Strength & Courage (The Night Horde SoCal Book 1) by Susan Fanetti Read Free Book Online

this one room than in the entirety of his own, barely-furnished house.
     
    “Why are you here?” She’d changed into a pair of light-blue plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a short little green beater that left a couple of inches of her belly bare. Not really helping in the hard-on department, now that he had such a vivid image of her in his head.
     
    He cleared his throat. “We need to talk.”
     
    “Why?” She rubbed at her forehead, and he remembered that she’d been drunk when she’d come out with the gun. She seemed pretty clear-headed now.
     
    “I need to know you’re not gonna cause more trouble for Tucker’s dad.”
     
    “So if I say I won’t, you’ll leave?”
     
    Actually, no, he wouldn’t. He wanted to be able to help Demon understand what was going on, so that he didn’t have to keep chasing around San Bernardino County, getting between him and trouble. Dakota was probably up next. Muse was surprised he hadn’t started there.
     
    That reminded him...he pulled out his burner. “No. I still want to talk. But I don’t mean you harm. Would you give me a sec?” When she sent him an incredulous glare, but didn’t otherwise protest, he dialed Sherlock.
     
    “Yeah, Muse.”
     
    “I sent Demon back to Hoosier’s place. Can you check in on him?”
     
    “Fuck. It’s like having a renegade five-year-old in the family.” Sherlock sighed heavily into the phone. “Yeah, I got ‘im. All clear where you are?”
     
    “Think so, yeah. I’ll catch you up later.” He ended the call and put his phone in his pocket, using the chance to push his stupid fucking hard-on into a less obvious position. Then he smiled. “I don’t suppose that coffee’s gonna happen?”
     
    A dramatic sigh and a shake of her head, then: “I am obviously insane. Yeah, what the hell. Come on into the kitchen.” She turned into that doorway, then turned back, her finger pointed at his head. “But I teach self-defense at the women’s center. I also know where all the good knives are, and you don’t. So just sit down and behave yourself.”
     
    There was fight in this girl. It seemed she was smart enough to have fear, and strong enough to stand up despite it. He tipped his head in a courtly salute. “Yes, ma’am.”
     
    He followed her through the doorway to another small, pretty room with creatively mismatched furniture. One corner, with pale green walls, held a small, round table and three chairs, each different from the others. The rest of the kitchen was sunny yellow and white. He sat down on a yellow wicker chair, then, feeling unstable on it, shifted to a white wooden one instead. He felt overly large and beastly around her dainty things.
     
    She went to a cabinet and pulled down a glass canister. Her blonde hair was loose and hanging down her back. It was longer than he’d realized the day before; it brushed her waist when she looked up. Lifting her hands up into the cabinet had bared more of her belly—flat and smooth. Her skin had a golden tone to it, and he wondered again about her heritage. But that was a fleeting thought. Most of his attention was devoted to the image he had now of pushing his tongue into her perfect, oval belly button.
     
    Damn. He needed to grab the first girl who showed up at the clubhouse today and get this shit out of his system.
     
    As she scooped ground coffee from the canister into a coffeemaker, she asked, “What is it you so desperately have to say to me?”
     
    He blinked and refocused. “I want to make sure what happened tonight doesn’t end up in that file you got.”
     
    She switched the coffeemaker on and turned to him, leaning her hip on the white-tile counter and crossing her arms under her pert little tits. “And why shouldn’t it? It seems like it’s relevant information, the father stalking the caseworker, pointing a gun at her.”
     
    If there had been any bite in her words, Muse might have reacted more forcefully to the threat implicit in them, but