Rock Chick Reborn (Rock Chick #9)(24)

He’d been redeemed.

He’d been reunited with his one true love.

He wasn’t living the life.

But he was finding his way there.

With Lee’s help. The Hot Bunch. The Rock Chicks.

Malia.

And lastly . . .

His son.

He told me the what.

I just didn’t get it.

“On that, I win.”

“Come again?”

“I didn’t go home to him. I didn’t go home to him bustin’ my lip or blacking my eye or whatever he did to you that I still feel sick in my gut thinkin’ about when you walked funny and wouldn’t look anyone in the eye.”

I swallowed.

It was good in the bad old days, and now, in the good new ones, Darius was exceptionally observant.

Though I was seeing it might also have been bad.

“So I shoulda saved you,” he declared.

“If you tried, you woulda died.”

“And that was a result I should have risked if it meant I might have bested it and got you free.”

“Darius—”

“But it didn’t happen that way and here we are.” He pushed off my desk and swung a hand out. “Can’t go back. Just gotta move forward.”

“No,” I disagreed, realizing right then how wise Moses’s advice was. “We gotta be in our nows.”

“What?”

Holding my nephew’s gaze, I stood.

“We gotta be in our nows, son. I met a decent man and he wants a second date. You got a second chance with Malia and your boy. That’s our nows. And they’re good. So we gotta be where our feet are. Right here. Right now. Not back then, where there’s nothin’ good, but it doesn’t matter, we can’t change a thing. Not in the future, which we don’t know what’s gonna happen and we got no control over it anyway. The now. Right now. Where it’s good.”

“I always trusted you.”

Lord God, I was going to cry.

“Darius.”

“I always loved you.”

So going to cry.

“Son.”

“And the only reason I stayed in was to protect you.”

That shut my mouth.

“And I don’t regret it,” he finished.

“The only reason I stayed in was to protect you,” I shared.

“The vicious cycle,” he muttered.

“I regret that. The fact you stayed in for me. The fact I stayed in to protect you instead of getting you out. Hell, I regret all of it,” I whispered.

“That’s not in the now,” he pointed out.

“It isn’t, you’re right,” I replied. “But it’s still true.”

We stood there, staring at each other.

Two sinners.

He’d been redeemed.

But I was so destroyed by the experience, I needed to be reborn.

“Be happy,” Darius whispered.

“I’m trying.”

“And I’m glad.”

With that, as was his way, Darius ended it without another word, moving to the door to the inner sanctum.

He stopped at it and turned my way in order to give me another word.

“Wished I’d killed him myself, what he did to you.”

I shook my head. “Don’t matter, son. Bottom line, he’s dead and it’s good it wasn’t at your hand.”

“I still wished it was.”

I got that.

I felt that.

Sometimes, in my darker hours, I thought the same thing.

So I nodded.

My nephew didn’t nod back.

He punched in the code to buzz open the door and he walked through.

I stood there watching as the door closed him from sight.

My worst mistake.

Shit.

It was time to go shopping.

I sat, booted up my computer and virtually went to my happy place.

In other words, I hit Nordstrom.





“Okay, lay it on me. What’s on your mind?”

It was that evening and we were having a phone conversation, me and Moses.

The boys were at the NI offices, not pulling a shift but working out with Mace in the down room. They’d be home soon and they’d be hungry, which was why I had the hamburger patties already formed, the deep fat fryer out ready to be plugged in to prep for the crinkle cuts, and the tomatoes sliced, the lettuce leaves cleaned, in hopes they’d get some vegetables by dressing their hamburgers with them.

And I was hiding in my bedroom because Moses had called, and when the boys had caught him checking me out at the grocery store, they hadn’t liked that much.

They also both gave the roses dirty looks, but I just pretended I bought them myself.

So now I was worried about them coming home to catch me on the phone with him, putting the one of the roses together with the one of me hiding in my room talking on the phone and getting Moses.

But this was only part of the heavy weighing on my mind.

Heavy it was weird that through the miracle of wireless communication, Moses had caught.

“I’m not sure I want to talk about it,” I told Moses.

“This is the beauty of the early dating phone conversation. You can talk to me pretending I’m one of your girls.”