Page 80 of Single Mom's Bodyguards
“I don’t know if we need a whole team of soldiers out there,” Bailey says, her teeth on edge.
“Why wouldn’t we?” Huck asks over the breakfast table.
She’s tense again. It’s been a few days since the four of us hooked up again, and our girl needs that, but she hasn’t sought us out, and we don’t push. She’s on the edge—pushing might break her. No matter how much the four of us need it.
She pins a loose strand behind her ear. “The kids—if they see them, I’m worried it’ll upset them.”
“Then let me do my job,” Huck quietly begs.
Her eyes narrow. “You’re not killing David, Huck.”
He merely sighs and sips his coffee. An attack dog, leashed.
“Besides, he didn’t have anything to do with the explosives guy.”
My head whips around before I can stop myself. “You’re still defending him?”
“David’s psycho, but he’s notexplosivespsycho?—”
“Who then?” Wesley asks. “Who has the money to hire someone like the guy who fended off Huck, who was setting bombs around your place? Who else would bother to hire a professional to kill you, aside from the man who, let me check my notes here…has threatened to kill you?”
She huffs under her breath. “It wasn’t him.”
“How do you know that?” I ask.
“I just do.”
“Then who?”
She glances away. “I don’t know. But actresses get stalkers all the time?—”
Wesley laughs derisively. “Bailey, I adore you, so please understand I am not trying to upset you when I say this. You give him too much credit, and you are smarter than this.”
She scoots back in her chair and stands. “I’m not having this conversation again.”
“We haven’t had it in the first place! You keep taking off!”
She glares at me. “Can you talk to him?”
“I could.” I shrug. “You won’t like what I have to say.”
She grunts in frustration and stomps away. It’s been like this all week. If we’re not fucking, we’re fighting. None of us like it. None of us know how to stop.
The house settles around noon the way a body settles after a hit—quiet on the surface, everything underneath braced and tender. Wesley rigs a new alert pattern on the monitors so anything that moves in a way we don’t expect pings our phones, not just the room speakers. Huck grunts approval and sips coffee he doesn’t need, right hand steady on the mug, left arm flexing under the fresh wrap every time the pain tries to climb.
Bailey tries to feed us. That’s what she does when she can’t make anything else better. She stands at the island and stares down a cutting board like it insulted her. When I tell her to sit, she ignores me. When Wesley tells her, she glares and keeps chopping.
Huck solves it by leaning his hip against the counter until she has to sidestep him, and while she’s cursing him for taking up the entire kitchen, I slide the knife out of her hand and put a glass of water in it instead. She drinks because I ask her to, not because she wants to. She doesn’t notice her hand is shaking until I steady it with mine. She nods like we made a contract and then pretends not to remember it ten minutes later when the tremor starts up again.
We re-sweep the house. We reset the trip wires we set last night because repetition is a sedative. Windows. Latches. Hinges. Alarm magnets lined up clean. All of it invisible and impossible to trigger accidentally for the kids’ sake.
Outside, the sky starts to go the color it goes before it decides to be dark. My men count themselves off. The gate camera picks up a jogger who has a dog that hates our hedges. Diaz radios that hecan smell smoke from someone’s grill two properties over. Chief walks the south line and pauses long enough in the camera’s slice of view for me to see the set of her shoulders. I know that posture. It’s not boredom. It’s calculation—how many angles, how many steps, how many beats between now and the moment the problem surfaces.
Huck appears in the doorway with a fresh bandage he put on himself. “Don’t start,” he says before I open my mouth. He holds up a hand. “It’s clean. I’m clean. I’m fine.”
“You’re vertical,” I say. “That’s not the same thing.”
He grins, a slash of teeth. “She likes when I’m horizontal more.”
