Ava flopped backward across the bed, the slats beneath the mattress creaking and groaning just as she remembered.
“Ha!” Maggie said. “And that’s the reason he can’t sneak down the hall in the middle of the night.”
“Remind me again why I decided to live at home while I went to grad school,” Ava muttered, smiling despite herself.
“Because you couldn’t live a moment longer without your wise mother’s daily advice.”
Maggie came and sat on the edge of the bed, at her hip, and the tiredness stole over her again, pushing down at her shoulders and drawing her gaze downward.
“How’s Andre?” Ava asked.
Maggie shook her head. “He died on the way to the hospital. Jackie just called. Collier’s upset, because he was his sponsor back when Andre prospected.” The breath left her in a slow rush “This is going to be bad,” she mused.
“I picked a bad time to come home, huh?”
“No.” Maggie twitched a smile and reached over to pat the soft underside of Ava’s wrist. “It’s never a bad time for you to come home.”
Across the hall, the bathroom door opened, releasing a cloud of steam, and a wet-haired Ronnie, his t-shirt sticking to his damp chest. Ava watched the way the cotton outlined his tennis player’s physique, waited for the butterflies to stir in her stomach, and felt less than disappointed when they didn’t.
“Did the water stay hot?” Maggie asked him with layered-on cheer. “I keep telling Ghost the water heater’s fine, but he won’t stop talking about getting a new one.”
Ronnie paused in the act of toweling his hair, frozen in the hallway, his gaze swapping between the two of them on the bed. Ava felt the reservation in him, that sudden caution. The world had been showing her that caution since she was a toddler, whenever anyone found out where she came from, and who her people were.
It was the first time Ronnie had shown her The Fear. “It…stayed hot,” he said, his expression slack.
Maggie stood, cheery and pretending she didn’t notice. “Great. I’ve got you a bed on the couch all fixed. Come take a look.”
“Um…okay.” He looked at Ava, The Fear intensifying.
“Not in my dad’s house,” she said with a sigh. “Sorry.”
When he trudged away, she stared at the ceiling, her mind spinning away from him, toward Andre, what had happened to the club that night because of it. Someone had murdered a member. That wouldn’t be taken lightly. There would be retribution. There could even be war.
She closed her eyes and remembered Mercy’s warm hands on her skin. Her pulse leapt at the memory of his tongue in her mouth.
“Welcome home, Ava,” she whispered.
“You all set? You need anything else?” Maggie asked on her way through the living room.
Ronnie was sitting on his makeshift bed, holding his cell phone which he’d just plugged into a wall outlet to charge. He looked skittish as a colt, eyes too open and mouth too small. “Maybe just a glass of water.”
“Okay.” She proceeded on into the kitchen, where she got down two short glasses. One she filled with water at the tap. The other with two good splashes of the Jack Daniels she pulled down from on top of the fridge.
When she returned, Ronnie stood up and accepted his water. “Thanks.” As he sat again, his eyes came to the whiskey, its lush amber color, as she raised the glass to her lips and took a sip.
“Sorry.” She twitched a smile as she stepped backward and lowered herself into the little slipper chair where she liked to have her six a.m. coffee. “Been a long day. I’d offer you some, but you don’t look like a whiskey man.”
He blinked, some of that trepidation replaced with the gentle coloring of rich-boy indignation. He might have come from a completely different side of the tracks from the men in Maggie’s life, but there was one thing she’d found to be true of all men: they didn’t like to have their masculinity questioned.
“So, Ronnie.” Maggie hooked her legs over the arm of the chair and got comfy, glass held against her chest. “You’re going to grad school at UT too?”
“It’s one of my top choices.”
“What’s your area of study?”
“Business. Marketing, specifically.”
“A salesman.” She sipped her Jack and kept her face neutral. She let her eyes take in the little details of him, plucking at areas she hadn’t had the chance to see earlier: the aristocratic shape to his lips, the feathering at his hairline, the flat, glassy color of his eyes. She saw his pulse in a tiny vein along his throat, saw that it was elevated. Saw the sheen of perspiration at his temples. He was a fit, handsome boy, all-American, clean-cut, and made for meeting girls’ parents. “There’s lots of money to be made in that,” she said. “I had a cousin who sold office equipment and ended up a millionaire.”
