Thewein her sentence makes me smile despite the situation.
“I’m gonna whip a U-turn at the next intersection, and try to get a look at him and see if we can catch his plate going the other way.”
Magnolia reaches into her purse and pulls out a pen. “I’m fucking ready. This bastard’s going down.”
“That’s my girl. All right. Hold on. Here we go.”
Even as I change lanes, I know this is a long shot, but it’s as much as I’m willing to do with Magnolia in the car. Keeping her safe is priority number one, and that means not taking too many risks. Just a few.
At the next green light, I whip the car around and punch it.
“Sunglasses. Hat. He’s ducking. Doesn’t want to be seen,” Magnolia says as we drive by him.
“Good girl. Get ready for the plate.” I cut off a car that slams on the horn.
“JQ2009. I got it,” she says with a note of triumph in her voice as she scribbles down the tag number.
“Fuck yeah.” I turn at the next corner, peeling off to the right and then turning again and again until I don’t even know where the fuck we are anymore.
Magnolia’s gaze is glued to the sideview mirror. “He’s not following us. He knows we spotted him. Fucker.” She faces me. “Should we call Trey with the plate?”
I can’t help but smile as we pass tree-lined streets and people on the sidewalks. This isn’t what I pictured for us when I came back, but even a shitty day with Magnolia is better than a good day without her. Still, she’s beside me now, so things could be much worse. It doesn’t hurt that at least I know nothing’s happening to her on my watch.
“Yeah, mama. Let’s do that. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll get lucky today after all.”
She reaches across the center console of the SUV and threads her fingers through mine. “Feels like we already did.”
I totally fucking agree.
Forty-Seven
Magnolia
“You ready to go home?” Moses asks, and my heart does a squeezing thing it hasn’t done in a long, long time.
Home. With Moses.
Damn, that sounds good.
Then I remember I don’t have anything at all there to wear, or my makeup, or my face shit.
“Yeah, but now that we’ve lost the tail, can we go get my stuff? If I’m staying with you, I’m gonna need it.”
“Shit. Yeah. Of course. I should’ve thought of that.” Moses glances over, heat in his eyes. “But then again, the idea of you wearing only my clothes has a real strong appeal to it.”
“You’re such a man.”
He looks down at the vicinity of his dick and nods. “Damn right I am. Bona fide.”
“Well, maybe if we weren’t sharing a house with twoothermen, that’d work. But my days of parading around in lingerie in front of a crowd are long over.” The smile on his face dies at my words, and I want to bring it back. “Hey. Don’t look like that. It’s the past. Don’t let it take what we have today from us too. Okay?”
Moses makes a turn toward the French Quarter, and I see him half grinning. “When’d you get all wise, woman?”
I knock my shoulder into his. “I don’t know if I’d say I’m wise, but I’m ... learning. Just makes sense that you can’t hold on to yesterday if you want to live every bit of today. Also, you just missed our turn.”
His full smile is back, and he laughs full out. “I should’ve let you drive. You know this city a hell of a lot better than I do.”
I grimace, all too sure my driving skills aren’t up to par with his, given the way he whipped that U-turn and drifted the rear end of the car perfectly before bringing it back into line. “I don’t know if I could’ve done what you did back there. I imagine you’ve got some stories if you know how to drive like that.”