Wild Like the Wind (Chaos #5)(17)

Hound returned to the kitchen that was, like his, open to the living room.

“Gonna do a shop,” he called from there.

“Am I low?” she asked.

“Coupla things.” He smiled and knew she could hear it in his voice when he said, “Though, not the Baileys.”

“Well, thank goodness for that,” she said before he heard the TV go on and a morning program started sounding.

“You down on magazines?” he asked.

“Gotta get my gossip, Shepherd,” she answered.

That meant yes.

He let the eggs cook, the toast toast, and dug out the shopping list to add Baileys and gossip rags to it so he didn’t forget.

He shoved it back.

“What’s on for your day?” she asked.

Do her shopping. Run her errands. Come back and get her lunch. Then continue to attempt to hunt down a maniac, and if that proved futile as it had done for the last months, recon the maniac’s minions so Hound could find the weak link, and as he was doing that, try not to ride to Keely’s, rush her to her bed and fuck her brains out.

“Gonna work in the shop,” he told her.

“That sounds fun.”

Except for when he took her to the doctor, the dentist, or the synagogue on Yom Kippur, Passover, Rosh Hashanah and days like that, she didn’t leave that apartment.

So anything for Jean sounded fun.

After he flipped the eggs, he took the coffeepot out to her and warmed up her cup.

“Thank you, motek,” she murmured.

He bent and kissed the top of her wet hair.

Then he went and made up the plate for her breakfast.

He moved the TV tray in front of her before he set it down with napkin and cutlery and returned to the kitchen to get his own coffee.

After he grabbed his mug, he moved back to Jean and sprawled on her couch.

He took a sip and muttered, “Need to call that woman to get her in to do your hair.”

She swallowed some egg and replied, “Probably time.”

“Want her to do your nails and feet too?” he asked.

“I like that,” she told him something he knew.

“I’ll sort it then.”

While he was taking another sip, suddenly, her gaze came to him.

“I heard a woman shouting in your apartment the other night.”

Goddamn fuck.

“Do you have a girl?” she asked.

“Jean—” Hound started, shifting in the couch.

“You need a girl, Shepherd,” she whispered. “Why a handsome, sweet boy like you doesn’t have one, I really never understood. One that shouts at you about scaring her to death, now that we’ll need to talk about.”

She wouldn’t understand why he was alone because to her he was a sweet boy and to the world he absolutely was not.

But also, she didn’t know he’d been in love with a woman he couldn’t have since he was eighteen.

The woman who’d been shouting at him.

“She sounded very upset,” Jean remarked to her eggs and salmon.

“She’s a friend.”

Her eyes slid to him. “Friends don’t get that upset with friends. Especially not female ones with men.”

He knew all about Jean. From the minute he saw her shuffling down the hall nine years ago, juggling grocery bags she was too weak to deal with, telling him plain she had no one to help, it started.

He knew she’d never been married. He knew she lost her fiancé in Korea. He knew she never got over it and lived her life alone. No man. No kids. Friends eventually dropping like flies.

The only help she’d accept was visits from her rabbi and a few members of her community.

And Hound.

How it happened, he couldn’t put his finger on. One second, he was helping her get groceries in her pad. The next he was veering his eyes so she could sit on the pisser or take a shower without humiliating herself too much. He figured the progression was natural enough once she trusted him more and more: groceries, cooking for her, setting up her chair, getting her cleaners, helping her get to bed.

And then they were there.

He’d talked to her about getting help in but she wouldn’t hear of it. Her pension was shit, she couldn’t afford it (she thought), and she refused to let Hound help financially.

Fortunately, part of that progression meant she let him pay her bills and go out and buy her groceries, and he used enough of her cash so that if she looked, which she’d stopped doing, she’d see her accounts dwindling. Just not as much as they would if he didn’t pay her rent and utilities, buy her groceries, cover the excess on her medical care and have a deal with her cleaner and hair dresser so that they told her how much they cost was a quarter of what they actually did.

He was a carouser and rough-houser long before he found Chaos, which was why his parents scraped him off. Like Keely’s, they were straight-laced, had sticks up their asses and felt living the Christian life was more important than trying to understand their boy, who was simply not straight-laced, hated church and was intense in a way that scared them, but they had no desire to put the work in to understand where that came from.

He’d put himself forward as a recruit for Chaos when he was seventeen.

With Tack’s sponsorship, they took him on as recruit when he was eighteen.