Page 81 of Handful

She felt it. Pressed up against me like that, there was no way she didn’t. Her eyebrows shot up, and then she laughed, delighted and scandalized at once. “You liked that. I just threatened to kill you, Tyler, and you liked it. That was supposed to scare you, not turn you on.”

“Everything that comes out of your mouth turns me on, Austen. The threats most of all.” I got both hands on her hips and pulled her in so she’d feel exactly what she’d done to me.

She huffed. “Oh, and any woman who puts her hands on you the way that one did tonight? I’ll end her too. Nothing personal. Housekeeping.”

“Say it again,” I said. “The mine part.”

“Greedy.”

“Starving, actually. Say it.”

She laughed, and she said it again, slower, against my mouth this time — mine — and that was it for me. I grabbed her and kissed her on the porch of the clubhouse with the whole party roaring behind us.

Behind us somebody put on something fast and Colt bellowed my name followed by the unmistakable sound of Smoke being told to get off the table.

“They’re going to come looking for you,” Austen said against my lips. “It’s your party.”

“Let ‘em look.” I kissed her again. “I’m a little busy being the luckiest man alive.”

“You’re really not going to play this cool at all, are you?”

“Not even a little.” I pulled back just enough to look at her, this woman who’d thrown me out and ruined me and come back and claimed me on a porch like she’d thought of it first. “I’ve got the patch and I’ve got the girl. I am going to be insufferable about both for the rest of my life. You should’ve thought about that before you told me to come.”

“God,” she said, taking my hand, towing me back inside the clubhouse. “What have I done?”

Plenty, I thought, following her in. Austen Wicker was the best thing that ever happened to me.

Epilogue 1

❧

— Handful —

Afew weeks after the SAA party

I’ve knocked out a county sheriff’s deputy. I’ve been bailed out of two separate jails in two separate states in the same month. Two years ago I ran escort on a job where three men pointed guns at my chest and I thought about what I was going to have for lunch. None of it touched me.

I have never, in my life, been as wound up as I was at seven on a Sunday evening, pacing a hole in the common room floor because my soon-to-be-old lady was eleven minutes late. Eleven minutes! I was going to have to put a tracker on her.

“You’re going to wear a groove,” Colt said. He had his boots up on the next chair, laughing at me. “She’s coming. She lives here, brother. Where’s she going to go?”

“She’s eleven minutes late.”

“Chill. You’ve checked your phone four times.”

I checked it a fifth time. Nothing. Just the two messages I’d sent her an hour ago still sitting there, delivered, unanswered.

The first one was a photo of our bed. Our bed, in our house—Dutch had handed me the keys the morning after the SAA party. It was straight after I’d confided in him that I was going to pack up Austen’s shit while she was at Velvet and move her into my room. I’d taken the photo this morning, sheets still wrecked from last night, and sent it to her at work with a short message: CSMDWIEYP.

The second message, sent thirty seconds later, said: Stop at the clubhouse first.

“You texted her a dirty picture and a logistics update,” Glitch said, drifting past with a beer, having read the whole thing over my shoulder. “That’s not how it’s done. You don’t tell a woman come home and ruin me and then but swing by the office on the way. Kills the mood.”

“It’s not a dirty picture. It’s a picture of our bed.”

“Exactly. Context is everything.”

“I sent her a picture of the bed and told her to come here first. She’ll know what it means.”