Page 78 of Lawless in Leather

“You all set?” Raina asked. Across the room, Chen lifted an eyebrow, as though asking if everything was okay. Raina gave a tiny shrug then focused back on Marly. “Marly?”

The blonde nodded but stayed where she was.

“Everything okay?” Raina persisted.

Marly smiled. To Raina’s eye, it looked a little stagy.

“I’m fine,” Marly said.

“Are you sure about that? If anything’s happening, you need to let me know. You heard Mal earlier in the week, any weird messages or anything, you have to tell us. They have a couple of pictures of the guy going into the storeroom but nothing with his whole face. So any info to help out is good.

“I know,” Marly said. She shrugged. “There’s this one thing I got on Instagram about two hours ago. I mean, I get plenty of shitty sexist drivel and come-ons every day but this one. Something about it bothered me more than usual. And it’s no worse than the others, so I’m not sure why.”

“Show me,” Raina said firmly.

Marly found her phone and brought up the offending message. She passed the phone to Raina. “This. I took a screen cap of the message and then the guy’s profile, like Mal said. Then I blocked him of course. That’s the message.”

Raina looked down at the screen. “Angel Slut. For fuck’s sake, what is wrong with people?”

She’d hardly finished the sentence when Chen was by her side, looking ominous.

“What’s the problem?” he asked.

Raina handed him the phone and watched his expression go even stonier as he read the tweet. He looked at Marly, anger flaring in his eyes.

He handed her back the phone. “Is that the first message from this guy?”

Marly nodded. “Yes. But it’s not the message, I mean, yes, it’s pathetic and disgusting, but it’s not the first time someone’s used that word to me. But have a look at the next one. His profile page.”

A flick of her finger brought up the next picture and she tilted the phone so Raina and Chen could both see it. The profile name was TomSmith. Hello, fake name. There was no profile picture to go with the name, just a generic icon. But the header picture was of a long white feather.

“Is that one of our feathers?” Raina asked.

“I don’t know. It could just be a feather. But it’s…”

“Creepy,” Raina supplied. “And definitely the sort of thing Mal needs to know about.”

“Agreed,” Chen said. He held out his hand for the phone. “I’ll mail the pics to him.”

“And I’ll go talk to him,” Raina said.

Chen looked like he wanted to argue.

“You have to stay with the squad. You’re the muscle.” She flashed Chen a smile. “More useful than me if anything happens.”

“Yes, stay, please,” Marly said to him and Raina thought she saw him redden faintly. Interesting. But she had no time to figure out if Chen was just maybe, crushing on one of her squad. She needed to talk to Mal.

Chapter Eighteen

Two weeks later, Raina found herself the host of an impromptu late-Sunday-night pizza-and-party-planning dinner with Maggie and Sara. They’d shown up at Madame R again for the second half of the show and then, claiming boredom with the guys away, had somehow strong-armed her into inviting them back to Mal’s place as it was “the closest.”

She had a hunch it was something more like curiosity because both of them claimed they’d never been to Mal’s before, and who was she to argue? With Mal gone, the huge apartment made her feel like a very small fish swimming endlessly round and round in a blue-whale-sized aquarium. Even Wash’s big paws couldn’t fill the space.

Which was why the three of them were currently sitting along the stainless-steel counter in Mal’s kitchen and eating far too many calories while Wash wound his way around their legs, begging for pepperoni.

“He’s worse than Dougal,” Sara said. “Maybe he’s part Labrador and that’s why he’s so big?”

Raina grinned. “Maybe. But he doesn’t need more pizza. He always gets cheese in his fur and then that’s a whole other problem. So ignore him.”

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