Rock Chick Reborn ~ Kristen Ashley Page 3

  Lee was cool I rolled that way.

  Still, everyone could be better organized.

  Including me.

  And no, I was not using purchasing hundreds of dollars of planner shit as a way to escape the fact it had been a week since I’d met Moses Richardson at King Soopers, and I could not call him no matter how weak I wanted to be (and in that weakness, call him immediately).

  And no, I would not be using organizing the shit out of my life and every life that touched my life, including every member of the Hot Bunch, as a way to continue to escape that.

  Even though I was oh so totally doing that.

  Bottom line, Luke should be happy.

  Not giving me shit.

  He looked down at the healthy (okay, ridiculously out of hand) display of planner and planner accoutrement littering the entirety of the top of my large desk, and then he looked back at me.

  “With purple markers, stickers and Post-its with flowers on them?” he queried.

  “I’m creating a system,” I shared as the front door opened.

  I didn’t look to it when Luke asked, “A system that includes purple markers and stickers?”

  What was he not understanding about this?

  “Yes. It’s all about color coordination, creativity and visual stimulation.”

  “Jesus, what’s all this shit?” Vance Crowe asked, eyes down to my desk, body coming to stand on one side of Luke.

  Hector Chavez appeared on Luke’s other side.

  “Fuck,” Hector muttered, also staring at the desk.

  Most women, facing off with that kind of eye candy in close proximity, would pass out.

  Yes, these men were that hot.

  Seriously.

  No female brain could stay conscious with Luke Stark, Vance Crowe and Hector Chavez two feet away from them.

  Fortunately, I’d grown immune to it.

  (That was a lie, but I’d become accustomed to it.)

  Vance, quicker on the move than his bros, probably due to his history as an ex-con, reached out and nabbed my pack of gem-tone markers.

  He then waved them in the air. “I’m pretty sure Lee wrote in the employee handbook that there are no pink markers allowed on the premises.”

  “That’s not pink,” I shared. “It’s fuchsia.” I reached out to the sorbet pack and tapped it with my nail (coated in Clothing Optional of course). “This one has the pink.”

  Seeing as Vance was taking my attention, I didn’t clock Hector picking up a sheet of stickers.

  “You got somethin’ wrong with your hand?” he asked.

  “No,” I answered.

  “Then why you got stickers that say ‘trash day,’ ‘treat yo’self,’ ‘laundry time,’ and ‘but first, coffee’ when you can write that shit out yourself?”

  “Because they have a cute font and cute little pictures,” I told him as the door to the inner sanctum opened. “And they’re stickers. Everyone likes stickers.”

  “Little kids like stickers,” Vance pointed out.

  He’d know. He was in the process of making an army of them with Jules.

  “I’m becoming one with my inner child,” I informed him snottily.

  “So you’re organizing your life, you’re not using stickers and purple markers to organize the men,” Luke declared, like he’d just about allow this but only under some duress.

  “I’m organizing all you all’s asses too,” I shared and finished, “With purple markers. Though you’re purple, as in grape sorbet,” I told Luke. “Vance is teal. And Hector is amethyst.”

  “Shit,” Hector muttered.

  “Holy fuck,” Mace muttered, rounding the end of my desk with Lee, eyes aimed down, and stopping there.

  When Lee came to a halt with Mace, his brows hiked high. “What’s all this shit?”

  Thank God I no longer carried a switchblade.

  “I’m organizing!” I nearly shouted.

  Lee reached out and tagged the pack of handy, glittery, metallic elastic bands I bought to keep my planner closed, say, when I threw it in my purse or in my car.

  “Did you buy this shit on the business account?” he asked.

  “Some of it,” I answered.

  Lee’s brows sunk low and most people, men or women, would lose control of their bladder at that look.

  I was accustomed to it.

  “You bought stickers with mushrooms on them on the NI dime?” Mace asked, waving my autumn stickers.

  “Those are for around Thanksgiving time,” I shared as the door to the inner sanctum opened again.

  “And this is?” Hector asked, and I looked to him to see him brandishing a laminated picture that had a pink peppermint house with a snowflake on the door, a curlicue pine tree next to it fashioned in white and glitter, and swirls and snowflakes in the air all around against a blue background with my name in pink on it.

  “That’s my Christmas cover,” I explained. “I have one for Thanksgiving, Easter, the Fourth of July and one for when I’m wearing blacks and silvers, instead of browns and golds.”

  “You change the cover of your planner with your outfit?” Vance asked.

  “And the season,” I answered.

  “That go on the business account too?” Lee asked.

  I swung to him. “Hell no.”

  Though the Thanksgiving, Easter, Fourth of July and etcetera stickers went on it because they had ones that said To Do.

  “Ohmigod! Dope! You got planner stickers!” Brody, the Nightingale Investigations computer guru (meaning nerd, alternately meaning hacker, but mostly it was nerd) shrieked (see? nerd). He dashed around the desk to stand by me, his hand snaking out to grab the entire sheet that had stickers that said, Jammin’ on my planner. He looked at me with bright shining in his eyes that was undimmed through his Buddy Holly glasses. “Can I have a sheet of these?”

  Since those were on the NI dime too, I stated magnanimously, “Knock yourself out.”

  “Whoa!” Brody yelled, looking back down to my desk. “Where’d you get these ones that say ‘don’t be a dick’ and ‘fuck this’? I gotta get some of those.”

  I decided not to meet any eyes as I replied, “Take one. I bought five.”

  “Yee ha!” he cried, snatching it up.

  “Who’s Moses Richardson?”

  My heart clean stopped in my chest, but my eyes moved to Hector.

  They did this slowly, but they moved.

  He was holding Moses’s business card.

  Stupid me, I’d upended most of my purse on my desk in my quest to get organized.

  And since I was carrying around Moses’s card like a personal talisman, it had fallen out.

  Then again, none of the men had ever shown the least interest in what was on my desk.

  And then again to that, it was rare anything was on my desk but a bottle of nail varnish and/or acetone.

  Hector’s attention was on the card.

  “Director of Juvenile Probation.” He looked at me. “You got a problem with the boys?”

  “No,” I pushed out.

  “There’s a number on the back,” Brody informed Hector helpfully.

  Hector flipped the card.

  Luke turned his head to look at it. Vance leaned in to look across Luke at it. Mace was also looking at it even if, from his position, he couldn’t see it. Though he had badass vision, so maybe he could see it, what did I know? I was a little badass but not like them.

  Lee was watching me.

  “Can you all move along?” I asked as a demand. “I’ve got a plan to organize your mission for tonight with peach sorbet being tactical and lime sorbet being surveillance.”

  Luke looked to me. “You seein’ a juvie officer, Shirleen?”

  Most of the time, considering some of the stuff they did was vaguely illegal and not-so-vaguely unsafe, I thought it was great they were all highly intelligent and uncannily perceptive.

  This was not one of those times.

  “We met. He asked me out. I said no. He
gave me his card should I rethink. The end,” I told him.

  Luke looked to Lee.

  Mace looked to Vance.

  Hector looked back down at the card.

  Brody looked at me. “Why’d you say no?”

  “Have I ever struck you as a woman who shares her personal life?” I asked.

  “I was over at your house watching Tarzan two weeks ago and you pulled out your family albums,” Brody reminded me. “All twelve of them.”

  Damn.

  “I was drunk,” I lied.

  “You were not.” He called me on it.

  “Alexander Skarsgård got me to feelin’ sentimental,” I snapped.

  “That, from you, I can believe,” Vance muttered.

  I swept a hand above my desk. “Does it look like I don’t have things to do? Once I color code your mission tonight, I have a year’s worth of holiday stickers to stick into my planner, and that shit includes Flag Day and cyber Monday and Palm Sunday, so it’s gonna be intense. In other words, I got shit to do.”

  “Why’d you say no?” Lee asked.

  Oh no.

  This question did not bode well.

  And the intent way he was examining my face boded even worse.

  “This really isn’t your business,” I replied quietly.

  Lee held my eyes.

  But he’d broken the seal.

  “You not into him?” Luke asked.

  I turned my attention to Luke. “I already got a full life, don’t need anything making it fuller.”

  “You’re into him,” Luke whispered.

  Shit.

  “There’s full, Shirleen, then there’s full,” Vance noted.

  “Are we really standing around my desk talking about my love life?” I demanded.

  “No,” Lee stated shortly. “We’re standin’ around it talking about the fact you don’t have one.”

  “And how’s that your business?” I queried sharply.

  Every single man, including nerdy Brody, leaned back from my desk in badass affront (the badass part not including Brody).

  Okay, I had to give them that since I meddled in almost all of theirs (save Brody, who didn’t have one (yet) and Lee, considering I wasn’t around when he and Indy hooked up—okay, all of theirs).

  “This isn’t the same,” I stated.

  “Yeah, you’re right. This isn’t the same as you helpin’ Ava get dressed up to go out on a date with another guy when she was sleepin’ in my bed,” Luke rumbled.

  Oh Lordy.

  “That wasn’t a date,” I reminded him. “It was a thank-you dinner. And anyway, Ava was the first Rock Chick I was in charge of. I didn’t have a lot of experience.”

  This was now years ago, the woman was wearing his ring, and he still did not look happy this event occurred.

  Damn, I told that girl it was a bad idea. Did she listen to me? Noooooo. She went. On a thank-you dinner that seemed a lot like a date with a hot guy the man whose bed she was sleeping in didn’t like all that much, primarily because he’d asked the woman who was sleeping in his bed out to a thank-you dinner that was really a date.

  And now she was still sleeping in Luke’s bed, doing it with a ring on it, and was she paying for that shit she pulled?

  Noooooo.

  She was getting the business.

  Regular.

  While I’d named my vibrator Eustace because he knew me better than any man on earth.

  And I was getting Ava’s man all up in my business.

  “And that guy she went out on a date with is who my sister is now livin’ with,” Lee put in.

  Hmm.

  I shut up.

  “You went with Sadie when she reported her rape.”

  After Hector spoke, I pulled my lips in and looked at him.

  “You’re a member of this family, Shirleen,” he said quietly. “Once you’re in, there’s no way out. What I’m thinkin’ you might not get with this is,” he flapped Moses’s card in front of himself, “that’s a good thing.”

  “He crashed his cart into mine at King Soopers,” I blurted.

  Me!

  Shirleen Jackson.

  Blurting!

  To badasses!!!

  “Deliberately?” Mace growled.

  Oh boy.

  Short-fuse Mace.

  He was getting it regular too, from his woman Stella, so his fuse should be less short.

  But he, like all the Hot Bunch boys, was of the Roam variety.

  You didn’t fuck with someone he loved.

  “I’d been kinda, um . . . running away from him all through the frozen food section,” I explained.

  Vance’s head dropped and turned to the side.

  I still saw his shit-eating grin.

  And his body shaking with silent laughter.

  What I said didn’t make Mace much happier.

  “So you clearly didn’t want his attention, he shoulda took the hint and backed the fuck off.”

  All of the men dropped their heads and looked to the side at that.

  “Yeah, and how’d that work for you when you so delicately pursued Stella after she told you repeatedly you guys were over?” I asked.

  Mace’s jaw went hard.

  “Unh-hunh,” I said on a head snap.

  Lee came back to the conversation before I could carry on about how he’d not backed off from Indy when she’d tried to make him do so (and Vance had not done that with Jules, or Luke from Ava, and so on). “So you’re into him, and he’s chasing you through the frozen food section. Why’d you say no?”

  “He’s attractive, but not my type.”

  “What’s your type?” Vance asked curiously.

  “Not him.”

  Brody piped up. “Alexander Skarsgård. Gerard Butler. Dwayne Johnson. Idris Elba—”

  His mouth was still open when I turned and ordered, “Shut up, Brody.”

  His mouth closed.

  I was glaring at him and mentally deciding no more Brody-Shirleen Movie Nights (at least for a month, what could I say, Brody and I had similar cinematic leanings) when Luke declared, “We’re on mission in an hour.”

  “Yeah, and it’s not color coded yet,” I put in.

  Luke gave me a blank look.

  Vance shook his head.

  The rest of the men started to move away.

  “My card,” I snapped at Hector, who still had Moses’s card.

  Hector turned back, mouth open.

  Vance’s mouth opened.

  Mace’s mouth opened.

  I didn’t look, but I was sure Brody’s mouth opened.

  Luke’s mouth thinned.

  But it was Lee who spoke.

  “Give her back the card, Hector.”

  Hector set it on my desk, his liquid black gaze to me before it shifted to Lee.

  I didn’t touch it or say another word as all the men moved through the door to the inner sanctum.

  Only then did I snatch it up and clip it with one of my (four) new magnetic paper clips to the week of Christmas, which was nine months away.

  Because I had a feeling Moses Richardson was like Christmas when it was April.

  Joy and goodness and dreams coming true . . .

  But still . . .

  So far away.

  Lee Nightingale

  Twenty-four hours later . . .

  Lee walked into the control room, asking, “What we got?”

  Luke shifted away from the desk Hector and Mace were also standing at to expose Vance in a chair, rolling over from the other desk in the room to the one Monty was sitting behind with his laptop in front of him.

  Monty looked up from the laptop and didn’t fuck around with laying it out.

  “Moses James Richardson. Fifty-one years of age. Army, honorable discharge. Distinguished Service Cross recipient.” His eyes locked on Lee’s. “Kuwait. Sierra Leone. Bosnia. Kuwait. Somalia. Bosnia.”

  “Holy fuck,” Lee whispered.

  “His boots got dusty,” Monty replied.

>   “Shit yeah,” Lee replied, impressed.

  That kind of résumé meant his unit was elite.

  Monty looked back to the laptop. “Married seven years. Divorce acrimonious, but since then they’ve straightened shit out and his ex is remarried. Two daughters, one seventeen, one fifteen. Both honor roll. Oldest drill team. Youngest, sophomore class president.”

  “How’d he get into juvie work?” Lee asked.

  “Far’s I can see from his interview notes, he had a cousin. His uncle was a good man, kid just had a tendency to go off the rails. Kid was younger than him, but Richardson took him under his wing. They were tight, helped keep him on the straight and narrow as best he could. While Richardson was occupied with earning his Distinguished Service Cross, the cousin got into some trouble that bought him being tried as an adult at seventeen and hitting the big house for a dime. After Richardson got out of the Army, used the GI Bill to get his degree, went into the Academy, became a beat cop, made detective. But eventually he moved over. Did his time as a juvenile corrections officer, now he oversees that outfit. What we got, he’s still very hands on with the kids in a way it’s not a job, it’s a mission.”

  Monty turned the laptop around and on it was the photo panel of a Facebook page album entitled “Me and my dad.”

  His youngest daughter was pretty.

  Her dad was built.

  And the man was good-looking.

  “So no red flags,” Lee noted, starting to look at Monty, but Luke grunting switched his attention.

  It was Monty who spoke.

  “He undoubtedly knew Park and probably knew Roam. Which means he might know Shirleen.”

  Lee felt his neck get tight. “Say again.”

  “Both Park and Roam went through Gilliam, Lee,” Monty shared. “Richardson was there when they were there. Park was there more often than Roam. Roam only hit juvie once, Park was there repeatedly.”

  “So how’s he gonna know Shirleen?” Lee asked.

  “It wasn’t exactly off radar how Jules and King’s Shelter finagled that placement, two teenage street kids placed in foster care with an ex-drug dealer who had not gone through the program. This right after a social worker was shot twice trying to protect one of those kids. It caused some ripples. It isn’t a stretch this guy, working in the system as long as he has for the reasons he quit being a cop and became a JCO, heard that word.”