Hold (Gentry Boys, #5)(14)
She wrinkled her upturned little nose. “Deck might actually be a minor deity.”
“He might be,” I agreed and tossed the cash on the shallow front counter. Aspen was devoted to Deck, but there’d never been anything romantic about it. He hired her a year ago and I never got the full story but I had the feeling she’d been in some kind of trouble that he’d extracted her from. Aspen and Deck’s girlfriend Jenny were good friends. Anyway, once Aspen and Brick –another wayward soul in Deck Gentry’s wide circle of humanity – laid eyes on each other, full color fireworks erupted.
She opened up her mouth to needle me some more but Brick wrapped a meaty arm around her waist and redirected her thoughts by sneaking his hand under her shirt.
Aspen squirmed and twisted around to face her boyfriend. She forgot all about me and my charity case. Meanwhile, Brick was zeroing in with the kind of intense expression one guy recognizes in another. It means, “I better get a piece of this before my dick busts open.”
I suppressed a smile and looked away. “Why don’t you guys take off?”
Brick didn’t rip his eyes from his girlfriend. “You sure, man?”
“Yeah. I’ll be heading out as soon as the boys get here.”
Aspen and Brick scurried out the door all wrapped around each other. I hoped in all their urgency they wouldn’t get caught humping in an alley somewhere. It had happened before. After switching the sign on the shop to ‘Closed’ I checked my phone.
About an hour ago Saylor had texted a picture of the girls as they grinned side by side at our kitchen table with large bowls of macaroni and cheese. Their sweet smiles were full of the best things in the world. I put the phone down.
Something was eating me, something I couldn’t quite put a name to. It had started gnawing on my insides at some point this afternoon. There was no reason in the world to feel this way. All was well with my girls and my brothers and life in general.
“Shit!” I jumped half a foot in the air when the door swung wide open. Without thinking about it I grabbed a steel baseball bat that we kept up front on the off chance of an unwelcome visitor.
“Cord!” Aspen gasped, her wide eyes absorbing the sight of me standing there like a slugger at the Home Run Derby.
Brick elbowed his way in, jostling her behind his powerful form as he glared at me. I couldn’t blame him for that. I would have had the same instinct to protect what’s mine.
“Sorry,” I muttered, lowering the bat.
“You expecting trouble?” he asked slowly and with suspicion, his sizeable muscles already coiling beneath the military fatigues he still wore regularly even though he’d been a civilian for more than a year.
“No,” I coughed. “Just my imagination going to weird places I guess.”
Brick kept his eyes centered on me for a few seconds. When Brick looked directly at you sometimes you got the feeling he saw more than you meant for him to see.
“All right,” he finally said and stepped aside to give Aspen some room because she was too short to talk over his broad shoulders. She swatted him playfully on the ass and darted over to the front counter to root around in a sea of post-it notes.
“I forgot to tell you,” she said breathlessly, as she selected the pink square of paper that she’d apparently been hunting for, “you got a call while you were inking. Well, not you. They were actually looking for Deck. I figured it was shop business so I asked the guy if he wanted to talk to you. He said you would probably be interested in what he had to say as well since the boys were your family too.”
“Boys?” I was confused. Anxiety started climbing. “Creed and Chase?”
“No, no.” She peered at her own chicken scratch writing. “He was a cop. Said a couple of your cousins got themselves hauled into the station down in that town you guys all come from.”
I relaxed. Slightly. In my head I took a quick inventory of all known Gentry relations still inhabiting the hardscrabble landscape of Emblem. Some were in prison. Some were dead. Some had run off to parts unknown. The few that were left weren’t really on my radar, but it didn’t surprise me that Deck might have taken an interest in them, particularly if they were young.
My father’s cousin Elijah had passed away a few years back and left behind a couple of boys who would be in their late teens now. There was never any doubt the boys were Gentrys – they looked the part from head to toe – but as I understood it, there was some speculation that Elijah died without realizing he wasn’t the sperm donor. It could have been my Uncle Chrome, Deck’s father, long dead. Or maybe it was even Benton. Neither idea would surprise me.
Aspen pressed the sticky note on my shirt and I swiped at it. The number was an Emblem one. I made out the words Officer Driscoll on the paper and understood. Fred Driscoll was a longtime buddy of Deck’s. Hell, he might have even been on his payroll for some reason or another that I didn’t care to know about. Everyone called him Gaps and he was tolerated, if not respected, as one of Emblem’s peacekeepers.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “You guys have a good night.”
Aspen bounded out of there cheerfully but Brick hung back and gave me an odd look.
“Just so you know,” he said mildly, “you ever need some help cracking heads, there’s a few bullet points I didn’t add to my resume.”