“Before we begin,” I looked at them all. “Please tell me names, ranks, marital status, and whether or not y’all are interested in blondes, brunettes, black-haired ladies, or redheads.”
The man at my side snorted.
“From your left, you have Banner Spurlock, Crew Vegas, Callister Green, Duke Miller, Everett Sais, Granger DeMille, Trig Rochester, Whittaker Pattinson, Noble Bates, and the one on my right, last and least, is Autry Bills.”
My brows went up at his comment of “last and least.” Mostly because the man at his side was now sitting with his arm around him like they were lovers and not friends.
I smiled and nodded my head. “Now, marital status?”
The men chuckled.
“Ol’ Banner is the only one that’s married,” Autry supplied. “He recently had a baby girl, too.”
“Awww,” I said. “And your wife? What’s her name?”
Banner leaned back in his chair and pulled his phone out of his pocket, showing me his screen.
It was a photo of an Asian woman holding the cutest, itty-bitty baby I’d ever seen.
“Awww,” I repeated my earlier sentiment. “Now that’s absolutely adorable.”
The smile on Banner’s face was soft and sweet, telling me that he absolutely loved his family.
“Jett is my daughter,” he said. “Perry is my wife.”
“Daughter named Jett.” I grinned. “Is that going to be something she does? Flies in the Navy? Or is that the Air Force?”
“Navy or Air Force,” Coffey answered.
But it was the other men at the table that said, “Air Force? Hell no. We’re Navy people. Air Force can suck a nut.”
I giggled, leaning into the man at my side.
His arm tightened around me, his mouth coming down to press a kiss to the top of my head.
“Aren’t Slone and Titus supposed to be here tomorrow?” Crew asked.
Banner was nodding, his eyes lighting up like Christmas morning.
“Hey, y’all have clowns?” Banner asked then.
I nodded. “Every circus has clowns.”
His eyes gleamed. “Titus is terrified of clowns.”
I almost felt bad for the guy. Clowns could be scary. I mean, I’d seen It before.
“But, just sayin’, our clowns aren’t the regular clowns,” I pointed out, thinking about our clowns and how “not scary” they were.
The only thing about them you could correlate to clowns were the bright colors and the polka dots.
“What do you mean?” he asked, sounding slightly disappointed.
“Well,” I hesitated, “they’re kind of ‘sexy’ clowns.”
Banner’s eyes went electric as he said excitedly, “Even fucking better.”
“What does she mean about sexy?” Autry asked Coffey on my other side.
“Well,” Coffey admitted, “I guess by ‘sexy,’ she means that they’re not all long feet and white faces. Most of the sisters put on clown wigs and makeup and walk around for half an hour to give the other clowns a break. But every last one of them does it in their leotards or getups, so they don’t have to change for their acts coming up. You’ll see if you come and it will all make sense.”
“I could do a clown or two,” one of the men murmured.
I couldn’t pinpoint which one, mostly because I was looking up at Coffey with love in my eyes.
He couldn’t “tell” exactly what I’d been talking about, meaning that he hadn’t really had eyes for anyone but me.
“I feel like maybe I should tell you now that my sisters all hate each other, so the likelihood of you getting two of them in a bed together with one man is like ‘end of the world’ shit,” I said, finally peeling my eyes away from Coffey.
Coffey’s eyes were warm as he said, “Who’s interested in a story?”
When he got a bunch of Yankees, whatever the hell that meant, he began the story of us, not leaving a single thing out.
“So you got her knocked up the first day you were with her?” Banner shook his head. “That’s impressive.”
“What’s more impressive is that you actually talked to her,” Whittaker exclaimed.
I raised my brows at that.
I was sure that these men knew what Coffey had done once upon a time—I mean, they all seemed very, very close—there was no way that he wouldn’t have shared. Or they hadn’t done the same damn thing with him.
“What you are trying to say,” Autry said as he curled what he could of his arm around me, too. “When you have a soul mate, you have a soul mate. She probably knows all.”
I didn’t know all, at least not by Coffey’s choice. Folsom, my computer guru friend, knew how to get anything and everything. There wasn’t a single thing that could be hidden around her.
Though I did have all the information at my fingertips if I wanted it, other than what we’d all discussed prior to my leaving to spend the day with Coffey that first time, I didn’t know all that much about him unless he told me.
And I had a distinct feeling that whatever Autry was talking about, I definitely didn’t know.
“Not yet,” Coffey said quietly. “It was on my list to tell her when I arrived, just to make sure she still wanted me around. But then that fuckin’ cunt of a sheriff fucked around and almost found out.”
The one directly across the table from me looked at me, Granger, who’d been awfully quiet. Then he said, “Do you want us to kill him?”
At first, I was sure that he was joking. Then when not a single one of them laughed, and almost every single one of them nodded their heads like they were more than willing to take one for the team by committing the act, I knew that they weren’t joking.
He was being very, very serious.
He would go out right now and kill the sheriff, and I would never have to worry about anything coming back at me.
Because he’d make the perfect kill. He’d ensure that whatever happened, he would be well and truly never looked at for said murder.
Coffey sighed. “If anyone is going to do it, it’s going to be me.”
Something warm and fuzzy traveled through my insides at his words.
I liked that he was willing to do what needed to be done—regardless of whether it was killing him—to protect me.
What did that say about me, that I liked a man that was willing to kill?
That was a rational and well-rounded human being, my inner self declared.
“So, you’ve been in each other’s presence for all of four days total, one of those days she spent in jail and then in a medical ward recovering from an accident that could’ve killed her,” Trig said as he shoved twelve fries into his mouth at one time. Then, around his full mouth of fries, he said, “Then you fall in love with her, find out you’re going to be a father, and she can’t remember you at all.”
Duke snorted. “Looks like she remembers him just fine.”
I was already nodding as I reached for my Dr Pepper, a sudden obsessive need to down it overtaking me.
Once I’d finished the nearly full cup, I set it down, let out a discreet burp, then said, “I think I remember it all, actually. Bits and pieces came back to me during our drive here. Did you know you might be running into them?”