Page 89 of Iron Hearts

“Okay, go back to your movie and sit quiet now while I finish fixing your potty.”

“Okay.” All three went back to the couch and climbed up on it.

Rarity looked after them for a moment and then turned to me.

“That’s awfully expensive,” she tried to argue, and I chuckled.

“Not when two of your club brothers practically run the place. The Boucher brothers got us handled. All it’ll cost me is snacks and drinks.”

“Are you serious?” she asked.

“As a heart attack,” I told her.

“I’m going to text Mom,” she said and she looked both so grateful and so relieved.

“I got you, let me get started on getting their toilet back in.”

“Thank you,” she said, and she sounded grateful to the bottom of her heart, which did mine some good.

“Anytime and anything for you, princess,” I said softly and made my way in the direction of the boy’s bathroom.

She broke for the kitchen and her phone sitting on the kitchen island.

I meant it, too – anything for her. My love for that girl was growing with every passing moment, let alone every passing day; and the more I saw her interact with her family, the more I wanted to do for them, too.

CHAPTERTHIRTY-FOUR

Rarity…

Grandma and grandpa were back from the Keys, and so it was all seven of us for the Gator Farm that weekend.

Striker was meeting us there, and we all piled in to my mom’s van for the ride up to St. Augustine. I brought a backpack full of things for an overnight if I could somehow manage to get left behind. I knew Striker would be good for a ride home.

I really hoped that things went well, but Grandma was already in one of her moods, nit picking abouteverythingfrom the passenger seat up front as Mom drove while Grandpa and I say back in the third-row seating behind the row of boys in front of us in their car seats.

While they hadn’t precisely gone back to being pious little angels, their fits and bouts had rapidly and diminished in the extreme enough that we were a go for the outing. Plus, how often could you get free admission to a place like the Gator Farm? We weren’t able to afford many experiences for the boys like that – so there was no way we could pass it up.

Striker was waiting for us outside in the parking lot, leaned up against his bike in the sparse shade from one of the flowering tall bushes planted between rows of cars in the parking lot.

He pushed off and started walking toward us as my mom crept down the lines of parked cars looking for an open space.

“Who is this man, again?” my grandmother asked, peering over her shoulder past me and Grandpa out the dusty back window as he strolled up the lane behind us and Mom turned us into a wide-open spot at the end.

“Rarity’s new boyfriend,” my mom answered and I felt the weirdest conflicting emotions. Like I both blushed and had the color drain out of my face at the same time!

On the one hand, my mom saying it so casually, and with not so much as a hint of having a problem with it in her tone, elated me. Of course, the fact that Striker and I were clearly outed in front of my grandmother gave me such a damn fright! It made everything feel like it was much higher stakes than it had the moment before.

The noise and the chaos of my family piling out of the van matched what was going on in my heart and my head as the panic rose and my grandmother’s voice, laced with a mixture of curiosity and disapproval just made my nerves jangle harder.

All of it was silenced when I hopped out of the back of the van, the last one out, and overbalanced, pitching forward only to be folded right into Striker’s arms.

I swear, the second they closed around me? Everything just… stopped.

I was home. The one and only place that made all the noise stop and that shut out all the bullshit. My brothers. My mom. My grandparents. The bar. The stress. The overwhelmingness of it all just gone –poof!

“Hey baby, you doin’ alright?” he asked close to my ear and I smiled and twined my arms around his neck and hugged him to me tight and said, “Never better, now.”

“Good to hear,” he said with a chuckle and I lowered myself from my toes down flat on my feet again.

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