Chapter 5
Tuesday was awakened by Knife’s cock sinking into her pussy from behind, her ass still plugged. Her mind wanted to protest, but her body was fully on board.
He didn’t take terribly long, and he reached around and fiddled with her clit to get her to orgasm before he came, thankfully.
“Fast shower,” he told her while he pulled the plug from her ass. “We do breakfast here this morning, and you’ll need to head up in the next ten minutes if you want to help, which I’m pretty sure you do.”
She made her way to the shower, put minimal makeup on, and pulled on fresh jeans and a clingy shirt. She put her hair in a ponytail and told him, “A little heads up about what’s happening would be nice.”
He blew out a breath. “Honestly, it works better if the ol’ladies are sympathetic to you. Like I’m the asshole not clueing you in, so they have to.”
She stared at him a few seconds, putting it all together.
“You pick up on more than most men.”
He shrugged. “Not all of them, but a lot, yeah. Brain doesn’t miss anything, but…” He tilted his head a little and grinned. “Probably better that most of my brothers are clueless about just how much the ol’ladies control.”
“Okay, thanks for letting me know your evil plan, at least.”
“I’ll have to walk you up, and then I’ll come back and shower.
You’re too new yet to have clearance to walk around on your own back here.
Just getting into the front room is kind of a big deal.
So once you’re out there, you can’t come down here without a patched member walking you to and from my room. ”
That gave her pause, but it made sense, and she decided not to argue about it when she knew other wolves could hear. She didn’t like the idea of not being able to get back to her things in the room, though.
Upstairs, she was hit by the smell of coffee, bacon, and of onions being sliced.
Tuesday stepped into the large kitchen area with a commercial griddle, oven, grill, refrigerator, and freezer. Angelica was turning bacon on the griddle, and Harmony was chopping onions.
“Hello,” Harmony said. “Do you have a specialty?”
“I can make biscuits from scratch.”
“Perfect,” Angelica said, and she motioned to a large workspace area. “All-purpose flour is in the canister. Butter and milk are in the fridge. What else do you need?”
“Flour sifter, grater, baking powder, sugar, salt, sheet pan. I can do it without a measuring cup, but I’d rather have one.”
Harmony told her where everything was, and minutes later, she was grating butter onto her pile of flour.
More women arrived, including someone who smelled of rabbit, and she’d never scented a rabbit shifter before. She immediately liked Gabby, who got to work making gravy with the bacon grease.
“Matty almost always helps with breakfast,” Daisy said. “I hope he isn’t in trouble.”
“He was in a mood last night, so he might be,” Angelica said. “How long did Micca, Will, and Davy stay?”
“Not much longer after you went down,” Gen answered.
Tuesday used a whiskey glass to cut the dough, and by the time the biscuits went into the oven, Gen was breaking eggs into a bowl, Daisy was washing dishes as they got used, and Lexi was using an antique glass juicer to get the juice from a large bag of oranges.
Angelica was working on steaks now, and Tuesday assumed the bacon was under a dome off to the side.
She set her phone for ten minutes, just to be safe, put some butter in the microwave to melt, and went looking for a brush. She couldn’t find one, but she found scissors and parchment paper, so she folded the paper and went at it with scissors to make one.
And then had to explain what she was doing, and told them she’d bring a pastry brush to use in the future.
By the time the biscuits were ready, other women had put everything on the bar, turning it into a buffet worthy of any restaurant — eggs, gravy, bacon, steaks, a variety of jellies, honey, and Tuesday’s biscuits. She’d quadrupled the double batch she usually made, and hoped that would be enough.
They looked good, but she wouldn’t know how they tasted until it was time to eat.
The men were sitting on the sofas watching the NASCAR pre-race coverage, but as soon as Gen placed the stack of plates on the end of the bar, Duke stood and headed for the bar. Clearly, that was the equivalent of the dinner bell.
The others followed, some sitting to wait instead of standing in line.
And the women waited until all of the men had moved through before getting in line.
But she was relieved to discover Knife had saved a seat for her beside him, as had all the other men with girlfriends and wives.
“Oh man, who made the biscuits?” Dawg asked. “These taste like my Mamaw’s.”
“Tuesday made them,” Angelica said. “And I knew by the way she made the dough and then worked it, they were going to be good. Her hands just did it without thinking.”
Others chimed in about how good they were, how soft, or how buttery.
“What do you do?” Razor asked. “I mean, for a living?”
“It’s kind of complicated. Technically, I’m a trained chef, but I don’t work as one. I help restaurants create their menus. Come up with the dishes, the ingredients and how they get made, train their people.”
“She has a YouTube cooking channel,” Knife said.
“Right,” Brain said. “Give me a minute.”
Moments later, her channel appeared on the large screen on the far wall.
She blinked at it, and then looked around and realized it was on every screen in the room — behind the bar, above the far tables, angled toward every possible sightline.
Brain had put her channel on all of them simultaneously, which was both efficient and slightly surreal.
He played part of one video, then a second, and questions came from around the room — had she ever done a video on smoking meat? On making biscuits?
Eventually, the men pushed back from the tables and disappeared downstairs, and Lexi must’ve noticed Tuesday looking at the door with her brow furrowed. Knife had just left with them, without saying goodbye or telling her where they were going.
“Church,” Lexi said, and that didn’t make sense at all.
“Church?” She repeated back, and she sounded pretty incredulous, but what the fuck?
“It’s just what they call their meeting,” Angelica said. “I grew up in the club. My dad is president in Atlanta, so all this seems natural to me, but I know it can be a shock, coming at it as a civilian.”
“I was completely na?ve when I first started seeing Duke,” Gen said, “and he shielded me from a lot of it for a long time, but it’s a lot.”
“And someone needs to tell Knife to get his head out of his ass and explain some shit to her,” Hailey said.
Tuesday didn’t tell them his plan, merely carried a load of dishes to the kitchen, and then went back for more.
- - - ? - - -
Knife had asked to speak, and Duke went straight to him after he gaveled them in.
“You’ve all met Tuesday,” Knife told them. “Thanks for making her feel welcome. I know you want answers, so…”
He took a breath. “She walked into the shop the day before Valentine’s.
I invited her to my place, thinking it’d just be a fun fuck, but then it turned out our kinks match up.
Fucking perfect match. But I still thought I could keep it to fuckbuddies.
See each other once a week when she was in town, nothing more. ”
He shrugged. “Turns out, everything else matched up, too. She was pack, and that meant I couldn’t share anything but the sex with her, and she couldn’t handle that, so she broke it off.”
He looked at Duke, then looked around the table.
“She decided it wasn’t working, being apart.
We hadn’t spoken in months at that point, but she went to Cora and asked to have her pack bonds severed.
She was a mess when she showed up at the restaurant Friday night.
Weak, still hurting from it. She’s still weak, but she’s managing okay.
Better than I did, when I paid a vampire to sever the bonds. ”
He focused on making sure he got the important part out.
The reason he’d asked to speak. “Long story short, she took a big hit to be with me, and I’m pissed, but I’m not turning her away.
She lost her pack, and I want…” He shook his head.
“I need the MC to replace that for her. To show her we have her back. I know ya’ll don’t know her well enough yet to vote for me to give her a vest, but I’d like to request you vote I can order it, so I can give it to her as soon as ya’ll are comfortable with her.
It can take a month for it to be made, so please, let me at least get it here. ”
The room was quiet, and he worried they might want him to wait. To follow protocol.
It was Gonzo who said, “Maybe we take a vote to let you order it, but it gets delivered to Duke. He’ll hold it until we can vote for you to give it to her.”
“If the vote goes positive,” Duke corrected. “Yes, I can call a vote for that.”
They went around the table, and everyone voted Yea. Duke told Knife to get with Brain on the specifics, since Brain would have to place the order, and then he moved to regular business.
When Knife made it back upstairs, he sat beside Matty on a sofa. Matty was focused on his phone, but he looked up and turned the screen off when he realized Knife wanted to talk to him.
He explained he wanted to build an eight-by-ten closet in his bedroom, shrinking the size of the room, which was fine since it was so big to start with.
He showed Matty pics of the room, gave him the dimensions, and Matty asked Brain if he could borrow a laptop.
Five minutes later, they were in a conference room, and Matty used a program he accessed online to draw out the closet to show shelves, bars, drawers, and shoe-holders.
“I’ll email you all four walls,” he told him. “But you have to get Tuesday’s input. She might want less shoe storage and more hanging bars, or less bars and more shelves. Every woman is different. Don’t try to surprise her with this.”