Rock Chick Reborn (Rock Chick #9)(45)

“It’s gotta be partially on his radar, Moses, unless he’s blind.”

“I’m not sure it is. He’s just really into her.”

I couldn’t even stop myself from uttering, “Gulk.”

He totally got me and that was not about the kid being white.

“I know. When’d she stop being seven?” he asked.

“Ten years ago,” I pointed out.

“Yeah,” he muttered, then went on, “In the end, it doesn’t matter. Unless he’s hurting her or changing her personality in ways that concern me, I just gotta let it play out.”

“Yeah, you just do.”

“You ever talk to the boys about them treating girls now with a mind to how they’d feel having their own girls in the future?”

“Not yet. But I’ll be leveling that Shirleen Lecture on them in between waiting on them getting their Follow Up Shirleen Lecture about going to college.”

That got me another chuckle before he said, “Ever think there’d be a time you’d be scheduling lectures to your teenage boys?”

“Dreamed it every day, but no. Never.”

There was a beat of silence then he asked, “You wanted kids?”

“Wanted a boy. Least one. One I could make into a good man. One who’d take care of his momma.”

“And then God gave you two,” he remarked.

“And then God gave me two,” I repeated. “We shouldn’t bitch, Moses. We’re so lucky. We both got good kids.”

“We are, baby,” he agreed. “Don’t I know that. Damned lucky.”

It was heavy and it went on with the heavy as Moses shared about some of the kids at Gilliam and the obstacles they faced in their lives to get them on the right path.

I took us out of the heavy when I felt he was ready by sharing about the antics of the Rock Chicks (the tamer ones, we were starting out, I didn’t want to scare him) just to try to make him laugh.

We talked and we talked, and we talked some more.

We even talked through me washing my face.

And a whole lot longer.

In fact, I was in bed, my hair twisted up, my silk scarf wrapped around it, under the covers in the dark after we’d talked out his kids, the Rock Chicks, movies we liked, books we’d read, places we’d been, dream vacations we wanted to take, and Moses’s sweet honey voice was in my ear, soothing me like a lullaby.

He didn’t miss it.

“Gonna let you go, sweetheart.”

“I don’t want you to let me go,” I mumbled.

And I really, really didn’t.

“And I don’t wanna let you go, but you sound about ready to pass out.”

I was.

“Okay, you can let me go.”

“Call you tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Thanks for listening, baby,” he said.

“Thanks for talking, and also thanks for listening,” I replied.

He chuckled.

And hearing it, that was where I wanted to end it.

“’Night, Moses.”

“’Night, baby.”

I pressed my phone to my chest after we disconnected and I did not even care I slept with it there.

Holding him close.

Holding his goodness to me.

His promise.

Holding it tight.





“Say what?” I asked during our phone date Thursday night (we’d had one Wednesday night too, bee T dub).

“I’m reading the Rock Chicks. I’m at the beginning. Indy and Lee.”

Damn.

I didn’t know how I was feeling about this.

“When do you come in?” he queried.

“Uh, the next one. Jet and Eddie.”

“Do you know this Kristen Ashley person who wrote them?”

“It’s a penname. It’s really someone who used to work at Indy’s bookstore.”

“Did she fire them?”

“No. But the books took off so she writes full time now.”

“Goes on book tours?”

“Apparently, unless you sell a bucketload, that doesn’t happen. That is, unless it’s your own dime.”

He sounded confused. “But she has a schedule of appearances on her website.”

Hmm.

He’d checked the website.

“That’s just some woman in Phoenix Jane hired to pretend she’s Kristen Ashley. Jane’s not super social. She’d lose it if she had to go to a book signing.”

“Ah,” he mumbled. Then he asked, “You okay I’m reading these?”

Yikes, but he could read me already.

Even over the phone.

“Well, uh, they met me when, uh . . .”

“Babe,” he clipped.

I shut up and not only at his tone.

He’d called me “babe,” not “baby” not “sweetheart.”

That was totally Hot Bunch.

Toe-tah-lee.

I’d heard Luke Stark call an eighty-three-year-old woman, who’d come into the office to hire the guys because she was concerned her children were slowly poisoning her, “babe.”

She’d blushed like a schoolgirl.

And Moses was getting impatient with me being an idiot.