Emily lifts her chin, but her voice is quiet. “I came to talk to Queenie about a job.”
I’m so shocked by her response that it takes me a minute to gather my thoughts. “I offered to be your protector, and you turned me down. Then you stopped answering my calls. What did I do?”
She just stares at me.
“Why did you shut me out?” I ask. The question is blunt, but I’m done pretending I’m not frustrated. “After everything that happened, you just ghosted me.”
She looks down at her hands. “I didn’t want to keep dragging you into my problems. You nearly killed Brennan. I don’t want you going to jail because of me.”
“Bullshit!” I spit out. Though she’s not wrong. If Mica hadn’t dragged me off him, he’d be in the ground right now.
“I was scared. I thought I could deal with it alone, but I can’t,” she adds in a quieter voice.
“You could have come to the club. My ma would have taken you in,” I say. I want to kick myself. There was me thinking she was doing fine. When she’d been living in fear for the past two weeks. Why the fuck hadn’t I gone to see her?
“I didn’t want to bother you. You do so much for me, I don’t want to be a burden.”
“You’d never be a burden,” I say.
She shakes her head. “Anyway, it didn’t cross my mind until Queenie called me the other day saying she had a job offer.”
“What kind of job?” I ask, not sure I really want to hear the answer. I remember how my mom’s been shady as fuck for the past few days. When Queenie gets something into her head then there’s no stopping her.
Emily clears her throat and says, “Queenie’s hired me,” clutching a file to her chest, similar to the ones my ma took with her when she walked away. “She says the club has decades of important documents and history taking up space in a room that could be used for storage or something. She wants everything archived properly, and put on microfiche using digital scans, and an indexed system created to make finding everything easy. She wants the club to have a real record of where it came from.”
What the fuck? That’s something that Striker could probably get his IT geeks to do over a weekend. Then I have another thought. My ma is sneaky. Maybe this is her way of making sure Emily’s safe but doing it in a way that Emily would accept, seeing as she refused my help.
I look at the folder in her arms. There’s easily thirty years’ worth of information, hundreds of files with thousands of pages. Maybe more. “That’s not a small project.”
“I know,” she says. “But it’s important to her and that means it’s important to me. She wants to create a legacy file for the club. Something her kids and grandkids and the allied clubs can reference. Something better than a bunch of boxes in a storage room.”
I nod slowly.
She takes a deep breath before continuing. “And to be honest, I need the work. My last contract ended, and I haven’t lined anything else up yet.” She gives a small, uncertain shrug. “This kind of project fits my skill set. And Queenie told me I can stay here. The clubhouse has people around,” she says, quietly. “There are cameras, locks, walls, security alarms and most importantly men guarding it.”
“Emily,” I say, voice low, “I wish you’d told me how scared you were. I’d have been at the cabin in a flash.”
“I know,” she says. “But I didn’t want you to think of me as some pathetic damsel in distress. You’ve always looked out for me. And I wanted to show you I can handle it alone. But I can’t.”
I sit there absorbing her words. I feel like she’s finally being honest with me. And the fact that she chose the clubhouse because she believes she’ll be safer under the same roof as me and my family hits me right in the feels.
Something shifts inside me again, deeper than before and it feels dangerously close to desire.
Before I can respond, she lifts her eyes. And the storm in her expression is how I know this conversation is about to change everything. “I also didn’t want you to get hurt. I didn’t want you to do something reckless for my sake.”
“Em,” I say, leaning forward slightly, elbows on the table, “you don’t get to decide what I’m willing to risk. You don’t get to decide what I do or don’t take on. Not even when it involves you.”
She flinches a little. And her fingers tighten on the folder she’s holding.
“I know,” she whispers. “I just… I couldn’t handle the idea of you ending up in prison because of something tied to me. I couldn’t handle thinking I’d ruin your life.”
Her words coupled with her quivering tone stop me in my tracks. The thought that she’s been carrying guilt about that blows my mind.
“Is that really what you thought?” I ask.
She nods, eyes dropping. “I saw what you did to him. And I know you would have gone further if Mica hadn’t stepped in. I didn’t want to be the reason you crossed a line you couldn’t step back from.”
I stare at her for a moment, turning her words over in my mind. The memory of that day rises in my mind. The only thing I regret is not getting there sooner.
