Page 194 of Victory at Prescott High (The Havoc Boys 5)
“Where’s Kara?” I ask instead, because I’m not ready to explain the full feeling in my heart just now. It’s bursting and overflowing and the only reason I’m not frightened by the intensity of it is because I’ve gotten used to feeling this way over the last ten years. Shit, the Havoc Boys—who now, really, can only truly be called Havoc Men—make me feel this way every goddamn day.
“Right here!” Kara says, coming down the stairs in a dress that’s black and sultry and much more like something I would’ve worn in high school than what Heather’s got on. She’s dressed in pink and sparkles, and I can’t help but wonder if, like her body spray, the dress is an ode to a sister that she doesn’t remember nearly as well as I do but misses all the same.
I smoke my cigarette as Kara bounces over and presses a kiss on my cheek, her floppy, curly chestnut hair piled into a bun but with tendrils that escape and spring against her cheeks and forehead in a way that reminds me of Aaron.
My eyes turn his direction as Kara offers him a kiss as well, clearly also attempting to make the great escape before the other boys find us. Only … it’s too late.
“I told them you two were trying to get out of here before they could grill your dates,” Ashley says in that smug fifteen-year-old way of hers, like she knows fucking everywhere. Heather and Kara both give her death glares, but Ashley doesn’t care. She’s so enamored with my boys that she slips up sometimes and calls them her dads in conversations with other people. She’s a bit of a snitch, too, when it comes to tattling on Kara and Heather, but we’re working on that.
“Not a chance in fucking hell,” Vic says, cigarette dangling from his lips. Ever year, I’m certain that he can’t possibly get more beautiful, that I’ll never be able to find him more handsome than I did the year before. And yet, year after fucking year, he proves me so wrong I could cry when I look at him. My husband. My boss. My protector. My emotional clone.
A knock sounds at the door, but I’m not surprised. In order for their dates to get up to the front door at all, they had to pass through the gate, past security. I’ve known for the last several minutes that they were on their way.
“I’ll get it,” Hael says with a Cheshire cat grin, chuckling as Heather groans and Callum perches on the staircase, a cruel smile painting his fairy-tale mouth. Oscar waits nearby, a brand-new iPad in hand, watching the door open with eyes the color of the full moon and twice as mysterious. “Well, hello there,” Hael drawls, dragging both Kara’s date and Heather’s date into the room by their wrists. “You must be Brody and Bailey. Nice alliteration by the way, any relation?”
The poor teenagers look half-ready to shit themselves already, so I step forward and give Hael a friendly slap on the shoulder.
“You’re scaring the fuck out of them,” I say, gesturing with the cigarette and wishing I’d dressed up in something even remotely resembling like, what a mom might wear. Then again, that’s sort of fucked-up, right? To assume that having a kid requires a change of style. I imagine that when the boys and I do start breeding like rabbits the way they’ve all been dreaming about for the last ten years, I’m still going to want to wear sweats with pink bats on them or cigarette pants covered in jack-o-lanterns. Anyway, when you’re the queen of Havoc, you can’t dress in mom jeans and chunky sweaters with cowl necks, now can you? “Hi there, I’m Bernadette; this is Havoc. And you’ve got nothing to fear as long as you don’t mess with our girls.”
Heather groans again and Kara buries her face in her hands for a moment, but hey, it’s better than if the boys do the talking. Callum is casually playing with a knife while Oscar makes notes on his iPad in just such a way that making notes is just as menacing as playing with said knife.
Aaron and I take a few pictures and then let the kids get on their way. What we don’t tell them is that they’ve got Havoc Crew members on their asses all night, wearing skeleton masks and waiting in the shadows. But hey, anything to keep them safe. That’s been the point of everything I’ve done up until this point.
When I flop onto the black jacquard couch later, it’s with a sigh of such intense relief that I couldn’t even begin to explain it. It’s like … I’ve been on a very specific journey for an entire decade, and that decade is now coming to an end. Heather is graduating, and she’s moving to New York for school while Kara starts college life in the dorms at the local U.
