Page 26 of Texas Hold Em'
Carrie sat bolt upright in bed beside me. “What’s happening?”
I groaned and rubbed at my eyes. Sunlight streamed in through the warehouse windows over our heads and cast patches of amber light on the cinderblock walls. “Fuck me.”
“Is that Jackson?” she asked, pulling the blankets up over her breasts like Jackson was there in the room seeing her naked body.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “Sounds like it.”
Jackson continued pounding on my front door.
“My neighbors are going to love this,” I grumbled.
“Should I stay here?”
I paused in the doorway of the bedroom, wearing nothing but my boxers, and turned back to Carrie, whose blonde hair was a mess falling about her shoulders. Her nose was pink, her eyes heavy with fatigue, and she clung to the blankets like she wanted to disappear inside them.
“Up to you,” I said.
She grimaced, and I made for the front door.
Jackson was still pounding on it when I unlocked it and swung itopen. The President stood on the other side, out of breath, glaring at me while Mason, standing just behind him, looked pleased to see me.
“Tex,” Mason said. “Glad to see you’re alive.”
“Of course I’m alive,” I said.
Jackson brushed past me with a grumpy grunt, and Mason followed with an apologetic nod. I closed and locked the front door behind them.
Jackson stopped and looked around at the bloody gauze on my coffee table. “What the fuck happened?”
I folded my arms over my chest. “I cut myself shaving.”
“Stop fucking around,” Jackson said.
I sighed. “We had a bit of a run in with some of Bates’s boys on our ride home from your place last night.”
“Where’s Carrie?” Mason asked.
“Here.” Carrie stood in the doorway to the bedroom. She’d put on one of my shirts, and I desperately wished Mason and Jackson weren’t there. She looked hotter than sin in the T-shirt that reached to the middle of her thighs. The sleeves nearly reached her elbows. “We took care of it.”
“Took care of it?” Jackson hissed. “We’re supposed to be avoiding heat from the cops, and now we have three more bodies on our heads. Are you fucking kidding me, Tex? What were you thinking?”
I opened my mouth to respond, but Carrie beat me to the punch.
“It wasn’t his fault. I shot them.”
Jackson looked incredulously from me to her and back to me. “Oh, great. That’s fucking great. Consider me relieved. The hero cop saved our asses by killingmorebastards. Thank you, Carrie.” He bowed dramatically. “What would we do without you?”
“Without her, I’d be dead, asshole.” I moved to the door off my kitchen, shoved it open with one shoulder, and stood in the fresh air while I lit a smoke. “We didn’t have any other choice. Those guys were on us and they weren’t fucking around. If we didn’t put them down, it would have been our blood on the pavement. Carrie only did what she had to.”
Carrie nodded at me. “Thank you.”
“You,” Jackson hissed, pointing a finger at her. “No more talking.”
Mason sighed. “Jackson, give it a rest.”
But Jackson wasn’t listening. “Give it a rest? Give it a fucking rest? Listen, you can think I’m overreacting all you want, but we busted our asses to get the cops off our tail. Hell, Mason, you almost died two weeks ago! And now we have three more bodies. Do you think Bates won’t know who did it? If he sent out a hit on one of us, which I assume was exactly what happened last night, then he’s going to know it was a Devil who killed his men.”
“Only it wasn’t a Devil,” Carrie muttered under her breath.
