Page 163 of Back in the Saddle

Time to get my question in.

“Do you know why Knox was at Luna’s Sunday morning?”

Raye shot me a baffled expression. “He’d come over to ours. Cap was going to make brunch then they were going to the shooting range.”

Oh.

That wasn’t very hot tea, or any tea at all.

Bummer.

“Knox was pretty up in her space while Mary was brandishing her knife,” Harlow noted.

“Knife?” Stella asked.

“Shh, don’t interrupt,” Daisy whispered to her.

“I saw him get close, but I didn’t see what happened when Mary whipped out that knife,” I said. “Liam had pulled me out of the way.”

“Knox put his arm around her belly and yanked her behind him,” Harlow told me. “It was really sweet. And I thought it was weird that it looked like Luna’s face would burn off, it got so red. But I figured she was ticked that he protected her when Mary wasn’t going to do anything with that knife.” Her gaze wandered to the restaurant. “Maybe it was something else.”

Oh, it was something else.

We all looked to Luna, including Daisy and Stella twisting on their stools to do it.

Luna felt it, and without turning our way, yelled across the space, “Kiss off and die!”

Daisy’s laugh sounded again.

“We probably should go back to work,” Raye said.

We probably should.

“I’ll check on your order,” I said to Daisy and Stella.

“Thanks, sugar, you’re the best,” Daisy replied.

I headed back to the kitchen.

The order was up.

I brought it out to the girls, gave them cutlery and got them both sodas.

Then, except for Stella, once she finished the toad-in-the-hole, declaring she was coming back once a week for lunch before they left, nothing else happened all shift (apart from Tito barking out laughter on occasion while he read his book, something I decided to take as a positive sign).

This lull in activity was good, even if I didn’t know how good it was at the time.

Because, as Eric would say, shit was about to spark off in a huge way.

We just didn’t know that.

If we did, we would have wallowed in that quiet time.

Alas, we didn’t.

EIGHTEEN

COPY THAT

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