Bounty(96)

Deke fought back the urge to slap her ass as she passed and sipped his coffee after she closed the door.

He did that sipping grinning.

The grin faded as he started thinking.

She did not have a desk job. She wrote music. She could do that anywhere. He even saw her doing it years ago, late night in a crowded biker bar.

She’d also lived a relatively rootless life and sustained no damage from it. The way she was, the things she said, the only roots she needed were bedded deep in the people she loved and that never went away even if they weren’t close.

She had a big house by a river in the mountains that was going to be spectacular. But she was more at home in a trailer by a lake.

She also had a shit ton of money but did not live large. She might be able to order furniture on the fly and pay for that in cash but she didn’t have a butler, she didn’t wobble around in designer shoes and she didn’t eat caviar for lunch.

She was famous but one of the most real, down-to-earth women he’d met.

And she could take life’s knocks, some of them brutal, and keep on ticking. Fuck, she’d been strangled near to death and that very night she talked to him about all the blessings God gave her.

Yeah, Deke was finally paying attention.

He’d watched Tate go down to Lauren and Tate did not do that fighting. He went down and stayed down because he liked the peace and beauty Lauren brought to his and his son’s lives.

And Deke had watched Ty fight it with Lexie, nearly lose her, and make adjustments to the man he thought he was just so that shit would not ever happen.

Chace had fought Faye too. She was shy, sweet, but she loved him so it didn’t take her long to pull her man’s head out of his ass.

And it was Emme who fought Deck, and even if the demons she was battling were fierce, he never gave up.

His buddy Ham, and his wife Zara, on the other hand, had history together. It wasn’t all pretty but what was far uglier was the baggage life had given them. In the end, they both were smart enough to know, you got a shot at good and a possible life where you faced the bad with someone who meant everything to you, you didn’t squander it. So they hadn’t. And Ham just that week told him Zara was knocked up with baby number two.

Deke had garbage in his past he had to work through. He was aware of it. He knew he had to get past it to give Jussy what she wanted—giving them a go.

Deke also knew he was a simple man but he wasn’t a stupid man.

He’d watched and he’d learned.

He might not have been quick on the uptake.

But after he got Jussy through that day, and that night, he sure as fuck would be in remedying that because one thing he’d learned from all the watching he’d done was a man’s garbage got sorted a fuckuva lot faster when he was man enough to let a good woman help him rifle through it.

And set it aside.



* * * * *



“Is this normal?” Jussy asked.

He glanced her way then back to the road.

It was after their showers, the water tanks filled and in the bed in the back of his truck. They were heading to his trailer to dump them, pick up their contribution to brunch (a case of beer, a bottle of bourbon, and some casserole Jussy had thrown together last night, put in the fridge and would bake at Krys’s place).

“Is what normal?”

“Brunch at Krys and Bubba’s,” she explained. “Krys doesn’t strike me as a brunch-type person.”

She wasn’t.

What she was was a woman who knew a friend of hers had been attacked and left with the threat that the attacker would return in a week, that week had passed, and now Krys was doing what she could to keep her mind off the fact that day had come.

“Think she’s tryin’ her hand at domesticity,” Deke noted, and maybe it wasn’t a total lie.

“God, if brunch is domesticity, I want no part in it,” she muttered.

Deke grinned at the windshield.

Anytime she said shit like that…

Hell, every time and there were a lot of them.

Fuck, it was beginning to feel like Justice Lonesome had been made for him.

“Not a quiche kinda person?” he asked.

“Quiche is to food what pet sweaters are to little dogs. An evil invented for unfathomable reasons.”

“Hear some of them little dogs get cold,” Deke noted, still grinning.

He knew she turned her head his way when she replied, “They have fur, Deke.”

“Some of it’s sparse, Jussy.”

“Then don’t force them out into the cold while you go shopping or wander the park or whatever these people do with accessory dogs. Little bugger gets his or her walk and does his or her business then goes home to camp out in front of the fireplace or the furnace register. They need exercise, throw a damn toy for them in the living room. Don’t dress them in a ridiculous sweater and make them prance through snow that’s taller than them. It’s undignified and inhumane.”