Page 16 of Rock Chick Bonus Tracks

“She’ll take him back.”

Now she’d lost him.

“What?”

“Lavonne. She’ll take Bear back. She always does.”

“Not my problem, not yours. Unless you’re in the line of fire when she’s waving around a revolver.”

“There’s nothing fun about watching people fight, but I’ll admit, that made it a whole lot less fun.”

Considering Jet had been in that room, and it had concerned her enough to call him, Eddie started to get pissed.

Jet covered his hand at her neck and said gently, “It’s over.”

His voice was inflexible when he said, “That was far from cool.”

“Agreed, but I noticed you didn’t give it back to her when we left, so it won’t happen again.”

No, he didn’t. And he wouldn’t. You didn’t use a firearm to put strength behind a threat when you were bickering with your spouse. You used it for protection. The end.

But he wasn’t going to discuss that with Jet.

“It was sweet, when Tex saw Mom was over it and he waded in.”

“You need to prepare,mi amor, he’s in deep for her.”

He said it even knowing he didn’t have to. Jet adored Tex. In the short time the man had been in her life, he’d been a better father to her, and a better partner to Nancy, than Ray had in her twenty-eight years.

But the stillness he felt in her was not about what he said.

It was about what he hadn’t yet said.

She loved him, he knew it, she showed it with peanut butter and chocolate sauce sundaes, and a fuckuva lot more.

She’d also told him.

He hadn’t told her.

He felt the same. It was there. He knew it when he saw the empty space where her bag used to be when she tried to break up with him after her ordeal.

But before he gave it to her, he needed them to have more than a couple of weeks under their belts.

They had that now.

She had to know.

He had a purple bathroom, and he didn’t throw a shit fit.

He came home from work only to have to haul his ass to Lakewood to extricate her from a situation that involved a .44.

But he wasn’t going to tell her. Not now.

She wouldn’t believe him.

Ray seemed to be turning his life around, but he’d been a shit dad and a shit husband who’d left his woman and daughters with serious baggage.

Eddie had more work to do to show her, and he was down to put in that work, as long as it took.

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