She shrugged, but I noticed the shaky quality of the breath she dragged into her lungs and knew the incident had unsettled her.
“He pestered me for ten minutes, and then I threatened to call Cy and the boys to come pick me up if he wouldn’t stop harassing me. He was visibly angry, but he let me go.”
“Whoa,” Benny said, his big eyes wrenched wide. “That had to be kinda scary.”
“They’re upping the ante,” Carson noted grimly, looking at me.
He’d started hanging around The Fallen, the first step before anyone was ever considered to prospect for them. I wasn’t sure if he hung out with the brothers just because he got on with them or if he honestly desired to patch in to the club. He had a degree in business from UBC, but so far, he hadn’t been able to get much work, and I worried he would join up for the wrong reasons.
I nodded, though, biting my lip. The police had been inserting themselves more and more into our lives over the past few years since Javier Ventura became mayor.
It seemed nearly impossible, but he was actually worse than our former mayor, Loulou Garro’s deceased father who was in bed with Javier’s Mexican cartel, Danner’s corrupt police force, and Warren’s high school drug ring.
Somehow, the villain had become the town leader, and things continued to spiral out of control, as evidenced by the fact his wife, Irina, had set up an illegal pornography business outside of Entrance.
“Be careful, okay?” I told Tayline, taking her hand in mine as she sat next to me. “Do what Cy says.”
She snorted. “You sound like one of them.”
I shrugged because I did, but it was for good reason. “We’re involved in a world where abductions, murders, and battery actually do happen to the people we love…I just want you to be careful if the police are going to give the brothers any more trouble. Everyone knows you and Cy are tight.”
“Then that should go doubly for you,” she countered.
I reached over to the end of the couch and produce the Sig Sauer handgun Zeus had given Harleigh Rose, Loulou, and me for Christmas last year. “Don’t worry, I’m always prepared.”
“Mrs. Irons carries a gun?” Carson teased. “Colour me surprised.”
“Miss Irons,” Benny corrected automatically and then giggled. “Soon-to-be Mrs. Garro, I hope.”
Everyone looked at me expectantly. There was a niggle of unease in my belly like a worm borrowing into the earth, tunneling through my foundation of confidence. I shrugged and laughed lightly, awkwardly. “Don’t look at me. We’re in no rush to get married.”
And we weren’t. Our lives were beautiful just as they were. I reminded myself of this every day, especially when I saw old friends from my past life in Vancouver getting married and having babies. There was always a pang in the base of my gut when I saw the gorgeous wedding dresses and celebrations, and those plump, wrinkled faces and little fists.
As much as I had changed over the past few years, I was still a romantic traditionalist at heart, and I yearned for those things with a fierceness that sometimes took my breath away.
“I call bullshit,” Rainbow announced as she rearranged her long, boney limbs in her chair. “I’ve seen your face every time we walk by a baby, and there’s no denying your womb basically melts at the sight. Plus, hate to break it to you, babe, but you’re not getting any younger.”
“Hey!” Both Tayline and I protested because we were the same age.
“Thirty is hardly ancient,” I argued even though I’d found a grey hair at my crown just last week and thrown a bit of a fit about it to King. I was lucky I had the kind of man who’d let me rant, then pressed a kiss to the top of my head, declaring me beautiful in all of my iterations.
“Have you talked about it at all?” Benny ventured, trying to keep his eyes on me and failing as they slipped to the side where Caron sat in his own chair flipping with a furrowed brow through a non-fiction book called Vagina.
I smiled at him because we were in the same tough spot. “Not really…I mean, we speak about the future all the time in kind of abstract ways. We want to name our daughter Eve if we have one, and we want a cat someday soon. We’ve always dreamed about going on our honeymoon to Alaska and driving up the coast on the bike together.” I sighed gustily and leaned my head back in the couch cushion to look at the beams in the ceiling, searching for answers. “At what point is it my responsibility to talk to him about it? Isn’t he supposed to be the one to ask me when he’s ready?”