Marc (Bowen Boys, #4)(22)
“I don’t know them. Do you know…do I want to know why they gave me up?” His dad shrugged and told her he could find out for her. “I’d like that, please. I don’t know where I’ll be, but I’ll be more than glad to call you sometime.”
“Where are you going, child?” His mom asked before he could. “You and Marc will stay here in his home. I hadn’t heard that he was leaving, had you, Khan?”
He started to say he didn’t think that’s what she meant when she spoke again. There were times when he wished he wasn’t the leader and didn’t have to be the bearer of bad news.
“You can’t leave him, Jonny. You and he are connected now and considered one. If you leave him or try to leave him, he’ll just find you and bring you back.” She stood up to pace, and he found himself relieved that she wasn’t going to hurt him. Yet.
“And I get no say in this? How is that even lawful?” His dad laughed, and she glared at him. “Laugh it up, buddy, and I touch you without his permission.”
His mom burst out laughing when his dad’s mouth snapped closed. “Oh, I like you. You’re going to do just fine with this family. Come along, dear; let’s go into the kitchen and let these two wonder what we’re going to poison them with. Have you ever heard what saltpeter does to a male? You should hear what it does to a panther.”
He looked at his dad as he watched the women go into the kitchen. There was something very frightening about two women talking about your demise. His dad slowly turned to him.
“You really don’t think they’d do that, do you?” Khan looked at the kitchen door, then back as his dad and shrugged. “Maybe we could just order in. That way we could give them a…a break from cooking? Do you know if Jonny can even cook?”
“I don’t know if she’s ever even been in a kitchen before this.” Khan stood up, then sat back down. “We should go in and help. I can cut things up for them.”
His dad nodded, and they both stood again. “Course, they could be kidding. We could just be putting ourselves out there to have to help in the kitchen more often.”
Khan nodded. Yes, they could be. But there was something bigger going on here, and he grinned at his dad.
“Could be, but that would mean that they didn’t kill us. Sorry, Dad, but I like that a hell of a lot better than not having to help out in the kitchen once in a while because I’m dead.”
His dad nodded and followed him. “Yeah, I do want to live a while longer. And if we show them that we’re willing to let this go, then maybe they—”
“Dad, why don’t you let me do the talking? I’m pretty sure that you’ll get all of us murdered in our sleep or enough saltpeter in our food to make it difficult for us for some time to come.” Khan winced at his poor choice of words as did his dad. “I’m gonna help.”
As they walked to the kitchen, his dad patted him on the back. “Good thing you’re leader, son, I’d hate to have to deal with Marc when he comes back and he finds out I touched his mate.”
He stopped moving forward and his dad bumped into him. “You said you talked to him. You said you got permission.”
“Well, I knew he was busy and I got some information that we didn’t have before. I don’t think he’ll mind overly much.”
Khan had a feeling his brother was going to mind a great deal. His dad might have just started a war, and probably knew it, too. They walked into the kitchen. His dad then started telling his mom and Jonny that he’d come up with a brilliant plan and they were ordering in. Khan sat at the table and tried to figure out how to keep Marc from killing him and their father.
Chapter 8
Marc wasn’t thrilled with the plan, but Caitlynne assured him that simple was better. He hoped the hell so, because this one was as simple as it got. He walked to the next house, two before the Thomas household, and this time Dylan knocked. When the door opened, he went into his practiced spiel.
“Hello, we’re in the neighborhood today selling magazine subscriptions. We were wondering if you had a moment that we could—”
The door slammed in his face this time. “At least you got to speak. Last three times I didn’t even get ‘hello’ out before they were slamming the door. And that other woman…sheesh, Dylan, what the f*ck?”
She’d let them in and then proceeded to try and seduce them. She’d gone into the kitchen to get them a drink and had come back f*cking naked. Marc shivered again. He looked at Dylan as he laughed.
“She was something. I never meet this kind of interesting people as a teacher. Of course, I do run into an occasional mother who wants to up her kid’s grade by blowing me, but I can’t say that any of them came to a parent-teacher meeting buck-assed naked.”
The next house brought them to the neighbor of the Thomases. They knocked and waited and Marc looked around. Caitlynne had told them that there were two cars on the street that didn’t belong there and she had a hit on one of them, as he was the grandson of one of the residents. The other was coming back as a rental car.
“It could be nothing, but I’m thinking that rental cars don’t usually have two people sitting in them for eight hours at a time before someone else comes to sit in it. Those men are who we’re watching.” Caitlynne had told them this as she put bulletproof vests on them under their jackets. “Just in case.”