I snorted and touched the top of her head. She’d done this each time we’d gone some place new. The grocery store. The gym. The freakin’ medical plaza. I’d taken lead, shown her how it was done, and she’d followed suit with the next target.
“Watch and learn, honey.”
And then I walked away, much less confidently than I would’ve done all those years ago when I’d been selling Girl Scout cookies of my own.
The fear was a constant throb at the back of my skull.
Even though, logically, I knew that these men wouldn’t hurt me in any way, I couldn’t turn my brain off.
I saw threats everywhere.
These men were police officers, for God’s sake.
Did that matter to my fear-filled brain? Hell no. It didn’t. Not even a little bit.
Everywhere I looked I saw men.
Men who were at least six-to-eight inches taller than me. Men with strong, bulging biceps. Men who had weapons that they could use against me in order to garner my cooperation. Men who saw way too much.
Luckily, I saw the one person that I knew that I could trust and made a beeline for him.
“Hello, Big Papa!” I called out, my heart still hammering.
Big Papa’s bright green eyes turned to me, and he grinned. “Hey, girl. Give me one sec, would you?”
I nodded and stopped directly next to his desk, pulling the red wagon up alongside me before taking a seat in the cushioned chair to the right of his desk.
He looked at me, taking me in, while he continued to speak about some case he had that was pending. He grinned when I pulled up a box of cookies and shook it at him.
He held his hand out for the box, made a ‘two more’ sign with his hand, and I grinned.
Taking out two more of the same kind, I handed those to him as well and watched with laughter in my eyes as he leaned over and withdrew his wallet from his back pocket.
He fished out a twenty-dollar bill, and then handed it to me.
I took the money, pocketed it, and then fished out a five from the wad of money that was in my pocket.
He took it, and threw it on the desk.
With my transaction complete, I waved at him and made a gesture sign to where Tobias and Leida were standing at the front door watching me expectantly.
Leida’s eyes were wide with awe, and she was bouncing from foot to foot.
I circled the wagon around as I got up and then started back toward the two of them, not bothering to stop when someone called out for me to ‘hold up.’
Once I reached Leida, I handed her the wagon. “Go get ‘em, Tiger!”
She grinned nervously at me. “Where should I start?”
I looked around the large room where multiple desks were perched. “Start with the man who tried to stop me as I passed him. From there, use those big puppy dog eyes and hit up the rest of the ones at their desks.”
She grinned at me. “Okay, wish me luck.”
Then she was off.
“I feel like a proud mama bear watching her go off into the world,” I said absently to the man standing beside me.
He started to chuckle.
“You’re good at this,” he said.
I blushed at the feeling of encouragement that roared through me.
He made me better. He didn’t know it, but just his presence at my back was enough for me to do things I normally wouldn’t have been able to do. Especially not with the room full of men.
“You give me a lot of confidence,” I said. “It must be the strong, silent aggression wafting off of you at my back.”
His eyebrows rose in question.
“I don’t normally get out like I did today,” I said absently when Leida went up to the man who’d tried to flag me down. “I get nervous in large crowds, and if the majority of the crowd are male, I freak out a little bit.”
Before he could reply to that, somebody caught his attention.
I turned to find a large, mocha-skinned black man who was one of the sexiest beings I’d ever had the privilege of laying eyes on barreling down on us.
Without thinking about it, I shifted to put myself in a better position to gawk while still allowing me to move if I needed to.
The move didn’t go unnoticed, either.
Not by the yummy man I’d never met before and not by the other beautiful man who was already at my side.
In response to my move, Tobias moved until he was standing slightly in front of me.
“Hey, Hail. You going on the cruise?”
I turned to eye the man, who was keeping his distance from me.
“It was offered to me.” I heard him say. “But I don’t have anyone to go with.”
Nelson, according to the name stitched along his left breast pocket, glanced at me over Tobias’ shoulder.
“Is that right?”
Tobias grunted. “Audrey, this man is Nelson. Nelson, this is Audrey Morrison. Ghost’s sister.”
Nelson paused and looked at me in a new light.
“You’re Ghost’s sister?”
I nodded questioningly. “Yeah, why?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. You’re so small and pretty compared to that big, ugly bastard.”
Before I could get aggravated, Big Papa also entered the conversation. “Watch it. Audrey loves her big brother and won’t have a problem telling you like it is.”
Nelson winked at me.
“Are you going?”
I held up a finger to my chest.
“Me?”
He nodded. “I’m…no. I’m not going.”
“Do you want to go?”
That was from Tobias.
My gaze jumped to his. “You want me to go?”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t going to go because I didn’t want to be the only loser on the cruise without someone with me. But if you go, I wouldn’t feel like I’m the third wheel.”
I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times, surprised that he would even ask me to go with him.
He barely knew me!
“I have to…” I started to say.
His grin had my back straightening.
“You’re scared of boats, aren’t you?”
I started to deny it, and then I shrugged.
“Honestly?” I asked.
He nodded.
“I’ve never been on a boat. Or a plane, for that matter,” I admitted. “So I have no frame of reference. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t do damn well on a cruise if I set my mind to it.”
He snorted, as did the other two men.
“Then it’s settled,” Nelson said. “You’ll take this little lady right here with you, and I’ll tell Carla to get you booked. You got the cake?”
Tobias nodded.
“Yeah.”
I started to tell them that I wasn’t going to go, but Leida ran up to me with an empty wagon trailing behind her.
“I did it!” she shrieked.
I grinned and held out my hand, which she promptly slapped so hard that my hand stung.
“Geez, girl,” I said, rubbing my hands on my pants. “You broke my hand!”
She grinned. “Uncle Tobias!”
She trailed off.
I looked at her.
“What?”
She pointed behind me, and I backed up just as a kicking and screaming man was being yanked through the door.
“Well, I think that’s our cue to leave,” Tobias said. “I’ll call Carla in the morning.”
I grinned as I made my way down the steps toward the truck that Tobias had parked illegally at the curb.
“Alrighty, girl,” Tobias lifted the wagon and placed it in the bed of his truck. “Time to get home and get that homework done. Your daddy made me promise that you’d do your schoolwork today. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.”