Rock Chick Reborn (Rock Chick #9)(8)

“I’m becoming one with my inner child,” I informed him snottily.

“So you’re organizing your life, you’re not using stickers and purple markers to organize the men,” Luke declared, like he’d just about allow this but only under some duress.

“I’m organizing all you all’s asses too,” I shared and finished, “With purple markers. Though you’re purple, as in grape sorbet,” I told Luke. “Vance is teal. And Hector is amethyst.”

“Shit,” Hector muttered.

“Holy fuck,” Mace muttered, rounding the end of my desk with Lee, eyes aimed down, and stopping there.

When Lee came to a halt with Mace, his brows hiked high. “What’s all this shit?”

Thank God I no longer carried a switchblade.

“I’m organizing!” I nearly shouted.

Lee reached out and tagged the pack of handy, glittery, metallic elastic bands I bought to keep my planner closed, say, when I threw it in my purse or in my car.

“Did you buy this shit on the business account?” he asked.

“Some of it,” I answered.

Lee’s brows sunk low and most people, men or women, would lose control of their bladder at that look.

I was accustomed to it.

“You bought stickers with mushrooms on them on the NI dime?” Mace asked, waving my autumn stickers.

“Those are for around Thanksgiving time,” I shared as the door to the inner sanctum opened again.

“And this is?” Hector asked, and I looked to him to see him brandishing a laminated picture that had a pink peppermint house with a snowflake on the door, a curlicue pine tree next to it fashioned in white and glitter, and swirls and snowflakes in the air all around against a blue background with my name in pink on it.

“That’s my Christmas cover,” I explained. “I have one for Thanksgiving, Easter, the Fourth of July and one for when I’m wearing blacks and silvers, instead of browns and golds.”

“You change the cover of your planner with your outfit?” Vance asked.

“And the season,” I answered.

“That go on the business account too?” Lee asked.

I swung to him. “Hell no.”

Though the Thanksgiving, Easter, Fourth of July and etcetera stickers went on it because they had ones that said To Do.

“Ohmigod! Dope! You got planner stickers!” Brody, the Nightingale Investigations computer guru (meaning nerd, alternately meaning hacker, but mostly it was nerd) shrieked (see? nerd). He dashed around the desk to stand by me, his hand snaking out to grab the entire sheet that had stickers that said, Jammin’ on my planner. He looked at me with bright shining in his eyes that was undimmed through his Buddy Holly glasses. “Can I have a sheet of these?”

Since those were on the NI dime too, I stated magnanimously, “Knock yourself out.”

“Whoa!” Brody yelled, looking back down to my desk. “Where’d you get these ones that say ‘don’t be a dick’ and ‘fuck this’? I gotta get some of those.”

I decided not to meet any eyes as I replied, “Take one. I bought five.”

“Yee ha!” he cried, snatching it up.

“Who’s Moses Richardson?”

My heart clean stopped in my chest, but my eyes moved to Hector.

They did this slowly, but they moved.

He was holding Moses’s business card.

Stupid me, I’d upended most of my purse on my desk in my quest to get organized.

And since I was carrying around Moses’s card like a personal talisman, it had fallen out.

Then again, none of the men had ever shown the least interest in what was on my desk.

And then again to that, it was rare anything was on my desk but a bottle of nail varnish and/or acetone.

Hector’s attention was on the card.

“Director of Juvenile Probation.” He looked at me. “You got a problem with the boys?”

“No,” I pushed out.

“There’s a number on the back,” Brody informed Hector helpfully.

Hector flipped the card.

Luke turned his head to look at it. Vance leaned in to look across Luke at it. Mace was also looking at it even if, from his position, he couldn’t see it. Though he had badass vision, so maybe he could see it, what did I know? I was a little badass but not like them.

Lee was watching me.

“Can you all move along?” I asked as a demand. “I’ve got a plan to organize your mission for tonight with peach sorbet being tactical and lime sorbet being surveillance.”

Luke looked to me. “You seein’ a juvie officer, Shirleen?”

Most of the time, considering some of the stuff they did was vaguely illegal and not-so-vaguely unsafe, I thought it was great they were all highly intelligent and uncannily perceptive.

This was not one of those times.

“We met. He asked me out. I said no. He gave me his card should I rethink. The end,” I told him.

Luke looked to Lee.

Mace looked to Vance.

Hector looked back down at the card.

Brody looked at me. “Why’d you say no?”

“Have I ever struck you as a woman who shares her personal life?” I asked.

“I was over at your house watching Tarzan two weeks ago and you pulled out your family albums,” Brody reminded me. “All twelve of them.”