Wild Wind: A Chaos Novella (Chaos #6.6)(29)

“Let me guess, you’re not a morning person.”

Jag nodded. “Total night owl.”

“Even being boss, I have to work today,” she announced.

“I do too,” he shared.

“So what’s on for us? Work then you want me to cook for you? You cook for me? Or we go out to eat? Then movie? Hit a club? What?”

He slid his hands to the small of her back, letting one keep going up her spine, the other he wrapped around her waist, and teased, “I see you’re already taking me for granted.”

She copped to it immediately. “Absolutely, and going with that theme, you cook for me. I wanna see your space.”

“It isn’t as cool as your space,” he warned her.

“I don’t care.”

“It also isn’t as clean as your space.”

“So you can be a boy, because a grown man looks after himself.”

He started laughing as he said, “Life is too short to spend time cleaning. I do laundry and hate every second of it. And that’s all I got in me to waste on that kind of shit.”

“So you cook here.”

He shook his head. “My baby wants to see my pad, I’ll make sure shit is picked up and presentable and so you don’t run screaming into the night when you see the bathroom.”

She got a smug expression. “I see how deep you are for me.”

“No, Archie, I’ll send prospects over to clean my place. Though, just to say, I’m in deep, but another reason I don’t waste time doing that shit is because of how much of it I had to do when I was prospect. So I earned bustin’ the guys’ chops and I won’t hesitate to do that, especially when something as important is going to happen as you coming to my crib for dinner.”

“Works either way.”

It did, it was just that this way, without him scrubbing toilets, was better.

“There’ll be clean sheets, sweetheart,” he told her. “So come with whatever you need since you’re spending the night.”

Her eyes warmed.

He moved his hands to either side of her waist and gave her a squeeze.

“Now, slide off, I need coffee.”

She slid off, and he pushed up to rest his shoulders on her mountain of pillows. But being Archie, she rolled from him in a way that she was up on a forearm in the bed beside him with her pelvis pressed to his hip and her leg thrown over his thigh.

He twisted at the waist and reached for the mug she’d been drinking from, and he did it back to fighting his rock-hard dick that hadn’t gone soft because after last night, this morning and now her message couldn’t be clearer.

He was owned.

However, he didn’t fight the warmth that thought burned into his gut, because when that happened between people, it went both ways.

He handed her the mug, got his own and lay back against the pillows.

They both sipped and then he asked, “How worried do I have to be about these Harris brothers?”

She caught the side of her bottom lip with her teeth, and Jag was not a big fan of that.

So he muttered, “Terrific.”

“Okay, they were in group. And you’re right. They’re bullies and motherfuckers. They got kicked out. But they don’t need close proximity to rain havoc. The kids all go to school together so they have a captive audience there for whatever shit they want to pull.”

“Backtrack,” he demanded. “Explain group.”

She sipped and said, “So, you know this ’hood is not in a high-income bracket.”

He nodded.

She nodded back.

“Freya, the teacher that lives up front,” she tipped her head toward the wall that separated her apartment from the next, “she teaches at their school, has lived in this area for years, knows everyone. We were out on the fire escape, having some wine when I first moved in. She shared about some of the issues people face. I had an idea, I told her my idea. She thought it was a great idea, so with her help, we did it.”

“And?” he asked when she didn’t follow through.

“Childcare isn’t cheap. If it’s a double-parent household, to get by with still mostly just basics, both parents have to work. If it’s a single-parent household, things are a whole lot tighter and sometimes that parent has two jobs. Some of the kids were latchkey. Some of the parents were hanging on by their fingernails, some sliding off. The kids suffered. Parents did. Families…”

Was she saying…?

“So, I take the kids in that age group,” she declared.

Yes.

She was saying that.

“Twelve, thirteen years old, one girl is fourteen,” she went on. “They hang at the soda fountain. I have an area in the back for them to do their homework. They also have a TV back there. I give them stuff to do to help out around the store, and when they do, I throw some cash their way. Nothing huge, but enough they know their time and energy isn’t taken for granted. And this surprised me, but they like that the best. Guess it shouldn’t surprise me, though, because anyone likes to feel useful. They also like having cash in their pockets. I also think it makes them feel grown up. Sometimes I come up with fun shit they can do. Or my staff does. Like they play DJ and spin tunes for the shop, shit like that. Sometimes we do field trips.”

She shrugged.