big Country’s gut again. The intensity of emotion these two shared should have made his skin crawl with horror; instead, the gnawing wanted to be filled with what they shared instead of rejecting it.
“Trust,” Zeus declared.
And with that one word, all the fear and tension vanished from Sabrina’s body. She reached between them and rested her hand over Zeus’s heart.
“With my life, big man. With the life of our girl.”
Zeus threw a look of raw pleasure Big Country’s way. “Woman’s brain. Sometimes you have to cut through to the heart of a matter to make them see reason.”
Big Country blinked twice. Zeus was now schoolinghimon women?In what fucking life…?
“Okay, fascinating as all this domestic bliss bullshit is, I got a woman off-mountain who ain’t worried about heart or reason, just all of this well-endowed sexiness,” he said, motioning toward his groin and grinning as Sabrina pretended to retch.
Zeus pressed his lips against Sabrina’s forehead, his steely gaze flickering toward Big Country again. “Maybe you should stop and say hello to the saint on the side of the road. Think he’s getting lonely.”
Big Country looked to Sabrina but she shrugged, shaking her head. Sabrina had a knack for deciphering the leaps in logic sometimes required to follow Zeus’s train of thought. Over the weeks, Big Country had learned not to dismiss what Zeus said out of hand, no matter how bizarre it sounded at first reckoning. Where most folks got from point A to point B in a reasonably linear fashion, Zeus’s thought process could make you to work like hell to link his meaning to your reality.
“Look here, cousin,” Big Country began, feeling around his pockets for his keys. He wasn’t of a mind to sort out riddles when there was a house full of people who could do that. The woman who’d laid waste to his damn-near infinite amount of good sense was down in the real world waiting for him to come unravel all her mysteries so he could use her vulnerabilities as he saw fit. He wasn’t giving that up to say hey to nobody. “I’m gonna pass on that invite and head on home, but y’all make do without me, yeah.”
“Why are you rushing off the mountain so much lately? Don’t tell me it’s because of one of those no-account women who don’t know nothing but laying up on their asses all day waiting for you to come and fu–”
“Mama!” he shouted, covering his ears and backing toward the door. Lord Jesus, his poor mind couldn’t handle her thinking about him and his women. She despised them on a level that wasn’t healthy, believing they were taking advantage of him when everyone else knew he held all the advantages in his unions.
’Course she cared so much because he was her favorite. She’d saved him when he was barely out of kindergarten, so her mothering tendency was stronger than with the others. In general, he didn’t mind, but Mama was mean, and bad things tended to befall people who threatened her Brood.
“Big Country, if there’s someone out there dogging my mountain, saint or not, I want to know what his purpose is.” Mama said.
“There’s likely nobody out there! Don’t act like y’all don’t know this,” he said, turning to glare at Zeus. The bastard smirked at him, rubbing his jaw against Sabrina’s temple. Blue flame tried to spark into existence as Zeus held onto Sabrina while keeping him from the tempting threat he knew actually existed.
Taking a deep breath, Big Country cracked his neck left, then right, and exhaled. Reaching for his cigar, he funneled his anger away from the cold spark by adopting an easygoing smile. He had to smile, he had to be calm, he didn’t want to be the one to unleash a chain of events that wouldn’t leave the bar standing or the Brood intact.
Mama must have sensed his struggle because she held his gaze and made her way to him, linking her arm through his as she guided him toward the front door. This woman knew him better than anyone, was more of a Mama than his own sadistic bitch of a…
Steady, ol’ son, the past is dead and buried, yeah.
Breathingin Mama’s scent grounded him. Mama knew his demons and the effort it took to rein them in. He leaned down and placed a kiss on the crown of her head.
“I know you’re anxious to be away,” she said, patting his forearm. “Just do a feeble old woman this one favor before you go.”
He snorted. At fifty-eight, Mama’s unlined face, radiant brown skin, and agile body made her look only a handful of years older than his thirty-six. Yeah, she was feeble as a velociraptor.
“All I need is a level mind to accompany Zeus and Cizan.”
Cizan groaned, none too happy about being included in this excursion that was no doubt their punishment for being a part of Zeus’s lesson. But Mama was right; if there was even a small possibility of a threat, they had to root it out. “Just make sure that if there’s a person down there, those two don’t kill him before we learn what his business here is,” Mama whispered once they’d reached the parking lot. Mama slid her arm free of his and headed back into the bar, retrieving both Cizan and Zeus and leaving them on the gravel lot right beside him.
“Now you boys have fun,” she called out, joining Sabrina at the front door, waving them off before slamming it shut.
