Chapter Six #2
“Is it all healthy junk?” Alex asked his aunt.
“Who am I?” Lottie answered.
So that explained the Dove ice cream bars, caramel M&Ms,
Tostitos and salsa and pork rinds, all purchases Lottie had not, in three days,
demonstrated she’d ever let past her lips.
Alex grinned up at her. “You’re Aunt Lottie.”
He knew there were treats in those bags for her nephews.
Mo’d been wrong.
He could not fall in love with her.
That shit was already happening.
“Go help your brothers,” she said gently, grinning back at
her boy.
Alex raced to the truck.
Dante was already digging in the back cab where the
groceries were.
“And this is?”
Mo had felt Jet approach, but he was engaged in doing
another scan of the street.
He turned back at Jet’s question.
“Jet, this is Mo, my new mound of hunkalicious
boyfriend. Mo, this is Jet, my sister,” Lottie introduced.
As previously noted, Eddie Chavez and his crew, all of them,
including the ones he was linked not-so-loosely to at Nightingale
Investigations, did not know about what was going down with Lottie.
Another reason, after the second letter, they didn’t bring
in the cops.
Or the Feds.
This meant Lottie’s sister couldn’t know. If she did, she’d
be on the phone with her husband faster than Lottie went down when her nephew
tackled her.
This meant they needed a cover.
And being unprepared for this visit, he had no other cover
to give even if Lottie hadn’t already decided, and communicated, what cover he
was going to have. No man like him would be with a woman like her just as
friends helping her grocery shop unless he was gay.
He put out a hand. “Nice to meet you.”
She stared at it, looked at her sister, then took it and
looked in his eyes before her lashes swept down, and pink hit her cheeks.
“Yeah, nice to meet you.”
Sweet. Shy. Pretty. Filled out jeans great.
No wonder Chavez went for that.
But the sisters couldn’t be more different.
Yin and yang.
The kind of perfect balance that made life worth living.
He gave her hand a light squeeze, let her go and turned to
Lottie.
“Gonna help the boys.”
Not missing a beat, or an opportunity, she moved into him,
leaned into him, pressing her breasts against hands flattened on his chest,
gazing up at him with sparkling hazel eyes, and breathing, “You do that, pookie-loo.”
If she was his, all of that would earn her a spanking.
Mo filed that away as he controlled his body’s reaction to
her that close, the feel of her, how much he liked that look in her eyes, the
smell of her perfume with hints of her shampoo, and he moved away to supervise
the carrying in of groceries.
“Why didn’t you just go in?” he heard Lottie ask her sister.
“I keep forgetting your security code,” Jet answered.
“You’re a dork.”
“You keep track of three boys, their laundry, their
mess, their mouths that demand food, football practice, a house, a husband who
likes your body a whole lot more after you gave him three sons, and he liked it
a lot before you did that, and a full-time job working with Tex and
Duke, most of the time with those two together and bickering at each other, and
remember your sister’s security code,” Jet retorted.
“You could text me…”
Mo lost track of the conversation as he hit the truck and
they went inside.
His job became mostly controlling squabbling brothers who
all (even the youngest) thought they could carry in six bags apiece, and they
didn’t even have that many, and making sure the youngest didn’t fall flat on
his face grunting and groaning with the two bags he demanded to carry while
they got the shit into the house.
They put the bags on the kitchen floor, an odd choice, one
Mo got when he realized this was a relatively practiced dance and the boys
couldn’t reach the counters, and they all went into unpacking mode. They
unpacked, but it was only Jet and Lottie, under Lottie’s strict placement plan,
who put away.
“So, are you a professional wrestler?” Alex asked him.
“No,” Mo answered.
“A soldier?” Dante asked, his eyes on the gun on Mo’s belt
that was in its holster looped through Mo’s cargo pants.
“No,” Mo repeated.
“He’s a commando,” Lottie announced.
Alex froze solid and stared with his mouth open at Mo.
“What’s a commando?” Dante asked.
“The coolest of the cool,” Alex whispered, then
shouted, “Even cooler than Uncle Luke!”
Dante’s face smushed up and he told his brother, “No one’s
cooler than Uncle Luke.”
“Muchacho,” Alex threw a hand Mo’s way, “look at
him.”
Dante looked at Mo.
His face conceded the point, but his mouth didn’t.
Mo nearly burst out laughing.
He was helped in controlling this when the youngest one
slapped him on the thigh.
Mo looked down at the kid. “I wanna
be a ’mando!”
“Give it time, bub,” he said.
“Oh my God, someone kill me,” Jet begged. “Last week,
Carissa was over, Joker showed to take her home, and Cesar wanted to be a
biker.”
“Well…I mean, he is Joker,” Lottie muttered while
obsessively lining up cans of La Croix in her fridge.
“I’m gonna be just like Uncle
Luke,” Dante declared stubbornly.
“I’m gonna be like Uncle Lee,
except the commando kind, ’cause Auntie Indy is fine,
and I want me a hot babe just like her,” Alex announced.
“I love Annie Sadie!” Cesar shrieked.
“Nobody is killing me,” Jet pointed out.
“What are you doing here?” Lottie asked her sister.
Dante shoved a bunch of bananas in Mo’s gut.
Mo took the cue and the bananas and put them in Lottie’s
fruit bowl.
“One, to ascertain I still have a living, breathing sister,”
Jet answered.
Mo had to hand it to her, Lottie didn’t even cut a glance
his direction on that.
“And two, to tell you Mom and Tex want us over for dinner
next Sunday,” Jet finished. “The whole family.”
Jet’s attention came to him.
“Cool. Mo and I’ll be there,” Lottie shared.
His eyes went to her and his hands itched with the urge to
toss her over his shoulder, carry her upstairs and tan her tight ass.
“You’re…uh, there?” Jet asked quietly.
“You can talk in front of Mo. We’re tight,” Lottie told her.
That bought her five more swats.
“Oooooh…kay,” Jet whispered,
giving her sister big eyes.
Lottie just smiled at her.
Jet’s eyes narrowed, and she started to look pissed.
Ah, hell.
“Dude, how do you become a commando?” Alex asked him before
Jet could get into it with her sister about how she suddenly had a boyfriend
that Jet had never heard about who Lottie was tight enough with, he was coming
to dinner with the family.
“This dude is Uncle Mo,” Lottie corrected.
Now he was “Uncle Mo.”
And now he wanted someone to kill him.
“Righteous,” Alex said to his aunt, then back to Mo. “Uncle
Mo, how do you become a commando?”
He opened his mouth to tell the kid he wasn’t a commando.
Though, with some of the missions Hawk took, he absolutely
was.
But Lottie got there before him.
“He was in the Army.”
“Righteous!” Alex yelled. “Just like Uncle Lee!” His gaze
dipped to Mo’s weapon. “Why do you carry a gun?”
“I’m on duty,” Mo told him.
“Cooooooool,” he
breathed. He recovered from that awesomeness and asked, “Do you know how to put
on camo makeup?”
“Yeah,” Mo said.
“Do you know how to use a rocket launcher?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you flown in a helicopter?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you jumped out of a plane?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you been to Afghanistan?”
Mo’s body grew tight and so did his repeat of, “Yeah.”
He felt Lottie and Jet’s attention.
Alex opened his mouth again but didn’t get anything out
before Lottie said softly, “Alex, honey, find the ice cream and get your
brothers and yourself a bar. ’Kay?”
“Sure, Auntie Lottie,” Alex said, then started digging
through the remaining canvas bags.
Mo avoided her eyes as he bent and picked up the spent bags,
folding them in half, like Lottie kept them, and stacking them on the counter.
He heard ripping ice cream bar plastic and felt Jet move his
way. He turned his attention to her and saw she was carrying noodles, Tostitos
and boxes of granola.
When she got close, she said low, “Thank you for your
service, Mo.”
She meant it.
They all meant it, but she thought he was involved with her
sister so it hit closer to home, thus she meant it.
“Not a problem,” he muttered as she passed him to get to the
pantry.
He couldn’t avoid Lottie anymore, not with strength of
warmth coming from her direction, so he shifted his gaze to hers.
Yeah, that was why he did it right there. That look on her
face.
He’d known he was going to be a man who was going to be a
soldier for a long time before he became one. That was about a lot of things
that were too numerous to boil down to just that look on Lottie’s face. It
included his mother and his sisters and the sense of duty and loyalty he had to
them since they had no other man in their life. They were not wallflowers or
doormats. Not one of them. It didn’t matter. It was the man he was from early
on that dictated the man he was going to be.
But that look on Lottie’s face and her wrestling without
hesitation with her nephews on her front lawn and her throwdown with a woman
she identified as possible competition to claim him morphing into a throwdown
to avenge him were why he got in.
And in a different world, one where she really was his, they
would be how he could live with what he’d seen, what he’d done and what he’d
lost in the dust, dirt and sand.
To be the kind of man who earned that look.
Who deserved it.
And who could claim the woman who wore it.
“It isn’t a big deal,” he lied.
“You’re absolutely wrong and you know it so shut up, pookie-loo,” she returned.
A good ten swats.
Bare ass.
Mo cut ties with her eyes and bent down to pick up the last
bag, forgotten in the ice cream rush, not surprisingly carrying the fresh
fruits and vegetables.
He put it on the counter and unpacked it.
“So…Afghanistan?”
She’d barely shut the door on her sister and nephews.
He was standing in her living room where he’d retreated,