Page 50 of Lone Star

His gaze locked with Fox’s, then, and he realized he’d been standing just inside his own front door, staring like an idiot.

He walked forward, and Fox pushed off the bar to come meet him, hand already stuck out for a shake, smirk twisting his lips. “There’s–” he started to say.

Candy caught his hand in a tight grip and tugged him into a hug. He heard the splash of beer hitting the floor as it overran the glass in Fox’s other hand, and heard Fox’s muttered, “Christ, you monster.”

Candy laughed. It sounded a little high and crazy to his own ears, but it eased a bit of the tightness in his chest. “Foxy!” he exclaimed, pushing him back at arm’s length. “Damn, I’m glad to see you! Did you just get in? What are you doing? Thought you were officially patched into Tennessee now.”

Fox did a little twirl, showing off the back of his cut, and the bottom rocker that read TENNESSEE in proud caps. When he turned back around, he was making a stupid, coquettish face that left Candy laughing again. “Why, you thought right, dahling,” he drawled in an overdone Old South accent.

“Easy, Miss Scarlett. You just patched. Why are you here?” A thought struck. “Did Ghost send you? Not that I’m not glad of the help, but he does tend to underestimate everyone who isn’t him.”

Fox dropped the act, expression closing off with a neat, vaguely terrifying efficiency. The way he flipped the switches on personas could make anyone’s head spin, even if you’d known him for years.

“Well,” he said, gaze fixed on Candy. Too fixed. “No. Not Ghost.”

“I called him,” Michelle said, stepping up next to her uncle. She held TJ with both arms – arms that were shaking – and the look on her face sent a pulse of disquiet through Candy. She didn’t have Fox’s knack for hiding what she was feeling – no one did – and she looked at him now with thinly veiled challenge. Jaw set, eyes hard, lips pressed together until they’d gone colorless. Not one of the soft looks she sent him when she thought he was being cute, or dumb; not one of the rare looks she gave him when she let her fear and doubt bleed through.

I called him,she’d said, with the air of someone throwing down a gauntlet. Daring him to reprimand her for it.

Like he was the sort of asshole husband who reprimanded in the first place.

In the last few days, he’d been worried, pissed-off, confused, and terrified where his family was concerned. But this was a new feeling hitting him now: like he’d been getting things badly wrong for a while and hadn’t even noticed.

“She didn’t have to try hard to convince me,” Fox said, putting an arm across Michelle’s shoulders.

Candy didn’t miss the slight shift of her weight as she leaned into him.

She said, “We need his help.”

Candy felt vaguely dizzy. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess we do.”

~*~

Michelle had expected Fox, but she hadn’t expected his retinue.

She hadn’t expected Albie, for starters. The last Fox had told her, he was looking for a place to set up a furniture shop stateside. His face sparkled with flecks of grit from the road, and he smelled like he’d been on the back of a bike for hours when he hugged her, but he looked almost excited, she thought. Maybe that had something to do with the blonde he kept shooting glances toward, checking on.

Her name was Axelle, she said, and even if she looked a little wild-eyed, she shook Michelle’s hand firmly and kept her chin up.

Eden she remembered, though it had been a while. Still as beautiful and put-together as ever, gorgeous enough to model clothes with Raven, too no-nonsense to ever put up with that kind of life. She’d softened a fraction, though; the set of her mouth wasn’t as harsh, and Michelle was surprised to get a hug from her.

But then there were the boys Fox had motioned toward offhand and called, “My students.”

“Um,” Michelle said, leaning into Albie’s shoulder, nodding across the room toward the two of them.

In a way, they couldn’t have looked more different. Different hair colors, and different clothes. Where Tenny was nearly posh, in designer jeans, and a new, still-shiny leather jacket, the scruff on his face groomed and stylish, Reese wore a patched and baggy old army coat under his cut, his jeans stained and ripped at the knees. His hair – pale blond – hung in untidy clumps to his shoulders, sliding out from behind his ears even after he’d tucked it back. He scanned the room with an inhuman watchfulness; she had the sense he had already pegged every exit, every weak point, and was cataloguing ways to disarm all of them. Tenny, by contrast, had perfected an aloof slouch, boots kicked up on the coffee table, hands behind his head.

But she’d grown up around her uncles. She could see the same thread pulled taut in both of them: that thick knitted line of training and performance. Both moved with deadly grace: Reese’s practical, Tenny’s practiced.

Tenny had been taught to walk and talk and sit and glance around a room like a real boy. While Reese had only ever been taught how to kill.

Both of them unnerved her.

Tenny most of all, because he was her uncle.

“Oh,” Albie said, catching on. Then he said, “Here,” and deftly plucked TJ out of her arms and into his own. Her back spasmed, and she stretched it out gratefully.

He arranged TJ on his hip and kept his voice low. “Fox told them this would be good training for them, but really, I think he just didn’t want to leave them in Knoxville unsupervised.”

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