Rock Chick Reborn (Rock Chick #9)(55)

I tipped my head back, mascara traces all over my cheeks and all.

“Sorry they got in your face,” I said.

“I’m not,” he replied.

I smiled at him.

Moses smiled back and gave me a squeeze.

“You hungry?” he asked.

I was feeling a might peckish.

I nodded.

He smiled again. “You wanna fix your face?”

Was he seriously asking that question?

I nodded again.

“Go fix your face, baby,” he urged quietly, dipping his head and touching his mouth to mine. “I’ll wait.”

I touched my mouth to his right back.

Then I scooted out of his arms to my room to fix my face.

When I got there, my bathroom seemed different.

Like it was shiny and new.

I had a feeling I’d have to get used to that kind of strangeness all around me.

Though I wouldn’t know, I’d never experienced it.

But my guess was that was how things seemed when your future was bright.





Just FYI . . .

I would find my guess was right.





She Made Me Believe

Moses

Some time later . . .

“HEY.”

Moses looked to the man walking through the side door that led into the vestibule.

“Hey, son,” he replied.

Roman started toward Moses.

The tux looked good on him.

Roman shifted his trajectory, moved to the closed door to the sanctuary and looked through the windows.

“It’s my understanding you and Julien are supposed to be walkin’ out to stand at that alter right about now, meetin’ me there,” Moses observed.

Roman turned his head Moses’s way and shared, “Sent a message to her. She knows I need some time.”

Moses drew breath in through his nose.

It was then Roman walked to him, asking, “She been cryin’ a lot?”

“Daisy’s had to put her false eyelashes back on three times.”

A ghost of a smile formed on his lips.

“Say what you gotta say, son, there’s important shit that’s gotta get done today,” Moses prompted.

Roman focused on him in a way that Moses held his breath.

“Nothing will ever harm her.”

His tone was utterly inflexible.

Moses’s throat closed.

“And I will love and protect her and the children I’ll make with your daughter until the day I die,” Roman continued.

“Roam,” Moses forced out.

“She means everything to me,” Roman told him.

“You haven’t hidden that,” Moses replied.

And praise be to the Lord he had not.

Not from the beginning.

Roman examined Moses’s face before he nodded and moved back to the doors to the vestibule.

He looked through the window.

“Thank you for lovin’ her the way you do,” he said quietly.

He was looking at his momma sitting in the front pew.

“It hasn’t been hard,” Moses replied in the same tone.

And that was the damned truth.

Roman turned to him.

“She made me believe in love,” he shared.

Moses nodded.

“And she taught me how to do it,” Roman went on.

Moses knew full well the way Shirleen loved. He’d now had years of learning how deep that woman could love.

“Then my baby girl is gonna get what she deserves.”

“Yes, she is.”

That was a vow.

Moses moved to him and lifted his hand to rest it on that broad shoulder.

“Son, go,” he whispered. “Go on. Marry my daughter.”

Roman lifted his hand and took hold of the side of Moses’s neck.

After a firm squeeze, he dropped it and Moses’s hand fell when Roman stepped away.

Moses watched as Roman walked back to the door that led to the side hall.

He moved through it.

The door closed.

Moses turned his attention from there to the window Roman had been looking through.

The mother of the groom was sitting in her pew on her boy’s side, her head turned, leaned over the arm rest at the end of the pew, her eyes aimed through the window at her husband.

They’d had a number of discussions about where they were going to sit.

Shirleen Richardson was not to be deterred from taking her boy’s side.

Since her mother was sitting on her side, his daughter was entirely down with her dad sitting beside her fiancé’s momma.

“You’ll get to see my face from there, Daddy. Not my back,” she’d told him.

That had decided it.

He watched his wife tip her head to the side.

She had some subtle glitter in that gorgeous ’fro.

She looked beautiful.

He smiled at her.

Her pretty face got soft before she forced herself to toughen up so she wouldn’t lose it (again) and she smiled back.

He watched her turn to face forward.

Only then did he step away to wait for his daughter to come to him.

It was his girl’s wedding day and Moses Richardson was not jittery. He was not worried. He had no reservations.

He knew, from the beginning, that Roman Jackson would do anything to win his girl then hold her safe.