That made sense.
“Okay, I’ll give you and Eddie time,” I agreed and jotted a call to Duke to give him a status report on my list of things to do that day.
“We make a miracle happen and talk Darius around, we pull in Jules. She knows the way to go about this shit and she can ease this for all three of them.”
That was such a brilliant idea I wished I’d thought of it myself.
“Right,” I said.
“And until all that’s in motion, Indy, Mom, Dad, Tom, Shirleen, no one knows about this. Darius is not gonna take kindly to us gettin’ in his shit. He needs fallback positions. If he picks someone in our crew, you out of his picture, it’ll be Indy or Shirleen.”
I nodded.
“You down with that?” he asked.
“Absolutely.”
That was when Lee nodded.
“This is the right thing to do,” I told him.
“It always has been,” he told me.
He was right about that, and suddenly I realized this had been weighing on him, and Eddie, and it had been doing it heavily.
For seventeen years.
Which sucked.
He looked away and I saw his jaw tighten before he looked back at me.
“Eddie and me, both of us, when he got into that shit, we almost lost him, Ally. I was in the Army when he got dug in deep with Leon so I wasn’t around to get involved. Eddie was and did. Hank was and did. When I was around, I did. But there was no turning back for him, he was that angry. His mind fucked, he made misguided decisions, not cluein’ into the fact that the man who was usin’ him was the man who deserved his anger. If he can hold anger that deep and extreme that it blinds him to the right path, you need to be prepared for what will come of this.”
“I am,” I assured him.
Lee studied me a moment and it felt like he was assessing the validity of my statement.
I would find he wasn’t when he admitted, “I’m not.”
“That right there,” I declared instantly. “That loyalty to Darius, loyalty that would make you, the strongest most fearless man I know, shy away from doing what’s right in order not to lose your friend, that’s what Liam needs to know is in his father.”
I muscle jumped in his jaw before he jerked up his chin.
Badass for You’re right.
I fought my smile.
Time to move on, though not to more pleasant things.
“I have a stalker,” I announced.
Immediately Lee straightened away from the jamb.
“What the fuck?” he whispered scarily.
“Not an old client or anyone affected by my work. An old neighbor. Don’t know him. Never met him. He was just around. And he takes pictures of me.”
“Are you shittin’ me?” he asked.
I wished I was.
I shook my head and said, “Ren clocked him and looked into it. Found the pictures at his pad. He’s not happy. As in Grade A, bona fide pissed. He’s protective of me and has made it clear he’s leading this charge, but he wants you invol—”
I stopped talking because Lee turned on his boot and stalked to the door.
Well, I guessed Ren was going to have an unexpected guest.
And that meant Dawn was going to come face to face with the man she’d wanted for her own (though she’d had no shot) who chewed her ass out and fired her.
I really wanted to go watch that, but with the way Lee moved, I figured I already missed it.
It then hit me that Dawn likely didn’t know that Lee knocked Indy up.
And she would hate hearing that news.
I also scratched it on my to-do list to inform her of that and with Lee’s meeting done (and entirely satisfactorily, in a big way), I had another item on my agenda while at that location.
Actually two. The first one, not so easy. The second one, talking Ren into having sex on his desk; probably not hard.
