“No,” Cass said.
“Decidedly not,” Raven said, and then cocked her head, and smiled wickedly. “At least, she never has been. But who knows what might happen when she meets the old man who stole her daughter away.”
“Aw,come on.”
Twenty-Eight
Raven dropped her wedding bomb on them—Shep honestly felt a little bad that Cass hadn’t been involved, and hadn’t gotten to make any decisions, creative as she was, but she seemed content enough with Raven’s efforts, and the clock was ticking besides—then swung on her cape like some kind of opera villain and whisked her way out the door.
Since it was Saturday, and Cass didn’t have school, she’d planned to spend most of the day working on her gallery pieces. She went to change into her painting clothes and connected her phone to the Bluetooth speaker over in her studio window.
The Fox boys, Shep knew, weren’t the sort to sit around and watch TV. “You two come with me,” he said, as he shrugged into his cut. “I’ve got midday patrol in Brooklyn and you might as well make yourselves useful.”
Tenny was still mopping up egg yolk with his last corner of toast, and lifted a disbelieving look Shep’s way. “You’re not giving me orders, are you?”
“You’re in my city,” Shep said, “in my house—”
“The club’s house.”
Fuck Tenny and his technicalities. And his superiority. Shep had sat at the kitchen island an hour ago and watched Tenny go cow-eyed and stupid over Reese. He could play assassin all he wanted, but the kid had a melted caramel center.
Shep put his shoulders back, and cocked his head, and played up every second of their age difference. “When your bottom rocker says ‘Tennessee,’ and you come where I’m living, and you let yourself in in the middle of the night, and you scare my old lady while she’s in bed, you’re inmy house. And this righthere.” He tapped the Sergeant at Arms patch on the front of his cut. “That means I outrank you. Get your ass up, and come on.”
Tenny stared at him a moment, staredthroughhim, and it was incredible how different Cassandra’s blue eyes looked in Tenny’s face, what they were capable of. Shep had a vision of a flashing hand, a wink of metal, and a thrown knife landing in his throat. But the thing about little shits: you had to risk the knife to knock them down a peg or two.
Nobody was going to embroider that shit on a pillow, but it made sense to Shep.
The knife didn’t come. After a few long beats, Tenny grinned, and slid off his stool. “Aye aye, sergeant.”
“Shuddup. Get your shit.”
~*~
“How’d you get here so fast?” Shep asked as the three of them crossed the lobby. “You fly?”
“Yeah. Ian let us use the jet.”
“Rich prick,” Shep said, without any heat. Ian wasn’t the sort of person he wanted to hang out and have a beer with, but he doted on the girls, and his riches had come in handy more than once.
A pleasant thought struck. “That means you don’t have a ride.”
“Oh no.” Tenny slipped his shades on, smug. “Ian helped with that, too.”
A black Range Rover sat parked at the curb out front.
“Man, fuck you guys,” Shep muttered.
An arm, Tenny’s, slung around his shoulders. “Only if you ask nice,” he said with a nasty chuckle. He laughed when Shep shoved him away.
Surprisingly, Reese was the one who slid behind the wheel. “You can take shotgun,” Tenny offered, and climbed into the back. “Manhattan traffic makes me want to shoot someone.”
Can he drive?Shep wanted to ask. Reese was, according to everyone who knew him, “a lot better” than he used to be, whatever the hell that meant. But he cranked the Rover, checked the street, and pulled smoothly away from the curb, so Shep assumed he’d operated a vehicle before.
Shep pointed through the windshield. “Take the next right. We’re gonna—”
“Pffft,” Tenny interrupted from the back seat. “Just put the address in the GPS. He’s not stupid.”
A glance in the rearview proved that Tenny sat slumped across the center of the seat, bent over his phone, but his gaze flashed up to meet Shep’s in the mirror, and it bristled with a clear threat.
