Leave a Trail (Signal Bend #7)(122)

“She okay?”

Adrienne shrugged. “She’s…Lilli. All business. She doesn’t want to talk about personal stuff.” After Isaac had left, Lilli had spent three days closed up in her house with her kids, telling everybody who tried to check on her to ‘f*ck off.’ When she’d emerged, she’d thrown herself into her work—rebuilding the B&B, running the town library, sitting on the town council. But she was not socializing at all.

She had not yet, as far as Adrienne knew, been back to the clubhouse.

Tasha seemed to be dealing with the loss of Len in the opposite way. She’d thrown herself into her work, too, but she never wanted to be alone. She and Cory had been spending a lot of their free time together, but Tasha sought out the company of all the Horde family, and she’d been going regularly into Springfield to visit her friends there. She was on the move constantly, hardly ever at home. Shannon had told her that she’d even spent the night on their sofa a few times after she’d been to their house for dinner.

Adrienne didn’t know whom to worry about more.

Badger was still thinking about Lilli. “She’s tough. She’ll be okay. She needs some time. They both do.”

Badger squatted, and Hector—who never strayed far from the kitchen when food was happening—walked into his arms for a rough hug. “Hey, boy. Taking care of mama today?”

He went to the fridge and pulled out a beer. “I’ve been thinking. We should buy a house. This place is too small for when the kid comes. And what if you have twins—they run in families, right?”

The thought scared the bejeezus out of Adrienne. “Don’t even joke. I love Millie and Joey, but watching Shannon and Show juggle two of everything is freaking exhausting. One baby at a time is just enough.”

He took a long swallow from his bottle and leaned against the counter near where she was working. The pasta was ready, and as Adrienne started to heft the pot of boiling water to the sink, he set his beer down.

“Hey, I got that.” With a gentle push, he set her out of the way and poured the pasta and water into the colander she’d set in the sink. “I’m just saying that we need a bigger place. The extra room here is barely a closet.”

As she took over and returned the pasta to its pot, then poured the sauce over it, she said, “I have the rest of the money from my mom. We could use that as a down payment.”

“We don’t need to. I’ve got money saved up. You should keep your mom’s money.”

Adrienne wasn’t sure why, but that pissed her off a little. “No. I want to help. I’ve been saving that money for something big, and buying a house is a big thing. You’ve been supporting me for months. I don’t want you to buy a house for me, Badge. I want us to buy a house together.” Oh. That was why she was pissed.

But Badger wasn’t angry at all. He grinned. “Okay, okay. Between us, we probably have way more than we’d need for a down payment around here. Maybe we can buy something outright.” His grin faded. “I’d like that. Not having a bank hanging over us, threatening to take our home out from under us if we’re ever in trouble.” He got up and went to the cupboards, collecting plates and utensils to set the table. “You want juice?”

“Yes. Cranberry, please.”

He poured her a glass. When she turned with the pasta, now in a serving bowl, there was a little, light blue pouch on the table at her place.

“What’s that?”

“It’s Valentine’s Day. You made me supper. I got you something.”

“That’s a Tiffany’s bag.”

“Yeah.”

“How did you get a Tiffany’s bag?”

“Well, I went to Tiffany’s.”

“Where is there a Tiffany’s around here?”

“St. Louis. Last week, when we did that run for Tasha’s clinic?”

“You went to a Tiffany’s store?”

“Yeah. That’s where they keep their jewelry.” Smiling, he picked up the bag and brought it to her, where she was still standing, holding the bowl of pasta in béchamel sauce. “Babe, are you gonna see what’s in here, or are we playing Twenty Questions?”

Living in Signal Bend, married to a member of the Horde, surrounded by leather and metal, wild men and the women who could tame them, Adrienne had sort of forgotten that things like surprise gifts from swanky jewelers could ever happen. Even though their wedding had been elegant, by town standards, their reception had been at the rowdy saloon, where the bar and all the tables were all slightly, permanently damp feeling, from eons of spilled beer. Actually, when she thought about it more, it made perfect sense that her man would be standing there with his long hair and full beard, his flannel shirt and worn jeans, holding a Tiffany’s jewelry bag in his calloused hands. Her life was a riot of unexpected juxtapositions. There was grime around the beds of his fingernails.

“You need to wash your hands before we eat.”

“Take the bag, and I will.”

She set the bowl of pasta in the middle of the table and took the bag from him. He went immediately to the sink and washed his hands. Pulling open the satiny rope of the drawstrings, she turned the pouch over into the palm of her hand.

A silver necklace with the infinity symbol at the center. Simple and classic. “Oh, Badge. It’s beautiful.”