Rock Chick Reborn (Rock Chick #9)
Kristen Ashley
This novella is also dedicated to Kristin and Brandon Harris.
And I think once Kristin reads it, she’ll understand why.
A BIG THANK you to all my Rock Chicks on Facebook, who were so excited about this story and helping me name Shirleen’s hero, they pulled out all the stops to help me find his name.
And especially to Judy Keating, who gave me Shirleen’s Moses.
It’s important to note that although Gilliam Youth Services Center is a real place in Denver, Colorado, obviously I’ve fictionalized Moses Richardson’s employment there. And here I must thank Marvy McNeese for assisting me with some insights into juvenile detention.
Last, a gratitude shout out to Liz Berry and Erika Wynne for helping me title this novella. Although we had a few good ideas, E came up with “Rebirth,” which informed Shirleen’s journey and became Rock Chick Reborn.
And as I hope you’ll now discover, it was perfect.
Your Attention
“CHICKEN AND WAFFLES.”
“Dude, are you crazy? No chick is gonna want you making her chicken and waffles.”
“I’m makin’ her chicken and waffles. Everyone likes chicken and waffles.”
“Yeah, and your bitch probably likes ’em too. The thing is, she’ll never want you to know she likes ’em or that she likes any food at all.”
At that, I stopped us all on a skid.
“If you call a woman a bitch one more time, Sniff, I’m gonna clock you back to the seventeenth century,” I warned.
Me and my boys were standing in the floral section of King Soopers.
This was because Sniff and I had been warned the day before that we had to skedaddle from the house for the night because Roam was bringing over one of his bitches (and I was an adult, I could think that and say it) to make her dinner.
So we were shopping for said dinner and for everything else it took to raise two teenage boys, this last necessitating me being at the damned grocery store at least three times a week.
Case in point, I’d seen Roam eat an entire pack of Oreos in one sitting, open a second and hoover through a whole row.
Not an ounce of fat on the boy though.
As an aside, why was the world so unfair? A woman did that her ass would follow her into a room three weeks after she entered it.
And by the by, I mentally asked about the world being unfair a lot.
I never got an answer.
Though I shouldn’t ask, because I knew the answer.
It was partly about people doing stupid shit their own damned selves, me included.
It was also that the world was just unfair.
Needless to say, raising two teenage boys meant most of the store would be in my Navigator in about an hour.
It should be noted that they weren’t exactly my boys, in the sense I didn’t birth either of them, and that was only obvious with one—the white one.
I was their foster mother.
They were still my boys.
Sniff, as usual, acted like he hadn’t heard my warning.
He said, “Shirleen, tell him. No girl is gonna want him to make chicken and waffles for dinner, because she’ll want him to make chicken and waffles for dinner and it’ll be torture pretending she doesn’t want to snarf down chicken and waffles at dinner.”
I studied Sniff, eighteen and long-since having grown out of his skinny, acne-ridden early teens.
Now the boy was six foot of lean muscle, not skin and bones, and although he had a couple of acne scars, which only made his face look interesting, the excellent insurance plan I was enrolled in at work and a good dermatologist had taken care of the rest.
In other words, now he was hot.
It made me throw up a little in my mouth to think that about my boy, but the evidence was standing right in front of me wearing jeans that every mother in the country would declare illegal and a cream, short-sleeved thermal that molded to various features of his developed chest, narrowing ribs, and flat stomach.
The power that package had over teenage-girl pussy I blamed on the Hot Bunch. It was them that took the boys under their wing, this including physical training, but also the inescapable soaking up of general badassness. So it was them that had honed the bods my boys now had, including Roam’s, who was a lot bulkier, taller, and a different brand of hot.
Chocolate hot.
Effective chocolate hot.
As evidenced by his serial dating.
Leading to chicken and waffles.
Sniff didn’t serial date.
He serial banged.
Due to an uncomfortable conversation Hank and I had some time ago—one that put me in my bed with the vapors for two days, and one that made Hank look like he might expire from trying not to bust a gut laughing after I’d talked him into having “the talk” with the boys—Hank kept them in condoms.
They could buy their own, of course. They not only got an allowance from me for keeping their rooms clean, taking out the trash and looking after the house, they were paid interns for Nightingale Investigations.
They didn’t do any of the dangerous stuff. They did stuff in the control room and stuff on the computers.
Or at least they didn’t tell me if they did the dangerous stuff. On that I just had to trust Liam Nightingale and his band of merry badasses would do the right thing with my boys.