“Okay. Then how do you dress so well?” I asked.

He went back to his plate and answered, “Personal shopper.” He dug into French toast, lifted it to his mouth, chewed, swallowed and looked at me as I tried to process this surprising information. “Gotta have clothes. Don’t like shoppin’ for them. There you go.”

Interesting.

And an excellent solution to every badass’s problem of having to be clothed and being allergic to the mall.

“And, we gotta talk about this, so might as well do it now,” he started. I bit off part of my own smoky link and focused on him. “My woman’s her own woman, so I get that it’s likely gonna be important for you to feel you’re contributing. I’ll say now I’m good with covering everything until you get on your feet. I’m also cool with you making a contribution, just as long as it isn’t you making a statement that overextends what you can actually afford.”

I got what he was saying, so I told him, “I wouldn’t be good with living here without doing something, honey.”

“Right,” he replied. “Then come up with something you think you can afford, and we’ll talk about it. Yeah?”

Clearly, we were back to the easy part of this together togetherness.

Thank God.

“Yeah, Ren,” I said softly.

He grinned and went back to his plate.

I did the same and kept doing it until I heard him say, “This is delicious, baby.”

I looked at him. “It’s Roxie’s recipe for the French toast.”

“Your hand that made it.”

Again I felt melty.

God, I was totally becoming a Rock Chick.

Nevertheless, I decided breakfast in bed every Sunday until that day long in the future when Ren and I were both in a nursing home where we didn’t have kitchen privileges.

“You done with your questions?” he asked, and I nodded. When I did, he stated, “Right. Then we got something else we gotta talk about.”

I hoped whatever it was stuck with the easy vibe of our together togetherness because I was still riding the high of Ava and Luke’s wedding, the fact that I introduced Ren to Mom and Dad (eventually, between Ava and Luke’s dance and cake cutting) and they’d both acted genuinely nice instead of stiffly polite, and breakfast in bed with Ren was the bomb. I was digging easy. We hadn’t had a lot of that. And, with our personalities, this was as easy as I suspected it would get.

“What do we have to talk about?” I asked.

“What I’ve been needin’ to get down to talkin’ to you about since we got back from the mountains, just haven’t had the time.” He sucked back some coffee and finished, “Now we have the time.”

Okay.

Good.

I was happy we were getting to this. So much had been going on I hadn’t thought about it that much. That didn’t mean I wasn’t curious. Then again, I was always curious.

“Shoot,” I invited, grabbing my mug and leaning over him to deposit my plate on the bedside table.

Ren followed suit, lifted one knee and twisted partially to me.

“Shit’s goin’ down at work,” he announced.

Oh man.

This was sure to take us out of easy.

Denying what Ren and I were, having my apartment explode and the rest of all that went down, it didn’t hit me in our together togetherness that an official Ren and Ally would not only include us sharing mundane things like why he parked out front, but also non-mundane things, like how his day was at the office where he was in charge of the legitimate side of a crime empire.

Fuck.

“Okay,” I said slowly.

“And you gotta know what it is,” he went on.

“Okay,” I repeated.

“You also gotta know why it is what it is,” he continued.

I didn’t repeat an “okay.” I just nodded.

He looked away and took a sip of coffee, but something changed in his face that I did not like.

Then he looked back at me and I saw whatever it was I really didn’t like.

But it was familiar. I’d seen it before whenever he mentioned his dad.

“My mother wasn’t in the life,” he shared. “She came here from Chicago after college for a job and met my pop.”

Yep. This was going to be about his dad.

I took in a breath and nodded.

“The way Aunt Angela told it to my sister Jeannie, Ma didn’t know shit. Not until Pop took over the business from my grandfather and two weeks later got whacked.”

Holy shit!

“Then she knew,” he said.

“Wow, I, uh… honey,” I stammered, reaching out and curling a hand around his thigh. “I hadn’t heard about that. That’s terrible. Awful. I don’t know what to say.”

“Yeah. It was awful and there’s nothin’ to say. I was three. Jeannie was five. My younger sister Connie was barely a year old. Ma was fucked. She didn’t have a job. Gave it up to be a wife and mother. Young. Three kids. Then she sorted it out, why Pop was dead from a bullet to the head, and it set her reeling. She packed us up and went back to Chicago to be with her family.”

Now it was becoming clear why he wanted me to be a stay-at-home mom. That was what he knew, and I knew he loved his mother; she’d done a good job with him, so that was what he wanted for his kids.

“That’s understandable,” I murmured, squeezing his thigh.

“She made a mistake though. She took family money.”