Magnolia reaches into her purse and pulls out a pen. “I’m fucking ready. This bastard’s going down.”
“That’s my girl. All right. Hold on. Here we go.”
Even as I change lanes, I know this is a long shot, but it’s as much as I’m willing to do with Magnolia in the car. Keeping her safe is priority number one, and that means not taking too many risks. Just a few.
At the next green light, I whip the car around and punch it.
“Sunglasses. Hat. He’s ducking. Doesn’t want to be seen,” Magnolia says as we drive by him.
“Good girl. Get ready for the plate.” I cut off a car that slams on the horn.
“JQ2009. I got it,” she says with a note of triumph in her voice as she scribbles down the tag number.
“Fuck yeah.” I turn at the next corner, peeling off to the right and then turning again and again until I don’t even know where the fuck we are anymore.
Magnolia’s gaze is glued to the sideview mirror. “He’s not following us. He knows we spotted him. Fucker.” She faces me. “Should we call Trey with the plate?”
I can’t help but smile as we pass tree-lined streets and people on the sidewalks. This isn’t what I pictured for us when I came back, but even a shitty day with Magnolia is better than a good day without her. Still, she’s beside me now, so things could be much worse. It doesn’t hurt that at least I know nothing’s happening to her on my watch.
“Yeah, mama. Let’s do that. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll get lucky today after all.”
She reaches across the center console of the SUV and threads her fingers through mine. “Feels like we already did.”
I totally fucking agree.
Forty-Seven
Magnolia
“You ready to go home?” Moses asks, and my heart does a squeezing thing it hasn’t done in a long, long time.
Home. With Moses.
Damn, that sounds good.
Then I remember I don’t have anything at all there to wear, or my makeup, or my face shit.
“Yeah, but now that we’ve lost the tail, can we go get my stuff? If I’m staying with you, I’m gonna need it.”
“Shit. Yeah. Of course. I should’ve thought of that.” Moses glances over, heat in his eyes. “But then again, the idea of you wearing only my clothes has a real strong appeal to it.”
“You’re such a man.”
He looks down at the vicinity of his dick and nods. “Damn right I am. Bona fide.”
“Well, maybe if we weren’t sharing a house with two other men, that’d work. But my days of parading around in lingerie in front of a crowd are long over.” The smile on his face dies at my words, and I want to bring it back. “Hey. Don’t look like that. It’s the past. Don’t let it take what we have today from us too. Okay?”
Moses makes a turn toward the French Quarter, and I see him half grinning. “When’d you get all wise, woman?”
I knock my shoulder into his. “I don’t know if I’d say I’m wise, but I’m . . . learning. Just makes sense that you can’t hold on to yesterday if you want to live every bit of today. Also, you just missed our turn.”
His full smile is back, and he laughs full out. “I should’ve let you drive. You know this city a hell of a lot better than I do.”
I grimace, all too sure my driving skills aren’t up to par with his, given the way he whipped that U-turn and drifted the rear end of the car perfectly before bringing it back into line. “I don’t know if I could’ve done what you did back there. I imagine you’ve got some stories if you know how to drive like that.”
He winks, making me melt into the leather beneath me. “I have a few. And all three of us—me, Jules, and Trey—took a lot of tactical driving classes. Partly because we needed to, but mostly because they were fun as hell. Saved our asses more than once, though.”
“Then I’m glad you did. Turn here, Earnhardt.”
A few minutes later, we pull up in front of my cheery yellow house.
“It won’t take me long,” I tell him as I reach for the door handle.
“I’ll help. We’re a team, after all. Where you go, I go.”
Moses shoots me a winning smile, and it’s in that moment that I realize I’m falling in love with him all over again. Not with the man I knew fifteen years ago, but with the man he is today.
Despite everything, today is a lucky day, I decide. Now, here’s hoping it keeps on going.
Forty-Eight
Moses
When we get back to the house in the Marigny, my gaze lands on Trey as I carry in Magnolia’s twin suitcases. “Any luck? We could use some good news right about now.”
His attention darts from us to his keyboard as he speaks. “I got a hit on the plates, but it doesn’t match the description you gave of the driver, unless he’s secretly a seventy-four-year-old black woman and his disguise was damn good.”
“Damn it,” Magnolia says from behind me. “Does that mean he stole it?”
Trey’s head bobs from his seat at the kitchen table. “Most likely, or he stole the plate of another black Fusion.”
Jules leans against the kitchen island. “What’s our next move? Because we gotta do something.”
Part of me wishes I’d taken Jules’s advice and had him intercept the guy, but there’s no way in hell I was going to let him take this on alone. I also wasn’t risking a confrontation, one that would most likely end in blood being spilled, with Magnolia at my side.
She might be tough as hell, but she doesn’t need to be in any more danger. Visions of her getting ready to stitch up the slice in her own side are still all too recent in my brain, and I refuse to let it happen again.
Across the table that Trey has turned into central command, complete with notebooks littered by scribblings and a slew of empty coffee cups, I ask, “You find anything else on the dead guy?”
“Nothing helpful yet. I’m still looking.” He scratches the back of his neck, and then his fingers are flying again.
I don’t need to tell him to hurry or look harder, because Trey’s already doing everything he can. The man is a beast on a computer, and I trust him to do the job better than anyone else could. Plus, he doesn’t know the word quit, which is exactly why we work well together.
“Okay, so we keep running that down, and we’re on high alert everywhere. No driving without checking for tails. Mama, you’re with me. Like glue. We’re taking no chances.”
She worries her bottom lip and crosses her arms over her stomach, feeling whatever is going through her head. “What about my girls? And Desiree’s? Is there a chance he could go after them? I still own the house. Because I was young and dumb, it was in my real name from the beginning.” Magnolia’s weary tone is filled with concern. “If this guy is looking for me and tracked me to my condo, would he try to find me through them? I mean, the bond for deed between me and Desiree is filed, but technically, my name is still on the house, so I’m connected.”