The look in his eyes wasn’t disgust, it was… appreciation. Respect. Gen shook her head and laughed. “You aren’t supposed to be impressed by that.”
“Genesis, I told you up front I’m an outlaw. I have my own moral code, and I handle things my way, the law be damned. Breaking the dude’s hand was the right way to keep him from coming back to my club and pawing it all over another woman. My code. My way. We don’t tolerate drugs, not because they’re illegal but because they fuck up families. I’ll tell you a lot more about the way we operate in the coming days and weeks, and I want you to understand through it all, it’s about our own moral compass, not the one the rest of the world uses.”
“But I just told you I’ve gone places that weren’t moral, though I stayed in the law. In some ways, that makes me worse than you. You keep it moral, even if others don’t agree with your definition.”
She sat up, realized she didn’t have a bra on under her light yellow tee, and pulled the pillow to her front nonchalantly, as if she wanted to lean into it as she talked.
His eyes narrowed. “You went against your own morals, or someone else’s?”
Gen opened her mouth to say she went against her own morals, but realized that wasn’t exactly right. She closed her mouth, thought a few seconds, and said, “It’s complicated.”
“Tell me.”
She shook her head.
“Gen, this is about trust. You know I wore a gun while drinking at Sticky Fingers. You know I broke a man’s hand last night. I’m not gonna hide what I do from you, I don’t want you hiding, either.”
“Okay, but it’s a long story. Maybe I can tell it while we cook?”
Duke didn’t let Gen help, he sat her on the counter where she was close, and where he could stop and give her the occasional kiss on the cheek, or nose, or forehead. He touched her almost every time he walked by, and by the time he put the pancakes with a side of eggs and steak on two plates, she was getting used to his touch. She’d put a robe on before they went downstairs, but she still felt exposed, sitting on the counter without a bra. Duke had made her feel comfortable, though.
He caressed, stroked, kissed, and occasionally fondled, but it was caring with an undertone of sex. He wasn’t trying to get in her pants, but Gen thought some of his touches were more intimate than sex. He handled her as if he’d claimed her, as if he had a right to, and she couldn’t find the motivation to correct his thinking.
She had to work her way around the story, which she could have told him in a few sentences, but needed him to understand her motivations.
When she finished her twenty minute story, he looked at her with a grin and summed it up. “So, you found out another Realtor was working with the bank to fast-track foreclosures on the easiest to sell property, you hired a hacker to find out what properties the bank had in the pipeline, close to being able to foreclose on, and you went in and worked deals with the homeowners for you to either list the property and sell it fast, or for you to buy it from them and then sell it, in which case you split the profits with them? And when the Realtor and banker approached you and threatened you, the CEO of the bank received documentation showing what they’d been doing, but in a way that kept you out of it?”
“Yeah. Since I got the info from the hacker and could approach the homeowners before the bank started the process of foreclosure, before there was an official paper trail, no one could tie me into what they were doing.”
“You considered how to do this and keep yourself out of trouble, and how to cover your ass should they figure you out? You planned it all from the start?”
She nodded, and he pulled the pan off the eye as he threw his head back and laughed, and then leaned forward and kept laughing. When he finally stopped and went back to cooking, she said, “It’s not a funny story, Duke.”
He cut his eyes to her and said, “One of the biggest issues local law enforcement has with us is what they call vigilante justice. The area around our compound is clean, with no drugs because we beat the hell out of any drug dealers in our territory, take all their cash, destroy any drugs they have on them, and give them a message to take back to their organization. You may not have used your fists, but that was vigilante justice. You followed your own moral code, and you helped people who needed help. Doesn’t matter you found a way to make a profit, because those homeowners were way better off with you looking out for them than they would’ve been on their own.”
He flipped a pancake and added, “Something tells me, you and Brain strategizing together might be downright scary. He thinks in numbers and legal terms, and he’s also a hacker, so if you need any more hacking in the future, bring it to us, yeah? Want to make sure you stay safe.”