Page 22 of Small Town Beast

“My nephew Kyle manages the Appletree,” said Laura Jane. “What happened to your ear?”

“Know anything else?”

“What is this girl to you, exactly? I don’t see you in over a year and the first thing you come knocking down my door about is some woman!”

“She’s a person of interest.”

Laura Jane sniffed. “I say you’re better off sticking with your own kind.”

He folded the drawing. “Some say that little section of Florin is pretty much an untapped spring.”

“Don’t be crude, Saverin. There’s a reason we stay separate from the Blacks.”

For whatever reason the way she said that word annoyed him.Blacks.

“Thanks for your help, Laura Jane.”

“Where did you meet this girl?” His cousin pressed, passing him a hot biscuit on a blue china plate. “Church?”

“I met her at the Turnkey.”

Laura nearly dropped a spoon of gravy in his lap. “That whorehouse?” She shrieked.

“She wasn’t a whore.”

“You’re sure about that?”

Frowning, Saverin tried to put his mind back to the previous night. Getting notched by a stray bullet had fucked with his memory.Go deeper…He thought back to the girl’s soft touch and her pretty eyes, her fierceness.

Her taste.

It doesn’t count if it was her first time.

But she was working for the Snatch Hills, wasn’t she? It was all a lie.

“What else do you know about her?” Laura Jane was now on a mission for information.

“She’s got a son named Amari,” said Saverin remembering the tattoo on her breast.

His cousin looked ready to brain him with the jug of sweet tea. “Your son?”

He gave her a sardonic look. Laura Jane flushed. “Don’t bring that business to my door. If she does work for me, she won’t be for much longer, you can be sure ofthat!”

“Now hold on a minute,” Saverin protested, moved for some insane reason to defend the girl that had nearly got him killed.

Maybe she had worked with Hiram to set him up…But he wasn’t so sure. Thinking back, it didn’t make sense that Eugenewould have harassed her on the way out the door for money if Hiram was really her pimp.

What if Eugene didn’t know? It still doesn’t prove she was innocent.

Saverin had been the one to request her services…She hadn’t lured him further than the bar. He’d been the one in control, and she’d gone along with his every suggestion. Did he see her reach for her phone? Give a signal? No, nothing like that.

It had been his idea to go upstairs, then his idea again that they ditch that room to fuck in the parking lot. His fault too for leaving behind his gun– which in all truth shocked him more than anything else that had happened that night.

He’d blamed the girl for Hiram’s setup, but he’d been the one announcing to all and sundry that he was hunting for Snatch Hills. The memory of the girl’s face as he roughed her up came unbidden. She’d been scared, not guilty. Her expression when she realized the condom broke…

She couldn’t be working for Hiram. It made no sense.

I wronged her.

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