Page 105 of Back in the Saddle

“You need to stay here,” he told me.

I braved the further depletion of my resources to process his dark-haired, russet-bearded, lumberjack hotness and looked at him.

“In case you didn’t know this, these people trust me.”

“That conversation is between a soldier and his superiors,” Brady returned. “The spell is cast. You can’t break the spell, or they won’t get anything.”

Crap!

He was right.

Whatever.

Eric would fill me in.

I turned back to the matter at hand, specifically, I looked at Homer.

“We have some things in the car. Before we start packing up Mary, can you and a couple of the guys help us bring it in?” I requested.

I got nothing but a nod, though Homer and a couple of the men followed me and my chicks to the car.

“Are they gonna see to General Grant?” Homer asked on the way.

“They’re looking into programs to help him, yes,” I answered.

“Good. He doesn’t belong here,” Homer mumbled.

This wasn’t a dis.

Like I said, there were people whose home was the street, and people whose circumstances put them there.

We both knew which camp the General fell into.

Raye opened the back hatch of the Sportage, and the men moved in to grab the plastic-wrapped, cardboard bottomed cases of bottled water and bags of bath wipes, mondo bottles of generic aspirin, Slim Jims, breakfast bars and packets of dried fruit and nuts.

Homer had his arms laden with two cases of water when he looked at me.

“They won’t like that team being here,” he announced.

“Who won’t?” I asked.

“You know,” he said.

The Shadow Soldiers.

I didn’t want to ask him if he knew what Jeff had been doing all along. I didn’t want to put him on the spot or do anything to shake the trust he had in me, which I knew was fragile and always would be.

But it still stung that I suspected he knew who Jeff was with and what he was doing.

“Those men are my friends,” I said. “They’re here to help Mary and the General.”

“I know, they still won’t like it.”

He said no more, and I could say no more, because he walked away.

My chicks didn’t gather around me.

They didn’t because they huddled nearby to watch, seeing as Eric was sauntering toward me.

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