Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 83167 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83167 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Though I couldn’t fry them shopping in King Soopers.
“Let’s get this finished,” I mumbled.
“Thank Christ,” he said and let me go.
He went back to the cart.
I’d lost my list somewhere along the way.
Oh well.
Fuck it.
I’d wing it and if we forgot something, we’d come back.
We had to get this done.
I had fish to fry.
Chapter Six
Tell Them to Work Faster
Mo
He’d thought he’d wanted her back in the way he could have her, that was chattering at him and being comfortable in his presence.
Another mistake.
He had her back, but she wasn’t back, as such.
Any man would read it the way Mo was reading it.
She was his.
He knew this partly because the floodgates had reopened on the gabbing, but apparently, it’d been a rainy season because she seemed incapable of shutting up.
He now knew about all the girls at Smithie’s, who was putting themselves through school, who baked the best cookies, who knew the best zit-covering strategy, and who they were fucking, one doing a bouncer.
He further knew that Smithie would find out about the bouncer, because he always found out, and fraternization between employees was prohibited.
He also knew Smithie would go apeshit, but in the end not do anything but be loud and threatening while going apeshit, which was why the strippers routinely slept with the bouncers regardless that it was against employee policy.
And he knew Lottie’s mom and Tex were always on her ass about adopting a coupla cats.
Further from that, he knew she was considering it, she just was building herself up to go to the shelters because when she did, if she hadn’t established impulse control, she wouldn’t adopt a couple of cats, she’d adopt fifty (this, by the way, he did not find a surprise).
And he knew her neighbors were being dickheads not because they had an outdoor TV, but because they played it loud and they did this a lot.
Mo had no idea what this all had to do with grocery shopping, the subject around which he’d like any conversation to remain, except they weren’t grocery shopping, him as bodyguard with his boss’s client.
They were grocery shopping as a man and a woman living together and he knew this because when they did talk about shopping, it was when she made him go all the way back through the aisles they’d already been through, forcing him to tell her what shit he wanted in the house.
Making matters worse, personal space was now just gone.
Vaporized.
She didn’t hold his hand or press up against him and give his neck a kiss or anything like that.
But she stayed close, bumped him with a hip if she was being funny or feeling saucy (something that happened often), grabbed onto his biceps to get his attention or hooked a beltloop and tugged to change his direction.
All this meant Mo was in agony.
And that agony wasn’t just about all of that.
Lottie had thrown right down with Tammy, no hesitation, and this was before she knew who Tammy was and what she’d done.
There was no way to deny it.
That felt good.
But it was even worse.
It was clear Lottie had claimed her man.
The end.
And he was that man.
Mo couldn’t think on this, mostly how it made him feel.
All of it.
Fortunately, she was talking so much, his mind didn’t have the opportunity to go there.
The FBI had come back with a negatory on the language, or any religious radicals in the area they were keeping an eye on that fit this guy’s description.
This meant they had zero leads on whoever this man was who wanted to harm her, and they’d all made the decision that the second letter, received yesterday, Lottie would not know about because she was already alert and not doing anything stupid.
But mostly they agreed on that because the degree of disturbing in the latest letter had ratcheted up about fifteen notches.
Smithie had called the ball on that one, not telling Lottie about it and not taking it to the police, or the FBI. The last two would, after the second letter, want very badly to get involved.
This was because Smithie wanted the threat eradicated, no dicking around, and although Mo agreed with Smithie (to a point), Hawk did not.
The guy was gearing up to make a move, building his confidence, getting his shit tight, getting off on the increasing extreme of his letters and the fact he hadn’t been caught yet to take him to the place where he could act out his twisted fantasies.
They all knew it.
Smithie wanted it handled.
Hawk wanted this guy on FBI radar.
Mo just wanted Lottie safe.
But Lottie didn’t need to know all of this was going on.
And Mo did not need Lottie being even more of all that was good about Lottie when this guy was on the loose, fixed on her, and working himself up, her being more of all she was only serving the purpose of making Mo want her more.