After placing the kiss of a lifetime on those upturned lips, I said, “Take care of yourself, Mable Louise.”
She scoffed. “I always do.”
Twenty-Three
Look, man or woman. I’ll punch whoever needs it. These hands are rated E for everybody.
—Odin to Romeo
Romeo
Everyone was there when I arrived.
“You would fuck this up for us,” Odin grumbled.
I narrowed my eyes. “I was the only fuckin’ reason that you had this opportunity in the first place, cocksucker.”
“Uh-huh.” Weaver rolled his eyes.
King, Gentry, Courtland, Creed, and Odin didn’t add much.
Not like there was anything to add.
“What are we going to do?” Weaver asked.
Just as he asked that, our phones rang.
Before anyone could answer, Apollo’s face popped up on the screen in the conference room we’d commandeered.
“I couldn’t leave,” he said as he focused on each of us individually. “She has a tap on my location, and I don’t want her to think that I’m running there to fix anything. I need to appear like y’all mean nothing to me.”
I gritted my teeth.
“She’s set up some fail-safes,” Apollo said. “Until I can disentangle those”—he looked at me then—“I think it’s time to disappear for a bit.”
Fuck.
Even though I knew he was going to say it, it still felt like a blow directly to my chest.
My heart skipped a beat, and it took everything I had to keep breathing.
“Good,” Odin said. “I like it here. I don’t want to have to leave unless I have to.”
I gritted my teeth.
“No one could’ve seen this coming.” King rolled his eyes at Odin. “What are the odds that he hooks up with the one fuckin’ woman in this town that has a psycho mother that is good with computers?”
He had a point, but still.
“Just a week or so until I can get everything figured out,” Apollo said. “I’m sending some people to board the horses for now, and clean out your place. This goes sideways, I want it to appear like she’s losing her mind, okay?”
“Okay.” I gritted my teeth.
“The woman’s not going to forget about him,” Weaver pointed out the obvious.
“No,” Apollo agreed. “But I think that if she knows that he’s in danger from her stepmother, she’ll fall in line.”
“Without telling her why she’s in danger from the psycho bitch, she might not fall in line like you think she will,” Weaver pointed out.
