Chapter 5 #4
Lifting her head, she realized they were on her porch swing. She was curled up on his lap like a small child as he held her to him, not seeming to care in the slightest as she got snot, tears, and drool down his shirt.
“Why is it we keep meeting when one of us isn’t fully dressed?” she mumbled against his chest.
His low chuckle reverberated through her, settling something deep inside her. “Maybe it’s fate telling us not to fight it until we just show up already naked.”
She snorted. “I didn’t know who you were before.”
“Well, it wasn’t like we sat down and got to know each other first. I also didn’t place your name until Susan showed up.”
Toni wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse about their… Was it a one-night stand? Maybe. One-night stand adjacent, at the very least.
He pressed his lips against her hair. “Want to tell me what happened?”
Toni shook her head. It was bad enough that she said it out loud over the phone to Steel. Admitting it to the guy she just had an adjacent one-night stand with, and was still hugely crushing on, was a bit too much for her sanity.
The front door opened to her left. But as Toni lifted her head to see what was going on, Ranger snapped out, “Wait!”
She froze, thinking he meant her. He shifted them forward on the bench carefully, always keeping one hand on her, as he removed his leather cut.
Once it was off, he laid it over her lap and around her hip, and it wasn’t until she felt the warm leather against her bare skin that she realized just how exposed she was at that moment.
Her cheeks flamed. Great! Now she was a murderer and a flasher! Her list of crimes just kept piling up.
Ranger turned her flaming face towards him. “They didn’t see anything. I made sure of it.”
His calm voice soothed her worries, and on top of it all, she really needed that. “Thank you.”
He kissed her forehead before calling out, “She’s decent.”
The door opened the rest of the way, and Ghost and Lucky stepped onto her covered front porch.
Though both intimidating men with their tattoos and leather, Lucky was the taller and broader of the two.
But there was something so purely dominating about Ghost that immediately put him as the leader, even without her knowing he was club president.
Lucky approached her first, reaching out to touch her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“Fuck. I didn’t even ask that,” she heard Ranger mutter, which was completely adorable.
To Lucky, she nodded. Then thought better of it and shook her head.
The look he gave her was one of understanding and sympathy. “You don’t need to tell us what happened. It changes nothing about why we’re here or how we’re going to help you, but I am still going to ask.”
Her eyes flicked between Ghost and Lucky as Ranger ran a comforting hand up and down her back. Lucky was speaking rather than Ghost. Was that because he was the one she was familiar with? Was the plan to lead her into a false sense of security?
But she knew how this worked. She called in a favor from Steel, but that favor got the MC to her doorstep. She would now owe the motorcycle club something, and she wasn’t sure that was a check she wanted cashed.
She met Ghost’s intense gaze. He was the leader, the one who would make the deal. “What is it you want? In exchange for making this go away?”
He lifted an eyebrow. “What makes you think I want anything?”
“I know how this works,” she snapped, frustrated by his evasiveness. “You’ll call me at some point in the future and need something. I won’t do anything illegal. I won’t destroy evidence or lie to a jury. That’s not the sort of attorney I am.”
“But you’ll ask me to destroy evidence?” he questioned back.
“Ghost,” Ranger growled, a clear reprimand in his voice.
Ghost’s eyes never left Toni’s, but he did nod his head slightly.
“Toni, even if you weren’t sitting on my best friend’s lap with his cut covering your body, I would help you all the same.
Clearly you’re terrified. From the mess that is in your house and the trail of bathwater we found upstairs, we can make certain assumptions of events.
I don’t give a damn that that man was your father or the fact that you shot him twice in the back.
I would still help you and protect you.”
“Why?” she demanded, not trusting it.
“Have you missed the fact that you’re on Ranger’s lap?
” Ghost reminded her. At her blush, Ghost waved off her embarrassment.
“Steel asked this of me, and regardless of the ask, I would do what he wanted without question or fail. If you require payment, to make this transactional, then all I ask is for you to trust me. Trust that I will make this go away and help you move on with your life in any way that I can.”
Fuck. She wanted to believe it was so simple, to trust that that was the only payment Ghost would require of her, but there was also the fear of blackmail.
Ranger took hold of her chin, turning her face towards him again. “I don’t know what this is, but you mean something to me, and after recent events in my life, I don’t say that lightly. If you can’t trust him, trust me.”
Toni bit the inside of her lip. She wanted to trust him, to trust whatever this spontaneous connection was between them, and while the argument could also be made that the damage was done and they’d seen her crime, Toni chose instead to not fight this battle alone.
“I don’t know where my mom is,” she confessed.
“Do they live around here?” Ranger asked, brow knit in concern.
Toni pointed behind her. “We modified the outdoor garage into an apartment for them.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lucky pull his phone from the inside pocket of his cut and text someone. A moment later, he got a reply and she shifted more fully to face him. “Scar says he already checked the apartment. No one is there and there are no other vehicles on property.”
Lucky tipped the phone towards Ghost as if to show him the message.
“Scar’s the one who…?” Toni trailed off, feeling guilty about pointing her gun at him. But then again, he’d scared the shit out of her, so maybe he should be the one feeling guilty.
“Opened the door,” Ghost answered, looking up from Lucky’s phone. “Toni, it looked like your father was collecting things in the house. Our tech says that ladle is valuable. We also found a bag of electronics and things easily pawned. Do you have any idea why?”
Toni tried to keep her face blank, feeling like that damn baggie was sending out a pulsing beacon in her pocket.
They might forgive her for murder, but not for drugs.
The club’s anti-drug reputation was fierce.
“No. No, I don’t have any idea. I was in the tub and I heard something downstairs.
I didn’t even know it was him until after I pulled the trigger! ”
Ghost watched her with too-knowing eyes as he gently said, “You pulled both triggers.”
“What?”
“You pulled both triggers, Toni.”
Toni frowned. She’d put two shells in the gun upstairs. She remembered seeing the two distinct holes in her father’s back. She’d really pulled both triggers? Maybe her hand had slipped in her fear, making her finger go back further than intended.
“I don’t…” Shit. These were military men.
Even Ranger. While she didn’t know for sure, his road name hinted at what branch and unit he’d served in.
Did Army Rangers have units? Squads? Teams?
No, that was SEALs. Fuck! She was losing it.
Scratching her head, she confessed, “I’m not good with a gun.
I don’t like guns. I have one for protection in my car and the shotgun in my bedroom.
I’ve only ever fired the shotgun once before and that was to scare off a bear!
I’m not… I’m not good with guns, not like you guys are.
If I pulled the second trigger, I didn’t mean to. ”
“You shouldn’t have been put in the situation where you had to pull the trigger at all,” Ranger said softly, tightening his hold on her. “Put the blame on your father’s shoulders where it belongs.”
Toni winced. Regardless of her father’s actions, she was the one who had still pulled that trigger. Or triggers, it would seem. Which also meant that when she held the gun up to Scar, it hadn’t even been loaded.
She rested her head back on Ranger’s chest. “I’m getting a headache.”
He shifted her so her head was more on his shoulder than chest. “How about we stop for the night? I’ll take you upstairs so you can pack what you need?—”
“Pack what I need?” she asked, bolting upright. “Why would I need to pack anything? You’re not burning my house down, right?”
“No, of course not,” Ranger told her, a slight smile on his lips. Why did he have to be so fucking handsome and calm? “But we need to clean up, and it’s better for you not to be here when we do.”
Fuck. She hadn’t thought of that. Of course it would be more complicated than just removing her father’s body from the house. There was blood, and glass, and she had gunpowder on her, which meant she now had gotten some on Ranger.
“Okay, yeah. I can check into a hotel or?—”