Page 31 of Shaman

Ian complied, amused, taking his coffee with him. “I appreciate it, ma’am, but it’s hardly necessary.”

“Oh, hush.” There was the squelch of cream coming out of the bottle, and then her hands were in his hair, smoothing the product through it, efficient, but gentle.

Ian froze.

Alec made a face at him that devolved into a smile.

“I miss this,” Maggie said as she ran the comb through his locks. “Ava doesn’t need me to play with her hair anymore.” She sighed dreamily. “And yours is beautiful.”

“Um…thank you?”

She chuckled.

Slowly, he relaxed into her ministrations. She was careful, slow, but clearly knew what she was doing, his hair pulling just the right amount of tight.

By the time Ghost came into the room, glaring and foul-tempered from lack of sleep, Ian had two tidy French braids holding his hair back.

The MC president came to a halt, squinting between his wife and Ian. “What?”

“Don’t worry about it, baby,” Maggie said, patting him on the shoulder. “Y’all are all ready to go. Coffee?”

“Yeah.”

~*~

The silence of this plane ride was the quiet of anticipation, punctuated by the warm looks Ian traded with Alec, and Ghost’s quiet snores, where he slept with a section of newspaper tented over his face.

Just before they landed, Alec reached across the space between them, and Ian met him there, took his hand into his own. Laced their fingers and held tight as the plane made its descent.

When they walked down the stairs a few minutes later – Ghost shading his eyes with his hand and cursing the New York cold – they found a car waiting for them. A black Suburban with tinted windows. Its driver, dressed in jeans and a hoodie, stood leaning against the driver door. He had aviator shades. Wasn’t very tall.

Charlie Fox.

He pushed his shades up into his tousled dark hair as they approached. “Let’s go deck the halls, shall we,” he said with a straight face.

Ian sighed.

Ghost said, “Hey. He’s the best. Just…try not to punch him in the face. No matter how tempting it is.”

~*~

“Alright.”

They were at the Ritz again, the park stretching beyond the window, dusted with snow, a gorgeous view ignored by the inhabitants of the suite.

Fox paced back and forth in front of the laptop he’d set up beneath the flat-screen TV. A news story was playing on the screen…an interesting one.

Daniel and Rebecca Breckinridge were on every local channel, their pictures paired up with headlines that called them “predators,” “monsters,” and “crooks.” The videos were too graphic to show, according to the pressed and glossed anchors, but the gist was that the couple had molested and coerced their models, both male and female, into sexual relations, and the models had caught them on video. All they’d needed was a means to share the videos.

“I trust you made that happen?” Ian asked, brows lifted, as Fox came to a halt and faced them.

“I have resources,” he said with an evasive shrug. “Yeah. I did. The models were very interested in exposing them, especially if I could guarantee they’d be blameless.”

“How could you guarantee that?” Ghost asked.

The English biker smiled, then. “My sister might know someone interested in buying out an American modeling agency.”

Ghost whistled.

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