Page 8 of Mischief

"I'm notimplyinganything." She lifts the tub. "I'm just saying a prospect's been sitting in our parking lot for ten minutes, and the second I mentioned him you looked like someone plugged you into a wall. But sure. Nothing there."

"Refill the case, Sophie." I flick the rag at her hip and miss on purpose.

"Refilling the case." She goes, and she's laughing.

Ihatethat she's right and I love that she never says it where anyone else can hear.

Because no one else can hear it.

That's the whole design of my life, if I'm honest with the early-morning version of myself, the one who hasn't got her armor all the way buckled yet.

Everyone in my family loves me so hard they've built a cage out of it, and the cage is made of good intentions, which is the sort you can't kick your way out of without looking like the ungrateful little princess they've decided I am.

My father, Tor, who missed the first fifteen years of my life and has spent the last ten trying to pour all of it back in at once.

He looks at me and sees a kid he didn't get to protect and overcorrects so hard I can't cross a parking lot without someone clocking my exits.

My grandfather, who built the Raiders of Valhalla MC out of nothing and rules it like weather and cannot,will not, wrap his head around the idea that the club is mine too.

That being born in this family means the kingdom runs in my blood the same as it runs in my father’s.

I don't want to be kept safe from it, I want to be trusted inside it.

Then there’s my mother.

My mother, who knows exactly what I'm doing with Bodul, and pretends with her whole heart that she doesn't.

That one I can't figure out, and I've stopped trying.

They all think they're protecting me.

Not one of them has worked out that I've spent the last nine months protecting him from them.

The bell over the door goes, and he fills the frame of it.

Every thought I was having about my family walks straight out the back of my head.

Bodul ducks under the doorframe the way tall men do without thinking, and half my regulars forget their coffee to look at him.

He finds me behind the bar before the door's even shut.

His eyes hit mine and hold, and for half a second the brace in his shoulders lets go, just for me, just where nobody's looking.

Then it comes back.

"Coffee's for paying customers," I tell him, because we do this, because the club thinks he's here on punch-list work and the two of us have gottenverygood at performing a man and a woman who barely know each other. "You paying today, or you here to stare at my grout again?"

"Grout's uneven by the far booth." His voice is low and even, and that's the tell, because the more level he sounds, the more he's hiding. "Came to fix it before you get a review that says so."

"My grout is flawless." I plant a fist on my hip and dare him to argue.

"Your grout is a lawsuit." He crosses to the bar, and up close it's worse, the tightness around his eyes, the way he's looking at me like he's memorizing instead of greeting. "Meghan around?"

"Original location till noon." Which he knows.

It means he's asking so we've got a window, and my stomach does a slow, uneasy turn, because Bodul doesn't engineer windows unless there's something he needs to say inside one. "Booth's all yours. I'll bring you a coffee you're not paying for."

I make it myself.