Page 188 of Duty and Desire
“Look at me, sweetheart,” he urged gently.
“I am,” I choked out nervously.
“Okay,focuson me,” he amended.
I tried to do that.
When I somewhat succeeded, I felt the boys had surrounded me.
“It’s gonna be fine,” Mo declared.
“What if they don’t like me?” I asked. “I can’t have them not liking me, Mo. They’re part of you. They’re blood. They’resisters. I have a sister!” My voice was rising with the increased beating of my heart which was keeping pace with the increased level of my panic. “I know how important sisters are! If they don’t like me, I’m gone. I can’t have that. Ohmigod!” That last was nearly yelled. “You beat up your dad for one of them. If they don’t like me, I’m not even a memory.”
I lost his attention as his eyes slid up and did a half circle and his lips growled, “Yup. Gonna kill every motherfucking one of you.”
“Babe,” I heard Boone call.
I pulled my chin from Mo’s hold only to have my body tucked into Mo’s hold a different way (this being with his arm) as I turned my head to look up at Boone.
“You may or may not believe this. Regardless, it’s true,” Boone started. “To get Mo, the tougher wall you had to climb was us.”
He jerked his chin to the others and I shifted in Mo’s clinch so I had my back to his front and I could take them all in.
“You might not have noticed, you bein’ you, together like you are, sure of yourself, but I threw down with you practically the minute I laid eyes on you,” Mag reminded me.
He did that. It was semi-subtle, in the sense it was not like getting hit by a freight train, more like getting hit by a bus.
But he did it.
“I know,” I told him.
“You won me over in about a minute,” Mag told me something I knew at the time, and was happy about at the time, but being reminded of it inthistime made me feel a whole lot better.
He wasn’t done.
“It was you bein’ pissed Mo’s dad is a dick. It was hearing about you takin’ on Tammy. It was you bein’ hilarious. It was knowin’ we were gonna have a beautiful woman among us who was also one of the guys. But most of all, it was the way you were with Mo. First time at our place, it was like you’d been there a hundred times before and you two were just chill.” Mag shot me a grin. “Outside you shoutin’ about his dad. Mo was goin’ through his mail and you were shoutin’ about his dad and you were all about him. I had to push it, ’cause he’s my boy. But I didn’t have to push hard.”
“For me,” Axl put in, “it was the fact I was worried I wouldn’t get out of your house before you jumped on his dick.”
I couldn’t help but smile at him.
“I wasn’t even there for you,” Axl went on quietly. “He walked in, and suddenly, everything was gone, including me. You were all about him.”
“Axl told us that,” Auggie added. “Before Mag even met you.”
All the rest I knew.
But that last was news.
“We don’t trust people easy, Lottie,” Mag said. “But the people who might become a part of the lives of one of our own, that’s worse.”
“I’m sure sisters can be tough to crack,” Boone shared. “They might not show it, but brothers…”
Boone let that hang but I understood him.
They weren’t brothers of the blood, and blood was thicker than water, but doing what they did for a living, all having served before, the trust that had to build, the men those experiences had made them, what they had was stronger than steel.
“We’re here right now, for you, and we’ve known you two weeks,” Auggie reminded me. “The Morrison women are gonna love you, Lots. You got nothing to worry about.”
