I giggled. “You mean, you want me to tell them that the very first thing on my mind this morning when I woke up was the fact that you burped in my ear?”
His face immediately fell. “I fucking did not.”
I tossed him a playful wink, though. “It’ll be our little secret, no worries.”
“I didn’t fucking do that, Brielle.”
The room came to life with cackles and hands clapping, which only made Axe stare at me harder. I swear, he was the cutest human being with his nose wrinkled up the way it did when he got annoyed.
“You got any other stories to tell us?” Wolf asked with a smirk.
“Quit giving me shit about your phone,” I said as I tossed him a playful wink, “and I’ll tell you about the time Dante decided—”
“Enough,” Mav said, lobbing his gaze in my general direction. “Get on with it, beautiful.”
Wolf pointed at me. “You owe me that story later.”
“She owes us a fuckton for even being entertained during this meeting,” someone grumbled.
“Anyone else would’ve been killed for barging through those doors,” someone else spat.
I knew I was on thin ice standing in front of all of them, and I wanted to make sure I did right by them. But, if embarrassing stories of the guys got them in my good graces, they’d all just have to take one for the team.
Some other time, though.
“Anyway, my point is,” I said, pulling up the definition of the condition my sister had been born with on Wolf’s cell, “I know why she’s doing all of this.”
“We’re on the edges of our seats,” a buff man with a fully-grown beard said.
“And you are?” I asked.
He sat up straight and cracked his back. “Rocker.”
I nodded. “Noted. But don’t fall off the edge of that seat just yet. It gets a bit convoluted. You can catch up by passing around Wolf’s phone and reading those definitions to yourself. That’ll make it easier to listen to what I have to say.”
A man sitting beside Rocker scoffed. “Really, Axe?”
I peered over my shoulder. “What?”
Dante crossed his arms over his chest and the guys just stared at the phone as if it were a grenade I had pulled the pin on. “Why don’t you just give us the bullet points?”
“Or, they could read,” I said, fluttering my eyelashes playfully at him.
A man who hadn’t yet introduced himself scoffed. “You come into our territory, fuck up our turf, get yourself caught at an undercover sting not all of us were on board for in the first place, and now you expect us to listen to your every whim just because you flounce your tits around and smile pretty?”
“Watch it,” Axe growled.
“No,” the man said as he stood. “No. We’ve been through enough. This crew has lost enough. We’ve rebuilt stronger than ever after Luca’s death. And now, we’re casting off all bounties heading our way because we want to chase this very specific bitch down.”
“Got a problem with that?” Dante asked.
The man held his head high with pride. “Yeah, I do. We’re watching some woman we don’t know after only a few days with us touting shit around and bossing us around like she owns the damn place.”
Murmurs of approval filtered through the crowd as I took a small step away from my position.
“Not to mention,” Wolf said and stood, “these plans. Not all of us have been on board from the beginning. You guys know that. But we trusted you enough to follow.”
“Our trust is about to wear thin,” Rocker said, standing.
