Page 74 of Sweet Rule
“Of course, ma’am. Thanks for the coffee. I hope to see you up and running soon.”
“Thank you, first cup’s on me, okay?” She grins at me and links her arm through mine. “Say goodbye to Officer Lewis, Law.”
I don’t like cops. I never have, but I do what she wants with a tip of my head. “Thank you for seeing to my wife.”
From the look Officer Lewis gives me I know he knows all about me and what I used to do. Good. He doesn’t seem inclined to visit with me like he did Honey, which suits me fine.
“No trouble at all. You two have yourselves a nice evening. Good-bye now.”
He leaves and a second later we’re alone. I wrap my arms around Honey and hold her tight.
“What the fuck happened?”
I had gotten a message from Taylor when I was leaving a meeting that he was en-route and Honey had been attacked. That’s all it said. I’ve never run faster than I did then. Not knowing if she was all right until a message from Marco confirmed she was safe and sound at home with the suspect in cuffs.
When I got to our building there was no one there. Not anymore. I know it was her mother that did it. Apparently, the bitch was still skulking around the city. Marco let me know she’d hidden herself beneath a car. They checked the surveillance footage and she’d crawled beneath the car after Honey had left that morning and waited. Marco was just a second behind her but that was almost too late.
I hold her tighter to me. “What happened?” I ask again.
“She wanted to kill me,” Honey says simply, as if that explains it all. Given her mother, I guess it does. “She’s hated me before and hit me but it wasn’t like this. This time it was for real. She really wanted to kill me.”
“What did you do?” I lead her over to the couch and sit her down when I feel her shake in my arms. She’s probably been riding an adrenaline high and is crashing now in the aftermath of what happened. I lead her down onto the couch and grab one of the fluffy blankets she’s obsessed with and wrap it around her shoulders.
I crouch in front of her and look up at her. “Honey? Answer me.” I cup her hands and rub them between mine. They’re icy to the fucking touch and I want to kick Officer Lewis in the ass for not letting her rest.
“I-I told her no.”
I raise an eyebrow. “What do you mean you told her no?”
Honey swallows and gives me a tight smile but her shoulder relax some and she leans back against the couch as she speaks.
“I hit her with a bag of coffee,” she whispers and then laughs. “A bag full of fucking coffee, Law. It went everywhere.” She points a finger and I see a small pile of coffee bags dumped unceremoniously on the dining table.
“You make fucking Officer Lewis coffee from those?” I ask her.
She giggles. “Yeah, I did. He brought them up for me so it seemed rude not to offer.”
I bite back a sigh. My girl is always fucking polite, even when she needs to be thinking of herself.
“What did she say?”
“My mother?” She sits up taller when I nod at her and leans forward until her forehead is touching my shoulder. I rub her back while she’s silent for a minute. “She wanted me to pay. Said I had her life and then she tried to stab me.”
“Bitch.”
“She is,” she agrees. “But I got something out of her.”
“What did you get?”
She pushes back from me and gives me a hopeful smile. It’s beautiful on her. It’s the only expression I want to see on her fucking face. “My grandmother. Her name and where she lives. I made her tell me.”
That stuns me, but I take it in stride. It didn’t cross my mind to look into Honey’s grandmother but then again, I wanted to let her process it. There’d been so much she’s had to handle that adding on one more family member wasn’t high on my priority list for her.
“Where is she?” I ask.
“Boerne, Texas. It’s a small town, but I know where it is. Her name is Agnes Vlahos. I-I want to find her.”
“Of course,” I agree immediately. “I’ll have Charlaine find her.”
