14. Solitaire
14
SOLITAIRE
Hugger
An alarm went off that sounded like birds tweeting.
Jesus , Diana woke up to tweeting birds.
Hugger was partly on his stomach, partly on his side.
Diana was tucked to his back.
He felt her shift, the softness of her lips pressed to his back, the softness of her voice ordering the alarm to stop, and then she rolled out of bed.
He opened his eyes and saw his gun on the nightstand.
He moved his gaze and watched her ass in loose shorts covered in daisies disappear behind the closed door in the bathroom.
He rolled to his back and lifted both hands to rub them over his face.
When he was smoothing down his beard, he saw Di’s 3D white flower hanging over the bed, and he felt her soft sheets and perfect-mix-of-firm-and-soft mattress.
“ What the fuck am I doing?” he muttered to himself.
He heard the shower go on and his morning wood made itself known.
“ Christ , what the fuck am I doing?” he repeated, again on a mutter.
Yesterday , the day they woke up without Maddy , had been a chill day.
Even so, Diana had moped through it, and Hugger found he liked she didn’t try to hide her upset Maddy was gone.
She didn’t make a drama about it, but he and big Petey knew she was suffering. They didn’t have to guess, and they didn’t have to worry she was tamping down shit that would explode at some future time and bite everyone around her in the ass.
Hugger had never had a relationship that lasted over two months. He’d never lived with a woman, outside his mother.
But his mother had moods.
Then again, he did too.
Whenever he’d hear a man bitch about a moody woman, he didn’t get it. Like , that man didn’t have emotions too, and show them? Like a woman was supposed to float through life singing, smiling and twirling like fucking Sleeping Beauty ?
Sure , it sucked when his ma got pissy.
Though , she didn’t like it much when he did either.
Also the day before, Hugger felt a weird warmth hit his gut at witnessing how Di let Big Petey look after her.
The man was a brother’s brother. When it came to his Club , Pete was not skimpy with his experience or wisdom.
But he was a woman’s man in the sense he set himself up as dad, uncle or grandpa to every female he met in order to offer them what they needed.
Hugger reckoned that was a father who only had one daughter. If you were a good man, and Big Petey was the best, that’s just what happened when you made a girl.
So Pete was in his element with Di .
In fact, the last few days, Big Petey had seemed more himself, and more content, than he had in a long time.
It went further though, because Hugger knew Di sensed it, and she gave him that.
Because she was Di .
All about giving.
Late in the afternoon, they got news from Scott that Maddy and her family were safe and settled.
Scott also shared Imran , Esad , and Esad’s boys were proving hard to find, and in the raid they conducted on the house where the suspected activity was happening, they discovered it had been cleared out. Though , there was evidence of recent occupancy, and it was not the kind of evidence that pointed at a nuclear family living there.
They believed they also discovered Maddy’s crime scene, and what they found there indicated it was the scene of many other crimes, so they had a lot to process.
All that was moving forward, which was good, just not very fast, which was expected.
The last thing about the day before was Hugger had let Di con him into sleeping beside her again.
Truth , it didn’t take much.
And she copped to what she was doing right away.
All she said was, “ Warning , incoming emotional manipulation.” She then made her pretty green eyes all soft and sweet and begged, “ Please don’t make me sleep alone tonight.”
Yep , that was it.
Again , it didn’t take much.
Now , Maddy was gone and life was going to go back to normal for Diana . Although they were keeping her covered, with Maddy out of the picture, the Babi?s had no beef with Diana , so no reason to fuck with her.
Armitage was a different story. But Hugger guessed you didn’t make it far, even in the criminal world, by wasting your time and resources on someone who mildly inconvenienced you.
That meant they’d likely find out soon there was no reason for Hugger to be in Phoenix anymore, except to be with Diana .
It also meant there was nothing in the way of them exploring what they had either.
This made Hugger uneasy.
He had his Club . A job he did so he could do his bit for the Club , but he couldn’t say he liked it. What he could say was that it passed the time. He had a house he didn’t give a shit about. A bank account that was healthy, because he rarely spent any money.
And that was it.
Di had friends, family, a job she did that she dug and a stylish pad that had her stamp all over it. They were having dinner with her father that night and she was having cocktails with her friends on Friday . This meant she had more social engagements in one week than Hugger had in the last six months. And the only one he had was a Chaos hog roast, so that was about the entire brotherhood and their family, he could go or skip it, it didn’t matter, so it wasn’t about Hugger .
She had a life.
He had an existence.
That wasn’t a lot to offer a good woman.
On that cheery thought, he angled out of bed, hit the guest bathroom to do his business, then hit the kitchen to make coffee.
While it was brewing, he went back to the bedroom to check his phone.
Like he’d been getting the last twenty-four hours, not overwhelmingly, but there had been more than just one, there was another call from Tack .
Hugger had been avoiding those calls, and had reason.
Now , he didn’t really have a reason.
He still didn’t call the man back.
He returned to the coffee and saw it was brewed. He poured himself a cup, and one for Di .
He took them back to her room and called through the bathroom door. “ Babe , you decent? Got coffee.”
Within half a second, the door flew open, and he saw her standing there with her hair twisted up in a weird towel, a short robe covering the rest of her body.
Her face looked slimy.
For a second, she seemed suspended in motion, her eyes locked to his bare chest.
His morning wood was gone, but her staring at his chest like that was making it threaten to come back.
Before he had to say something to snap her out of it, like warning her if she didn’t quit looking at him like that, she’d find herself fucked for the first time by him on her bathroom floor with her face shiny and her hair in a weird towel, her gaze shifted to the mug in his hand.
“ Oh my God , you just rawk ,” she declared, taking her cup of coffee, leaning in for a quick kiss of his beard, then turning to go into the bathroom to her sink, which had makeup spread all around it.
He went to his own.
“ Sleep good?” Diana asked, her ass shaking as she rubbed what seemed like more slime on her face.
He took the toothbrush out of the fancy cup she had on her counter and answered, “ Yeah .”
“ Me too. I’m surprised. But I felt a lot better when Rayne called and said they were safe.”
He spread toothpaste on the brush and replied, “ Yeah .”
He started brushing as he watched her start to do shit to her eyelids as she babbled, “ So , Dad wants us over at six thirty. I think I should bring something. A sort of ‘ I come in peace’ gesture. But he’s a dude, so I don’t think flowers, even though he’s got fresh flowers all over his office. He drinks gin, so maybe a bottle of Hendrick’s . But he can afford his own gin. Though , it’s the thought that counts, right?”
Hugger had brushed, spit, rinsed and was about to splash water on his face, but when she asked her question, he said, “ I think all he gives a shit about is you bringing is you.”
He splashed water on his face.
“ Right ,” she muttered.
He was toweling down when he turned to her, and now she was at it with a thin brush.
She also didn’t seem to have any problem with him standing right there.
“ You live with a man before, baby?” he asked quietly.
Thin brush pointed to her eyelid, she turned her head his way. “ Yes . Twice .” She shifted her attention back to the mirror. “ The first one I caught texting and sexting his high school girlfriend, who’d moved to Virginia . They weren’t doing the deed physically, but they were totally doing it mentally. I broke up with him. He acted like that was the end of his world, but within a month, he’d found a job in Virginia and moved there to be with her.”
She switched brushes, grabbed a long, narrow box off the counter, flipped it open to expose a bunch of eyeshadows that were a bunch of colors in the same shade, and went at it again.
“ They got engaged,” she continued. “ A month before the wedding, he found her schtupping the guy she dumped to be with him, because, yes, when they were texting and sexting, she was with someone too. They were doing it in the bed he shared with her. The wedding wasn’t called off. She just married the other guy during it. My ex was so humiliated, he came back to Phoenix . He tried to start it up again with me, but that was definitely a no-go.”
Hugger was now leaning a hip against her bathroom counter, arms crossed on his chest, watching her put on makeup and listening.
“ Wild story, babe. But sounds like you dodged a drama bullet.”
“ Yep ,” she agreed. Then , all Diana what seemed to be all the time, she kept giving it. “ The other guy, well, we just weren’t meant for each other. It was crazy, but we both kinda figured out we were going through the motions at the same time. He asked if we could have a quiet night ‘to chat’ the same day I was going to go home and ask him to have a ‘chat.’”
She shrugged and switched up makeup shit.
And she kept talking.
“ We’re still friends, mostly. I mean, if I ran into him, we’d be nice to each other. We don’t hang out or anything.”
“ Right ,” he muttered.
“ You ?” she asked the mirror.
“ What ?”
She turned to him. “ Have you ever lived with anybody?”
“ My ma. A coupla roommates. No woman,” he shared, feeling some discomfort in doing it.
Her brows drifted up. “ How old are you?”
“ Thirty -five. And just so you know, never had a woman in my life for more than a coupla months either.”
Now she was staring at him. “ Really ?”
He nodded.
“ You’re sweet. You’re protective. You’re insanely hot. You bring a girl coffee. So the question must be asked, why on earth not?”
It felt good, all those things she said about him.
Damn good.
But that was an excellent question.
The one who he had, Mandy , was solid. Great smile. Good in bed. Had her shit together.
Though , if it had lasted with Mandy , he wouldn’t have a shot with Diana , so he was glad it didn’t.
“ Harlan ?” Diana called.
He focused on her and said quietly, “ Think that’s part of the shit I didn’t want to lay on you, baby. And we gotta talk about that, because, now we’re without any distractions, we gotta figure out what this is and how hard we wanna fight for it.”
“ I think I already know how hard I wanna fight for it,” she declared.
Now he felt even more uncomfortable.
“ Babe —”
She shook her head and turned to the mirror, interrupting him. “ This isn’t a conversation for now. Let’s have a normal day, the dinner with Dad notwithstanding. We can make a date to talk about serious stuff later. I’m thinking Saturday . No , we should have a fun day Saturday . Let’s do it Sunday .”
Hugger felt his lips curl up. “ Right . So we got a date to do that Sunday , four days from now when we’re essentially livin’ together and I’ll be going to work with you, so we got all sorts of time to talk.”
She was at her cheeks with a bigger brush. “ But we’re talking about that stuff on Sunday .”
“ Right ,” he repeated.
“ Do you want me to take my makeup to the bedroom to finish this so you can shower?”
“ I can shower in the guest room.”
She pushed closer to the mirror to get a better view of what she was doing, which tipped her fine ass up, and she did this while mumbling, “ Okay , honey.”
He liked the sight of her ass tipped up like that in her short robe. He liked that she called him honey. He also liked that she seemed totally cool with putting on her makeup while he brushed his teeth beside her, in her nice bathroom with the handles on her sky-blue drawers and cupboards being glass with gold hardware. The blue, gold and white wallpaper on one wall being both a geometric design, but there were also flowers. More flowers, these fake but looking real, a small bouquet of them between his sink and hers.
This space, like all her space, was her. Sharp , smart and sophisticated, but full of personality. Attractive . Welcoming . And he felt good in it.
What he didn’t like was knowing he was a man without a lot to offer, and she was a woman who should have it all.
But they’d talk about that Sunday .
Now , he needed to get a shower.
* * *
In the small parking lot outside her work, as necessary, Diana popped off the bike before he swung his leg over.
He did this with his eyes on her, coming off liking what he was feeling, Di on the back of his bike with him, to liking what he was seeing.
She was wearing a pair of brown pants with wide legs and a wide black belt through the hoops, a tight black top that had no sleeves, and shiny black pumps that had a strap over the top of her foot.
Hugger never in his life found a woman dressed like that for work, entirely—no, almost excruciatingly—fuckable. And it wasn’t (only) about how hot it was that Di jumped on his bike in that getup like she’d been riding behind him on it for the last decade.
But since Maddy left, he was finding everything about Di fuckable. Though , deep down, he knew, before Maddy left, it was just that all the shit going down with Maddy could take his mind off it.
Right now, he had a job, though, and he wasn’t doing it watching Di’s tits move while she slung her big black bag more securely over her shoulder.
He’d scanned the area when they drove in and he scanned it again as he went to her, took her hand and walked to the front door.
He felt her hand twitch in his when he took it, so he looked down at her.
“ All right?” he asked.
“ For not being a guy who’s touchy”—she squeezed his hand and gave him a bright smile—“you’re kinda touchy.”
He wasn’t.
But he couldn’t keep his hands off her.
“ That cool with you?” he asked.
“ Yes , honey, it’s very cool,” she murmured, still smiling big as she pushed through the door and took them into the tidy and small reception area of Di’s work.
When he’d been in the space before, it felt unused.
Now , there was a woman behind the reception counter looking like she was rifling through the place in order to steal secret documents.
Hugger was a biker. This meant he was a live and let live kind of guy. Before that, he’d been a bouncer.
He’d seen it all.
But the woman behind the counter made him do a double take.
She was whip thin, short and wearing a black turtleneck. She had steel gray hair, and a part of it at her forehead was tucked under in one of those big, 40s-style curves. The rest was held back with a wide black headband to fall in soft curls at her shoulders. And either by nature, or by design, there was a long, black stripe of hair running through that gray above her left eye.
She had black-framed glasses perched on her nose, the lenses circles that seemed too small to be useful in correcting vision.
The slash of red that was her mouth shone stark against vampire-white skin he could see was made that way by her natural color and whatever makeup she put on. Her skin was beginning to wrinkle in places, showing her age, and she seemed down with that. And she had those black eyeliner things women were doing these days that kicked out the sides of her eyes, but hers were pronounced almost cartoonishly.
Against the odds, she worked those too, along with all the rest of it.
She didn’t have anything near a “normal” vibe, part of why Hugger instantly dug her. The other part was she looked like the kind of woman you’d want to know.
“ Hey , Annie ,” Diana called. “ Looking for something?”
Annie’s head shot up like she didn’t hear the front door open and two people arrive. She then stared at them as if she didn’t know what human beings were (though, it could be she couldn’t see them through the tiny round lenses in her glasses).
Total blank for Hugger , and the same for Diana , who was on her payroll.
Something cleared, and Annie said, “ Oh , hi, Diana .”
Di tugged him to the opposite side of the receptionist counter. “ Looking for something?”
The woman appeared massively confused. “ I am?”
Diana gestured to the reception desk.
The woman peered down at it like she was supposed to see something there, but she saw nothing there, not even the desk.
Jesus Christ .
Di had warned him her boss was “a little vague,” but damn.
“ Oh !” Annie exclaimed. “ Right . I’m out here looking for the Bernardi invoice.”
“ I sent that last week,” Diana told her. “ It’s on the spreadsheet.”
Annie raised her tiny-lensed glasses to Di . “ Did they pay?”
“ I don’t know. They pay by check. I sent it on Thursday and I haven’t been here for two days.”
Annie’s attention listed to the door and she mumbled, “ I forgot to get the mail.”
Shocker .
“ I’ll get it,” Di offered.
“ I’ll get it,” Hugger declared.
She looked up at him. Annie looked up at him.
Di noticed Annie noticing him so she said, “ Annie , this is Hugger . There’s been a situation with one of my father’s clients. A possible threat. Not a credible one,” she said swiftly, even though Annie had zero response to the mention of a threat. “ So until we know that isn’t an issue, Hugger is going to hang with me. I hope that’s okay.”
“ Will you go get the mail?” Annie asked him.
What she did not ask was about this “situation” or anything about the fact her only employee needed a bodyguard.
Damn , this bitch was a trip.
“ Yeah ,” he answered.
“ Great ,” Annie said then dropped her attention to the desk again. “ Now , what was I looking for?”
Holy fuck.
He heard Diana stifle a laugh.
Time to get past Annie being a total ditz.
“ Where’s the mailbox?” he asked Di .
She went around the reception desk, opened a drawer, got a key chain with a small key on it and handed it to him. “ It’s on the outside of the building, to the right of the door if you’re facing it.”
“ Gotcha ,” he muttered and took off.
By the time he got back with the mail, Annie was gone, and Diana had lost her bag and was at the door to her studio waiting for him.
He walked to her, and she lifted a hand for the mail when he got close, so he handed it to her.
“ How does that woman run a business?” he asked as he followed her into her studio while she sifted through the mail.
“ Not very well, before she hired me. I’ve had occasion to have a gander through her personnel files and she had a lot of other me’s that didn’t last long, likely because she drove them batty. She drove me batty too, at first. Then I offered to take over the admin, if she upped my salary a bit to add paying me for those responsibilities. I got what was fair for taking on more work, she doesn’t have to worry about it, the business runs smoother, and I like the autonomy her being scatterbrained gives me.”
There it was again.
Di taking care of someone.
But at least she got paid for it this time.
She stopped sifting through the mail and headed across the space, still talking.
“ We have a spreadsheet we share about projects, so I know what she’s working on, samesies with me, progress, target completion dates, estimates of work, invoices sent, invoices paid. This way, if she remembers to check, she knows I’m getting work done, and we’re getting paid. She has a bookkeeper, so I don’t have to deal with money, outside depositing a check or making sure we got the PayPal or Venmo payment. I don’t have set hours. I have set projects. And I dig that.”
“ Sounds cush, babe,” Hugger replied, watching her sit at a small desk facing out at a diagonal in the corner, away from all the mess of easels, tables, lamps, pots, jars, jugs and instruments.
But he was feeling even more shit because she wasn’t only doing what she liked doing, she was free to do it without a lot of hassle and someone breathing down her neck.
Sure , the woman he just met in the reception area was flighty as all fuck, but if she mostly got on with her thing, and let Di get on with hers, that, to Hugger , was the perfect work situation.
He knew, because that was his work situation.
Di had grabbed a letter opener, and she was slitting open the mail.
Hugger headed over to the chair he’d put by the window.
He settled in, boots up on the sill, eyes aimed out the window, and he stayed that way until Di left her desk and went to the easel that held the painting she was working on.
“ I thought we’d got to Taco Chelo for lunch today,” she stated.
Of course she thought they’d go for fucking tacos.
He felt his lips tip up, but he stopped doing that when he turned his attention to her.
“ How long you worked here, babe?” he asked.
“ Four years,” she replied to the painting. “ Since I quit school because of the situation with Dad , it took me an extra year to get my bachelor’s, even going to summer school. With the internship, it added another six months to getting my masters. Annie’s my first job in my field.”
So she had a master’s degree.
Shit .
“ Landed on your feet,” he muttered.
She stopped rolling a Q -tip in her mouth and smiled at him.
“ Got it made,” he stated.
She bent over the painting with her cotton swab.
“ Not really. Though Annie pays well, since she takes private commissions from people who can afford it, the holy grail of conservation work is getting a position at a museum. I keep my eye on PHAM’s career page, but alas, nothing has come up.”
“ PHAM ?”
“ Phoenix Art Museum . Outside of going somewhere like The Met , or one of the Smithsonians , which would be a dream, locally, that would be where I’d want to be,” she stated. “ Don’t get me wrong, this is good work and I love it. But the diversity of work I’d have access to, the things I could learn, and the collegiality is missing here.” She shot him another smile. “ Not that Annie isn’t collegial. Just that she’s, well… Annie .”
That woman was definitely… Annie .
“ You’d take a hit to your salary if you went to a museum?” he asked.
She was rolling the other end of the swab in her mouth.
She took it out and went back to the painting, saying, “ Yeah . So it honestly might not be in the cards. Things are steady for me, but if I took a pay cut, they’d get tight.”
Not if she halved her expenses by having a man.
He turned to the window again, thinking the Denver Art Museum was supposed to be awesome. He’d never been, but he knew where it was, and it was his favorite building in the city. It looked like a gray spaceship. It was the total shit.
“ If I’m not doin’ a job like this, I work as a sales associate at Ride Auto Supply Store , the Club’s business,” he told the window. “ And I got a two-bedroom crackerbox house I furnished all at once from a charity shop.”
When Diana had no reply, he turned to her to find her looking at him.
“ Sunday ,” she said.
Okay .
Yeah .
But she had to know what she was working with on Sunday .
“ Babe , the brothers share profits equal across the board, and we got a slew of auto supply stores, and the builds from the garage bring in a shit ton. I’m not hurtin’. But I don’t live like you do.”
“ So , if you wanted to live like I do, you could, because you have the money to do it. You just aren’t really bothered, so you don’t.”
“ Honestly ?” he asked.
“ Absolutely ,” she answered.
“ I never had good like you got, so I didn’t really think about it, even though a lot of the brothers, especially the ones with old ladies, got it pimp.”
“ Do you like it pimp?” she asked quietly.
Her pad?
The scent of her hair and her perfume on her soft sheets?
A home-cooked meal every night?
Fuck yeah.
“ Definitely gonna look at some rolls of wallpaper when I get home,” he joked.
She gave him another smile and went back to the painting, asking, “ What did you want to be when you grew up?”
Hugger returned his attention to the window.
He wanted his mom safe and out from under the thumb of some asshole pimp.
Enter Chaos for the second time in her life, they got her free of the last asshole pimp she had, set her up so she could manage her own clients, and she went freelance.
After that, he just hoped he didn’t grow up to be like his father.
“ Harlan ?” Di prompted.
“ Never really thought about it,” he said to the window.
He felt the air get heavy and he let it be.
Because , yeah.
On Sunday , she had to know what she was dealing with.
They were in the zone they hadn’t had much time in, so when they talked on Sunday , if this wasn’t going anywhere, she wouldn’t feel like she wasted time on him.
In the meantime, he got to have her for the next four days. Have her time. Her smiles. Have her back when she sat down with her dad.
And he decided in that moment that was good for him.
Hugger hadn’t had a lot on his life, and it was no joke that what he had with Di the last six days was the best he’d ever had, bar none, and he hadn’t even banged her yet.
So he’d take what he could get of Diana Armitage , then he’d take off out of her life when she realized he was a hassle who wasn’t worth it.
On a thought that was unhappy, but not unusual for Hugger , he pulled out his phone to play solitaire while she spit-washed an ugly-as-fuck painting.
At lunch, they went downtown to a place that made excellent tacos using freshly rolled and grilled tortillas, and Hugger noted, in a city that seemed to be nothing but a never-ending succession of strip malls, they had damn good food.
On their way back to her work, they stopped at a Total Wine so she could buy her dad a bottle of gin.
She returned to the painting.
And he went back to something familiar.
Solitaire .