Rough Ride (Chaos #5)(54)

But everything was solid. It was not good, but instead golden.

Rosalie Holloway was not about adventure and excitement. She was just about being with the people who meant something to her, dialing down the world so all you needed to feed your soul was an hour with her quiet, stretched out with you on the couch.

And learning that, Snapper had fallen in love with her even more.

“They look good,” she declared, attention on the cupboards they’d already put in.

“You’d think that you picked them,” Tabby replied to Rosalie and looked at Snap. “They are nice. I still think you should have gone with the cream.”

“The place is modern, cream is more traditional,” Rosalie said.

“Cream is more neutral,” Tab returned.

Rosalie shot her a smile with her eyebrows raised. “More neutral than white?”

Snap was not a fan of the eyebrow raise only because it took his attention to the split in the left one.

Her scars were visible, thin white marks that ran through her brow, along her jaw, and one that was about a half an inch down the left side of the bridge of her nose.

Since they had the conversation now months ago, she hadn’t mentioned them, and that was good.

But every time his attention was turned to them, he saw her on the floor of that warehouse, and that was bad.

He’d lied to her that night he came clean about what Chaos’s real plans were with her ex. He did not think there was anything Gerard Beck could do to atone for what he’d done to Rosalie. He thought the guy was a useless piece of shit and apologies after you and your brothers delivered a beat down to a defenseless woman because you’d been caught breaking the fucking law were worthless—if they came in words, or if they came in deeds.

But Rosie seemed mellow about it, was definitely on the path of moving on from it and Throttle, and he wasn’t about to do anything to bite into that.

“Need you to look at those tile samples, Rosie,” he said to take his mind off that shit. “We need to make a decision so I can order it and get it delivered.”

She nodded to him and moved with Playboy over to a box that had a cupboard in it that Shy and him hadn’t taken out yet where there were a bunch of tile samples on top.

“The black,” Tabby, having wandered over to have a look too, decreed.

“My woman’s always got an opinion,” Shy muttered through a smile, stripping the shrink wrap and protective covering off the cupboard they were about to mount.

“Gray,” Rosalie said.

“Gray-shmay,” Tabby returned. “Gray’s boring.”

“It’s a rental, Tab,” Rosalie replied in that sweet, lilting voice of hers, not upset in the slightest about Tab’s outspoken ability to share her opinion. Then again, that was the way it was with those two, or Rosie with anybody. She didn’t get wound up a lot. In fact, since she settled in after what happened to her, she never got wound up. “It needs to be neutral so people can build on it with their own things.”

“You can build on black,” Tabby said.

“And black shows everything. It’s harder to keep looking nice,” Rosalie retorted.

Tabby had nothing to say to that because Rosalie was right.

The gray it was then.

Needless to say, the women had become friends. Outspokenly opinionated or not, it was hard not to like Tabitha Cage. She was just good people. And if you were a woman, she was the best kind of friend you could have around (if often a nutcase, but since Rosalie was totally not, they evened each other out). And straight up with everything, it was impossible not to like Rosie.

They’d gotten close. It might have been about Rosie opening the doors for Tab to swoop in because she was worried after what had happened to Rosalie. Mostly it was about the fact that they all just liked each other. History didn’t factor. It was just done in a way that there wasn’t even awkwardness. There was just what they had now.

Furthermore, they were the generation of the brothers and their women in the Club that were around the same ages, so with Joke and Carrie, they hung together a lot.

Playboy reached out to his momma and Tabby took her son.

Rosie turned to Snap. “We came to check out the cupboards and look at the samples. We also came to see if you guys wanted to take a break and go out to lunch with us.”

“Lunch sounds good,” Shy replied, moving to his wife and son, and when he did, his boy lost interest in Momma and reached out to Daddy.

Shy didn’t make him want. He took his little man and pulled him close, brushing his lips across the top of his cranium, then breathing in deep, like the essence of his son was the elixir of life.

And it probably was, something Snap looked forward to getting his own whiff of when the time was right.

“Joker, Carissa, and Travis are meeting us at Las Delicias in half an hour,” Tabby told the men.

“Perfect,” Snapper said, looking to Rosie. “You on the back of my bike, baby?”

She looked him right in the eyes.

“Absolutely.”

At her word, the way it settled down low in his gut, he smiled.

He was that guy who’d always known his destiny. Whatever life smacked him with, he knew he’d deal with it while he headed unerring for one thing: keeping himself breathing while finding a woman to love and building a family.