“What time is it?”
“Ten.”
“At night?”
“Yep.”
“Shit,” I said, starting to push up, only to have something sail across the room and smack me in the head—a pair of sleep pants.
Slash turned, and I pulled on my pants.
“Alright. Decent.”
“Get the impression that you’ve been keeping shit from me.”
“Yep,” I agreed.
“Alright. I’m all ears.”
“This isn’t my story, mostly. And the person is sensitive about it. So this can’t go beyond this clubhouse.”
“Pretty good at discretion over here.”
“I took Lula with me on the trip to Florida.” His brows lifted at that but he didn’t say anything. “She recently got herself conned out of a shit ton of money by a guy who she’d tracked to Miami.”
“And you were just being a good guy who had no ulterior motives at all.”
“I had many reasons, yeah. But when we got to Florida, we were staying at Teddy’s house.”
“The rich guy?”
“Yeah. I got a call from Arty, so I left Lula there sleeping. York was in the other room. But someone came in and attackedLula, tried to kill her. York… handled it. The club handled the body—”
“I’m jealous of the crocodiles sometimes,” Slash mumbled to himself. “Is Lula okay?”
“Yeah, she got lucky.”
“I’m assuming it was the guy who conned her.”
“Yeah. He hired someone to do the dirty work, though. While Lula was healing, Arty gave us an idea for how he could raid this guy’s digital wallet and get her money back so she didn’t need to have any sort of confrontation with the guy. That’s what we agreed to.”
“And?”
“And that was it. I put Lula on a plane back here. I started my drive back here, stocking up as I came. I got the text this morning that Arty got the money.”
“That why the guys say you looked like shit when you showed up here? You drove through to try to, what? Get back here to tell Lula?”
“I did drive through, but no, Arty would have texted her too. I just wanted to be home.”
“I get the feeling that I’m gonna need to plan to start demanding some of the other guys start doing this trip more. You’re burning out.”
“Sometimes, it’s great.”
“By sometimes, do you mean when you have the woman you’ve had a thing for for years sitting in the passenger seat?” he asked, shooting me a knowing smile. “There’s leftover pizza on the counter and the guys just headed down to The Bog. That’s some information I get the feeling you’d be grateful to hear.”
With that, he headed out.
I should have anticipated he would be so chill about it. Technically, what I got myself involved in didn’t involve the club. I’d kept the danger away from us and Lula away from thebusiness. A white lie wasn’t really something someone like Slash was going to get pissed about.
